John Muller and Martin Splitt from Google discussed whether AI will replace SEO professionals. Muller expressed a sensible opinion about the reality of the web ecosystem and AI-based chatbots in their current form.
- Context of the discussion
- Is it worth learning SEO in 2025?
- Why can’t AI replace creative professionals?
Context of the discussion
The context of the discussion was the basics of SEO that businesses need to know. Mueller noted that companies should consider hiring an SEO specialist who can help manage the website during the optimization process.
Mueller noted:
“…you also need someone like an SEO partner who can give you updates along the way and say, ‘Okay, we’ve done all these things,’ and they can list them and tell you exactly what has been done. “These things will take some time, and I can show you when Google is crawling the site, so we can follow the process and see what’s happening.”
Is it worth learning SEO in 2025?
Martin Split asked if generative AI would make learning SEO pointless, and if it would be enough to simply enter a specific prompt to get all the answers a business needs.
Mueller’s response was focused on the current state of the industry and avoided speculating about how things would change in a year or more.
Split asked:
“Okay, I think that’s pretty clear. And lastly, with the development of generative AI and chatbots, do you still think it makes sense to learn these things? Or can I just enter a prompt, and everything will be solved for me?”
Mueller confirmed that SEO knowledge will still be required as long as websites exist, because search engines and chatbots need the information that is on the websites. He gave examples of local businesses and online stores that still need to be found, whether through a chatbot or organic search.
John responded:
«It’s very important to learn these things and create a good website. I believe that there are many things that these chatbots and other ways of obtaining information won’t replace, especially for local search and e-commerce.
So, especially if you’re a local business, it might be sufficient for the chatbot to provide the name of your business and tell people how to get to you. It’s probably quite normal, but often it does it based on the web content it found.
Having a website is the basis for visibility in all these systems, and for many other things: if you offer a service or something else on the website – products for sale, subscriptions or something like that – the chatbot’s answer won’t be able to replace it.
If you need a t-shirt, you don’t need an answer on how to make your own t-shirt. You need a link to the store: “Here’s a design for a T-shirt, maybe in the style you like. You go to this website and buy T-shirts there.”
Martin noted the common sense of this response and joked a bit about Mueller’s hope that AI could do his job after he retired.
Here’s the context of this part of their conversation:
“Okay. This is very honest. Yes, I understand. Does this mean that you don’t think AI will take everything away from us?”
And Mueller responds with comments about AI replacing him after his retirement:
“Well, we’ll see. I can’t make any promises. I think at some point I’ll want to retire, and then maybe AI will take over my job. But there’s still a lot to do. There are a lot of things that I don’t think AI can replace.”
Why can’t AI replace creative professionals?
Will AI ever replace all SEO professionals? Many simple tasks that can be scaled have already been automated. However, many ideas for marketing and communicating with people are still better implemented by humans rather than AI.
The essence of generative AI — creating the most likely response or series of words in a sentence — eliminates the possibility of coming up with an original idea. AI is so fixated on the average that if you ask it to choose a number between one and fifty, it will choose 27 (you can try it yourself), because AI’s training is tied to selecting the most likely number, even if it is asked to choose a number randomly.
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