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- SEO is Dead (Again)
SEO is Dead (Again)
The rise of answer engines, AI memory, and the new visibility meta-game.
Matthew Berman
May 20, 2025
In partnership with
Your competitor just got recommended by ChatGPT to 400M users last month. You weren't even mentioned.
Welcome to AI SEO warfare.
I've helped brands rank on search engines for 15+ years. But lately? Every founder asks me the same urgent question: "How do we rank in ChatGPT?" The interface has changed. The game has changed. And there's an entirely new playbook you need to master before your competitors do.
Today we’re breaking down:
TL;DR (Swipe This If You’re Busy)
"AI doesn't rank you—it remembers you. And that memory comes from Wikipedia blurbs, not your homepage." [Click to Share]
📊 Some brands are already seeing 10x+ traffic from AI referrals—one case study showed 2,300% growth by aligning content with AI Overviews.
🧠 AI Overviews are Google's new top-of-page answers—generated by Gemini, shown before ads, and often without showing your actual site.
📈 You can track your brand mentions in AI Overviews using tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar or Dejan's AI Rank Tracker.
✅ Your new playbook: summarize smart, speak conversationally, and seed content on trusted surfaces—Wikipedia, Reddit, and anywhere AI scrapes first.
📈 AI Search is exploding — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are driving serious traffic. Canva's Head of SEO reports a 300% YoY surge.
💡 Gemini's "memory" is programmable. With dynamic thresholds for grounding, your brand description can flip on/off in real-time.
📉 Clicks convert worse—20–30% drop vs classic SEO—but volume is rising, and influence is compounding.
✅ New playbook: Forget keywords. Engineer summaries. Seed citations. Feed the machine what you want it to remember.