Should SEO change its name to account for AI?
Yes
No
The introduction of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity amongst others has provided searchers with a new, quicker, and easier way to find information. Businesses and content publishers will want to be there when people come looking for relevant content.
For SEOs willing to consider AI, we will be leaned on to help them gain visibility. This is something we should be preparing for now. Gartner recently predicted that AI is going to take 25% of search volume by 2026. That's not a distant future.
As our scope will broaden beyond search engines and into a plethora of AI tools, should we consider changing our name from SEO to something more inclusive?
In a recent study about gaining visibility in AI, the researchers offered the term "Generative Engine Optimization." The issue with this name is that it is focused on generative engines. This covers only part of the AI scope. And considering the rate of technological change, it's not future-proofed.
The name I am leaning towards is Intelligent Search Optimization (ISO). I think it is future-proofed and encompasses traditional search engines, current AIs such as LLMs and AI-augmented search, and any future AI introduced. BTW, I'm not taking credit for this, I didn't make this up.
For fun, I wrote a little bit about it in my article Will we still “Google It” in 2 years? Search in the AI Era.
I am curious, what are you all thinking? Do we need a name change? If so, what do you suggest?
Just drop the cryptic acronyms altogether.
Most people still don't know what SEO is or equal it to spam even though the term exists since 1997!
You can say online visibility, findability or popularization depending on context and mere mortals will get it. Those terms are self-explanatory and can be applied no matter the technology or platform you use.
With increasingly bizarre and obnoxious word combinations like
negative SEO
parasite SEO
illegal SEO
I'm afraid to admit that I'm doing SEO: it feels a bit like in 2004 when I started out.
Back then the SEO reputation problem was so bad I had difficulties even getting office space.
Is positive SEO even possible? By 2024 I'm not so sure anymore.
There have been plenty of often ridiculous new acronyms suggested over the years:
DPO
KGO
OC/DC
were among them!
Most SEO pundits seem to have a severe case of acronymia!
ISO is already used for industry standards: https://www.iso.org
I remember in 2015 when "50% of teens only used Siri, Alexa, and other voice search tools" and speakers at conferences were saying we needed to add VSO to the toolkit. TikTok has SEO, as the entity map it's building is non-trivial, and more complex than anything on Meta. SEO will continue to persist, as chatbot interfaces just aren't great for many searches. Just like how I don't need Amazon's Echo to pick certain products for me, I don't need ChatGPT to pick certain answers for me.