Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordpupilusercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Over that time. Hello and welcome back to SOS. Not that Hard. It's me here, ed Dawson.

Speaker 1: 1:18

As always and this is a new episode I know I've been putting out a lot of best ofs recently. That's what, as I said, the start of all of them Summer, family work, lots of other things came in and I needed to take a break, and I'm still not completely back into certain things, but I did come across something quite interesting, an interesting article that I wanted to discuss and share with you. There's been an awful lot of noise recently in the seo world about the impact of ai and things like chat, gpt, gemini, gemini, perplexity, claude all those new tools and the effect that it's having on SEO, on search and how people are using the web and how people are now trying to find information online, and there's been a lot of panic out there and I've seen a huge amount of panic, but from my perspective as I think I've said before my sites in general they're doing okay and in some cases, are doing better than ever. Some don't do so well. When you have a large portfolio, you can always find you can have some winners and some losers. Some will get affected by algorithm updates, some by seasonality, some by a whole number of things, but in general it's been very positive on a standard search perspective, the old-fashioned seo traffic from google. So I do understand that for some people, though it's, the effects of ai seem to be much more pronounced and that might just be specific to their particular industries or their particular niches, or they could have actually been affected by other things that aren't AI related their habits for the majority of the population, and that people in the tech industry, the SEO industry, like ourselves, are always going to be early adopters of new technology like AI, and that it's not necessarily going to work its way as fast through the rest of the population as it does with ourselves. Now, that's just an opinion I've had, with no real data to back it up.

Speaker 1: 3:40

I've just been going on historical context, like the fact that it's only very recently in the UK that a thing called the yellow pages disappeared. Now, if you're old enough like me, before internet times, there used to be that every house was delivered a big yellow book. It's a telephone directory, essentially, but I had paid advertisements in it of businesses all the local businesses in your area, and it was a big, thick book got delivered for free every year, paid for by the people who were putting those advertisements in. And if you wanted to find a local service, you went to your Yellow Pages, flicked through it, found like all the plumbers in your area and there was a. You'd see their adverts, get their phone numbers, call them up. That was how people used to search for local businesses. They only went out. They only stopped delivering those Yellow Pages books in the UK maybe three, four years ago. So it took over 20 years for the internet to kill off the Yellow Pages physical book and it still is online. You can still go to the Yellow Pages online in the UK and it still hasn't completely killed that business. People were still using it because people's habits take a long time to change, especially the for the older generation of which I am rapidly approaching. I appreciate that, but in general, the older people are, the less likely they are to change the habits. So that kind of like human behavioral trait is what's led me to believe that this ai revolution in search isn't going to be something that is necessarily devastating so immediately.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Now we've actually now got some data. Now this is a new report that's come out. It's authored by Ron Fishkin and it was put together by Spark, his company, spark Toro, and Datos, who I think are a SEMrush company, and they've actually looked at some of the data. I'll put a link to this report in the show notes. I'm sure if you just google SparkToro AI report, you will also find it. Now this report has basically decided to try and get answers to this question how much are we being affected by traditional ICOs, being affected by ai search?

Speaker 1: 5:51

So let's look at what this report actually says. So, first of all, it talks about ai adoption. So the growth has been explosive, right? Okay, it feels like everyone is using ai for everything, and the numbers in this report do show significant usage. The report found that over 20% of Americans are heavy users of AI tools, meaning they use them 10 or more times a month, and nearly 40% of Americans use AI tools at least once a month. Now that is a very big number in a very short time. But here's the first surprising twist that growth is slowing down. The explosive month-over-month growth that was seen in 2023 and early 2024 has plateaued, and the combined set of AI tools analysed in the report haven't had a 1.1 times growth month since September of 2024. So, while AI is definitely here to stay, that big, meteoric rise is now starting to level off.

Speaker 1: 6:46

Now the big question is how has this impacted traditional search engines like Google? So, if you believe the hype, you'd be thinking that search usage has fallen off a cliff, but my anecdotal evidence and the data in this report tells a different story. 95% of Americans still use traditional search engines every single month, and it gets even more interesting the percentage of heavy users of traditional search engines every single month. And it gets even more interesting. The percentage of heavy users of traditional search engines has actually increased from 84 percent in the first quarter of 2023 to 87 percent in the first quarter of 2025. So it's not that people they're not abandoning traditional search, but the most active searches are even more engaged than before.

