I'm calling out a costly mistake I see everywhere: companies firing their SEO teams and replacing them with ChatGPT. In this episode, I explain why AI can't do SEO despite what gurus claim. These tools are pattern predictors, not thinkers - and research shows they fail up to 65% of tasks. You still need human strategy to succeed online.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m talking about AI again - and I’m here to warn you away from making a horrible decision. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and I wanted to talk about the fact that AI cannot do SEO.

There’s a lot of buzz around AI and all the things it can do. Sora 2 just came out and AI-created video is getting ridiculously good. We’re seeing the rise of AI agents that can go out and perform tasks instead of just synthesizing information.

Since it’s so easy to have a conversation with these AI models, and since everyone is calling the models “AI”, most people tend to take the sci-fi film perspective and assign intelligence to AI. That’s a massive mistake. The systems are still LLMs - Large Language Models. They are awesome at discerning patterns and they can talk to you and sound like something a human would say.

You have to realize that the LLM models are not thinking. They’re simply predicting a word pattern based on the analysis of metric crap tons of content. They are plagiarism made automatic. They are not able to reason or think critically about a topic.

Recent research by SalesForce shows that AI agents fail 42% of the time on single-step tasks. When asked to perform two-step tasks, the failure rate jumps up to 65%.

I’m not saying we won’t have sci-fi movie AI someday, but we’re definitely not there yet.

And that’s the problem with so many people using LLMs to do SEO. Companies are firing entire teams of human SEOs and replacing them with one person prompting ChatGPT. There are endless gurus on LinkedIn claiming to have the secret to doing SEO with ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost of human-led marketing.

The problem is that none of the AI models are capable of doing SEO. They can help make some of the tasks more efficient, but they cannot “think” themselves. They cannot look at a website and diagnose what needs to be optimized. They cannot do research in a local market to determine which factors need to be addressed in a company’s digital footprint to achieve better visibility online. The AI models can’t even write good content that would rank in Google.

For the foreseeable future, you still need humans to do SEO. AI models allow those humans to do more in the same amount of time, and they allow some simple mundane tasks to be automated, but they cannot replace the strategic mind of a human.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that AI can do everything for your digital marketing. You still need a human in the driver’s seat or your digital marketing is going to crash and burn.

That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.