Navigating AI's Wild West - is SEO broken or evolving? #seoadvice #seostrategy

Aug 27, 2025 · 1:25 · Short-Form Video
Garrett Sussman Guest · Yoast

Key takeaways

SEO teams face an ethical dilemma: doing sustainable practices may lose to competitors using shady manipulative techniques in the short term.
We won't have year-over-year data for 3 years because everything is changing and it's impossible to predict or control.
Traffic quality is increasing and CTR is rising even though overall traffic is dropping, indicating a fundamental shift in how SEO value is measured.
Teams are actively rewriting their playbooks to understand where the pulse of SEO effectiveness is right now rather than relying on historical patterns.

Chapters

The Wild West of SEO and AI
Adapting Strategy Without Year-Over-Year Data

Quotes

It feels very wild wild west. There are a lot of aspects of SEO and content strategy and content marketing that can manipulate these tools.Garrett Sussman
It's a really tough conversation internally for teams right now of how to mitigate that. Do the right thing and not screw yourself over long term while maybe losing something in the short term.Garrett Sussman
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