Speaker 1: 7:26

So the report states that the rise of these ai tools has had a negligible impact on the use of traditional search engines, with usage dropping by less than one percent over the past two and a half years. So this brings what I think is the most important takeaway from this research that ai and search are not mutually exclusive. So this ai versus search narrative that people have been going on about it's actually a media creation. For most people, especially those who are new to AI, these are complementary tools. So, in fact, the research is suggesting that many AI adopters actually increase their use of traditional search. So, if you think about it, I'm thinking about the way I use AI as well. You might use AI tools to brainstorm an idea and then use a search engine to find specific websites, products or services related to those ideas. Or you might use AI to help you write a blog post and then you might use search to find data and sources to back up the claims that you put in that blog post. So you are serving the same purpose, but they're different. They're overlapping purposes, so they're using the tools mutually beneficial to each other, not to replace each other.

Speaker 1: 8:42

The report also talks about something that that I think people should pay close attention to, and that's the role of education. Apparently, a significant amount of the ai tool usage is tied to educational use cases. In 2023, we found that nearly a quarter of all chatGPC products were school related. This is a huge audience. That is a future audience that is learning to use these tools for research and learning. So that's like where we see the future of information discovery coming. Okay, and this is a bit like how I said earlier, the older generations are going to is a bit like how I said earlier the older generation is going to be a bit more set in their ways. The future generations is what's going to shape search over the future. So this is not to say that this is a static position where we're in. We may find that future generations are going to rely much more on AI, but we've also got to remember that AI itself relies on search.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Search is still important and interestingly on this one as an aside, I recently did some log file analysis on one of my major affiliate sites, and this is a site that gets many thousands of visitors a day from Google. I also was wondering how much are we being cited by the AI platforms? So we did some log file analysis to see how many times, chatgpt, perplexity and others were coming and taking content off our site to cite as part of prompt responses, and it's around about for every five users from Google. I'm seeing about one user from the AI tool, so it's about five to one essentially, which was much more than I thought. But this is the interesting thing, our traffic hasn't been diminishing for that site. It's actually anything that has been growing from Google. So this shows that those people using the AI search results that were getting information from our site. I like additional users rather than cannibalized users.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Now going back to the SparkToro and Datos research where does the data come from? With any kind of research, it's really important to know where the data comes from and what the methodology is, because that's what makes it credible or not. So the research was a partnership between, as I said, sparktoro and Datos, which is an SEM-rich company, and they used a clickstream panel from millions of devices in the US and they looked at visits to major search engines like Google, bing, yahoo and DuckDuckGo and they compared that to visits to large AI tools like ChatGPC, claude, copilot, gemini, perplexity and DeepSeek. And, quite importantly, they excluded mobile app and mobile browser usage, because that would have unfairly skewed the data against. Ai tools which are used have a much higher adoption rate on desktop. So, if anything, these numbers are going to be different on mobile, will be much, much different to traditional SEO, would be much stronger, I would imagine, on mobile, which is a huge amount of the actual traffic for most sites. So this AI adoption, ai potentially AI is probably even lower.

Speaker 1: 11:36

Yeah, what does all this mean? What does this data actually tell us? First, google is not going anywhere. Traditional search is still the dominant way people find information on the web. So the fundamentals of good SEO creating that high quality, relevant content that answers user questions is more important than ever. But secondly, don't ignore a I. It's a powerful tool that your audience are using and think about you can incorporate, I know, into your workflows how you can create content that is valuable to people who have using both AI and traditional search, because whether the AI tools go when they want to find additional information, they do searches okay, they go to the search engines. So you want to appear well in AI, want to be cited by AI, appear well to the search engines.

Speaker 1: 12:24

And finally, maybe it's time to move beyond the AI versus search debate. I don't know if this is going to happen, because there's a lot of people out there who are pushing ai really hard because they see it as a new opportunity to part people from their money. If they can offer the greatest and latest thing when it comes to ai, it's always going to be within. This is going to be a lot of marketing out there, but really you've got to pay attention to the substance. At the end of the day, if you don't get return on your investment for the things that you're doing, then it's not worth doing so. Really, fundamentally, the smart people out there are going to be the ones who understand how to use both AI and traditional ICO to connect with their audience. That's where the real power is going to be. So, anyway, I hope that was useful.

Speaker 1: 13:12

I hope I do suggest you go and read the article in full. There's lots more information in there than I've given out on here. It's a great piece of research and it does seem to fit well with my experience. So I'd be interested to see what your thoughts are. Are you surprised by these findings? Are you seeing something different? Do get in touch All the ways to get in touch with the show notes, and it'd be great to hear from anyone on this. So until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 13:42

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 13:57

You can record a voice question to get answers on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeoplesusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content with targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is not that hard.