Voila – you have an SEO expert.

I think this creates a dangerous illusion.

AI is becoming extremely capable. I use it myself, and I believe it will fundamentally change how SEO professionals work. But there is an important distinction between having access to SEO knowledge and having SEO expertise. A model can be trained on an enormous amount of information about crawling, indexing, internal linking, content, structured data, JavaScript, backlinks, Core Web Vitals, and hundreds of other topics. That does not mean it has the same knowledge as someone who has spent 10, 15, or 20 years actually doing SEO.

There is an enormous amount of empirical knowledge in this profession that is difficult to reduce to a checklist or a prompt. For example in my case, I have tons of practical knowledge doing SEO for hundreds of site, but I also have a unique skill set that complements my practical SEO knowledge. I spent almost 2 years at Udacity studying machine learning and a year at Kellogg School of Business studying strategic marketing.

My knowledge has accumulated through experience, but it also has unique modifiers that no one else in the world has. I built some one of a kind SEO projects that moved the companies forward and that no LLM is aware of.

And installing an SEO skill into Claude does not suddenly transfer 15 years of that experience into Claude.

SEO has supposedly been “dead” many times before.

  • Google killed SEO.
  • Social media killed SEO.
  • Zero-click searches killed SEO.
  • Now AI is going to kill SEO.

I don’t think that is what is happening.

What is happening is another transformation of the profession, probably a much bigger one than the previous ones. The difference this time is visibility.

Previous changes in SEO were mostly discussed inside a relatively small professional community.

AI has been democratized. Millions of people now have access to tools that can perform tasks that previously required specialized knowledge, so this wave feels much larger.

But democratizing the tools does not automatically democratize the expertise.

The role of an SEO professional will change.

A lot of execution will become automated. Research will become faster. Agents will handle tasks that used to take teams of people.

And I think that is a good thing.

But the people who have spent years developing deep expertise will not suddenly become irrelevant. Quite the opposite.

The future of SEO, in my view, is SEO experts who know how to use AI vs. everyone else.

That is exactly how the 12-month SEO program is built: an AI team handles the recurring execution, and 15+ years of human experience decides what is worth doing in the first place.