2025 Pubcon Keynote - SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO.

My 2025 Pubcon Austin Keynote. SEO is dead. Long live SEO. We look at AI's effect on the modern search landscape and what we as marketers have to do to evolve for the new AI optimisation landscape.

Transcript

1. #pubcon @RyanJones SEO is Dead. Long Live SEO Ryan Jones
2. #pubcon @RyanJones Ryan Jones SVP @WeAreRazorfish Founder, SERPrecon.com @RyanJones Linkedin.com/in/jonesy www.RyanMJones.com
3. #pubcon @RyanJones My Day Job Title: SVP, SEO Role: I co-run the SEO Practice How Long: going on 15 years Company name changes: 6 (so far)
4. #pubcon @RyanJones My Night Job What: SEO Tool Based on Information Retrieval Features: AI Share of voice, GEO Optimization, Real metrics! Sign up: SERPrecon.com (everyone gets a free trial!) Coupon Code: WELCOME3. (10% off first three months) Swag? Stickers – come see me
5. #pubcon @RyanJones What Else I DO
6. #pubcon @RyanJones And WAY too much cornhole…
7. #pubcon @RyanJones Let’s Talk About AI vs SEO
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10. #pubcon @RyanJones Slide 2: The Myth [Big bold quote on screen: "SEO is dead."] Script: How many times have we seen this headline? Every time the algorithm changes, someone sounds the alarm. But this time, it's different, right? Because now AI is answering questions for us. It's summarizing. It's skipping the blue links. So... is SEO really dead? What we're seeing isn't the death of SEO. It's the evolution of search. Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity — they're not just giving us a list of results. They're giving us answers. Which means the game has changed.
11. #pubcon @RyanJones The Media Agrees
12. #pubcon @RyanJones Google Is still Dominating Google 90% Other 5% Bing 3% Yahoo 2% Search Market Share 5.8 % 13. 5% 14. 4% 59. 4% Gen AI Market Share 2 1. 9 M 3 5 0 M 376. 6M 5 1 7 M 1 6. 5 B 3 1. 8 X AI vs Google Market Share
13. #pubcon @RyanJones Prediction: AI Usage will dip in June
14. #pubcon @RyanJones SEO isn’t dead. You’ve just been doing SEO wrong
15. #pubcon @RyanJones Bad SEO is Dead
16. #pubcon @RyanJones We Have A Perception Problem
17. #pubcon @RyanJones What is good SEO? • Semantic Relevance • Topics & Passages • Ambient Findability • User Intent • Value add • Quality, Uniqueness, Relevance, Authority, Trust, Expertise • Real Marketing
18. #pubcon @RyanJones So what Is it now?
19. #pubcon @RyanJones And No, we aren’t replacing it with “Vibe SEO”
20. #pubcon @RyanJones • Clients have a real problem. Traffic is down. We can’t say “it’s just SEO” That traffic is gone. Gotta change how we think of SEO We need to update our branding
21. #pubcon @RyanJones It’s not a pretty picture for traditional SEO metrics
22. #pubcon @RyanJones Gen AI drives less than 1% of traffic across major brands Source: Publicis Groupe Clients 0.08% 0.1% 0.06% 0.1% 0.02% Appliances Insurance Finance Healthcare Spirits 99% of AI traffic is from ChatGPT 0.02% Auto
23. #pubcon @RyanJones But the clicks aren’t coming back Source: ahrefs
24. #pubcon @RyanJones BOTH of these are True! source: Advanced Web Ranking
25. #pubcon @RyanJones Most AI searches have 0 historical search volume. 80% of these 1,955 keywords have <100 monthly searches.
26. #pubcon @RyanJones “The Future of Search is Verbs” – Bill Gates
27. #pubcon @RyanJones 28 How Old is Taylor Swift?
28. #pubcon @RyanJones 29 NO, I just want the F*@#%^&! Number!
29. #pubcon @RyanJones It’s Time to Evolve: Full funnel engagement Semantic relevance SOV / Visibility Keywords Organic rankings Upper funnel awareness FROM Multi-modal AI search AI Overviews / Citations Quick Answers / People Also Ask TO AI systems Search algorithms Text / voice queries
30. #pubcon @RyanJones
31. #pubcon @RyanJones Retire Multi-Channel Attribution Models
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34. #pubcon @RyanJones For AI It’s all about SOV now.
35. #pubcon @RyanJones For SEO too!
36. #pubcon @RyanJones From Keywords To Topics
37. #pubcon @RyanJones That’s right. SEOs are coming for that brand budget!
38. #pubcon @RyanJones It's not just a person behind a keyboard. It's also the AI model reading your content before the person ever sees it. AI is now the first audience. It decides what to include, quote, or reference – using Search We're not just optimizing for people anymore — we're optimizing for machines that summarize for people. The New User
39. #pubcon @RyanJones • How do you optimize what you can’t measure?
40. #pubcon @RyanJones Every SEO Agency is showing you this slide right now 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 Apr-24 May-24 Jun-24 Jul-24 Aug-24 Sep-24 Oct-24 Nov-24 Dec-24 Jan-25 Feb-25 Mar-25 Apr-25 May-25 AI Overview Rankings AIO launched on May 17th Widespread rollout occurred mid August AIO coverage peaks at 4,008 listings
41. #pubcon @RyanJones
42. #pubcon @RyanJones Let’s Un-Pack The AI Overview Patent
43. #pubcon @RyanJones Generate LLM Output
44. #pubcon @RyanJones Generate Synthetic Queries We can reverse engineer this!
45. #pubcon @RyanJones This is what we care about!
46. #pubcon @RyanJones • You don’t need to rank for that query. You need to be retrieved. • (sorry link builders and guest posters)
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48. #pubcon @RyanJones
49. #pubcon @RyanJones If you rank for 1 query, you can do it for many!
50. #pubcon @RyanJones It’s Not The Race You Think it Is
51. #pubcon @RyanJones • How do teams and SEOs adjust for this future? • How does the C suite adjust? • “Just make my clicks go up” “they’re not coming back”
52. #pubcon @RyanJones Step 1: Your Org Structure and OKRs are the problem
53. #pubcon @RyanJones Stop Letting Social Own AI. They’re looking at it through the wrong lens (Sentiment)
54. #pubcon @RyanJones Clicks are vanity metrics
55. #pubcon @RyanJones Tools need to do better • The future will NOT resemble the past. • Historical Keyword Volumes won’t cut it anymore. • We need SOV and upper funnel measurement • We need semantic relevance
56. #pubcon @RyanJones Measuring Sentiment of AI Answers Makes No Sense All of the AI System prompts are here: https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks
57. #pubcon @RyanJones So I Built Note: the below tool is FREE!
58. #pubcon @RyanJones Prediction: Agencies Replace In-House SEO
59. #pubcon @RyanJones Here’s why you will FAIL:
60. #pubcon @RyanJones THANK YOU Ryan Jones SVP, SEO @WeAreRazorfish @RyanJones Linkedin.com/in/jonesy RyanMJones.com More Sites of Mine: WTFSEO.com SEODataViz.com ServerHeaders.com & SEOnews.pro Use code: “welcome3” to get 10% off for 3 months.