Pink Elephants and Black Swans: What is the Future of SEO with AI?

Summary: I have been in the world of SEO for over ten years and, although AI is breaking our paradigms—with those AI Overviews that keep the answer on the table and leave us the crumbs—I still think that the fundamentals have not died: crawling, indexing, UX, structured data, and freshness are still the basis. However, brand authority and intelligent linkbuilding matter more than ever now; AI content spam and the crisis of the advertising model threaten the open web; my practical advice: diversify income, work on brand and quality links, and don’t get down—a pink elephant may appear at any moment—you’ll understand 😉

I have been dedicated to the world of SEO for over 10 years and I have seen everything. From the announced death of the discipline, messes due to changes in regulations (GDPR), changes in Google’s policies, thousands of websites falling in ranking due to algorithm updates, hundreds of changes in the SERP (search engine results) but never what we are seeing today.

I almost miss those times when we debated the implementation of HTTPS and having to create the header redirection; or when we discussed AMP, or whether the domain extension had any influence on Google’s rankings.

Society’s access to AI, and the emergence of possible threats to the search engine’s power, have forced changes in Google as a company that could not be predicted.

Changes that affect millions of people who live in the digital world and who have been accustomed for years to certain methodologies, practices, and metrics, and who now have to reformulate everything to adapt to the new times.

I believe that blogs, specialized magazines, and the media in general generate an amount of information, a cacophony, that does not always clarify, sometimes it muddies the ecosystem and our minds a little.

We have moved from SEO to a set of fashionable acronyms that do not make the slightest sense in many cases, other than to increase the ego of the original author.

I have asked ChatGPT to create a table with all the acronyms and flip out with the current diversity:

Acronym	Meaning / full name	What does it represent? / How is it different from traditional SEO?
AEO	Answer Engine Optimization	Optimization for engines/answers that directly answer the user, such as “answer boxes” or voice assistants. (helloroketto.com)
GEO	Generative Engine Optimization	Optimization focused on generative AI engines that create new answers (“synthesize” content) and give visibility there. (Lumar)
AIO	AI Optimization (o Artificial Intelligence Optimization)	Adapt content, structure, SEO processes to work well with AI-powered systems. (helloroketto.com)
LLMO	Large Language Model Optimization	Optimization for your content to be referenced or cited by large language models. (helloroketto.com)
AISEO	AI‑Driven SEO (o AI Search Optimization)	SEO adapted to the AI context, combining traditional tactics with new ones that ensure visibility in AI environments. (Xponent21)
AIEO	AI‑Enhanced Optimization	Variant that aims to optimize with the help of AI, but maintaining human supervision or control, not leaving everything in the hands of AI. (Xponent21)
CEO	Chat Engine Optimization	(?) A less consolidated term; the idea is to optimize for chat-type engines (or chatbots / conversational interfaces). (Lumar)
SAIO	Search Artificial Intelligence Optimization	Optimization that integrates AI into the search strategy to ensure that content adapts well to these new scenarios. (Digital Brand Expressions)
SGE	Search Generative Experience	Name of Google’s generative search experience (when Google generates summaries/answers directly as part of the SERP). (iOB Business)

I imagine it’s normal for this noise to be generated.

Faced with a shake-up of this magnitude, everyone tries (with better or worse intentions) to anticipate the changes that this will generate.

Personally, I recognize that using AI has been a damn miracle for multiple tasks that could previously take much longer. I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of things they solve and they have undoubtedly helped me to be a better professional in every way.

But nothing is black or white, I have many doubts; they have fed without accounting for all the knowledge accessible on the internet, and without entering into legal debates that I am unaware of, they make me ask three very important things (in my field):

1. What will be the future of web pages as we know them today? Will they make sense?
2. How is SEO going to change?, as a discipline, and secondly, as a professional: Where are we going to go as «workers» in a field that is in one of the biggest changes we have ever experienced?
3. What will become of that desire for the decentralized web and the open web model? What will be the impact of spam and content created with AI?

All these reflections are, obviously, in my field. What is my concern, which is SEO, the internet, companies, and digital business models.

The impact that AI will have on the rest of the fields of society, well, I can’t even dare to make that intellectual sin of guessing. It would be as accurate as a witch with the damn tarot.

I am a follower of the ideas of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His postulate on the prediction of the future makes it clear that we are a disaster in establishing those predictions. Black swans do not exist until we see them for the first time.

I was always amused by the example he gives of the turkey on Thanksgiving. The bird sees in the figure of the farmer, a kind man who takes care of it and feeds it a lot, until it becomes big and strong, what it cannot prevent is that one day its head will be cut off.

Therefore, and because of my professional background as an archaeologist, I like to analyze the history and genesis of things.

Let’s do a historical review of the changes in the SERP and of Google as a company, to understand where we are today.

A (SEO) Journey to the Present

Years ago, when I started giving talks, I loved this infographic that, for obvious reasons, I stopped using.

It is a timeline, a timeline that shows, from 1997 to 2013, the introduction of different functionalities and technologies that were changing and improving the search engine results:

I see this graph with a certain nostalgia for how «simple» the past looked compared to what we have in the present.

Something that always cost people a lot was separating the search engine results from the company.

Except for SEOs, and developers aware of security and privacy (as well as open source), ordinary people see Google as a synonym for the internet.

They use Google to access the web, without reflecting much on all the implications. This has meant that, currently, Alphabet has a privileged distribution position, having a usage share of more than 89.83% internationally (according to StatCounter, between August 2024 and 2025), which, as is normal, has generated many legal conflicts due to its dominant position and monopoly.

I always give Google a mixed review.

On the one hand, I criticize that dominant position and that «marketing image» that they have sold us of a modern and cool company, which omits its black or gray parts in terms of privacy and use of user data.

But it must be recognized that they have improved our lives with a series of technological advances that we could not conceive of life today. With a cost, of course.

I find it incredible what was born from a project at Stanford University, while Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page were studying for their doctorate (1997), and that they have created such an efficient search engine by crawling and indexing the web worldwide.

They replace AltaVista, the search engine that was used at that time (1999), in just one year in terms of usage share. A technological feat that demonstrates that they had a much better product and that provided better results.

That is the essence of SEO and the reason for its secrecy about the algorithm.

It is the promise that the search engine in a role of «impartiality» will give you the best possible result, always.

They comply by giving a series of «guidelines» that we know have never been very transparent, and we as professionals have to «accept» these scoops with the aim of improving the results of the websites we work on.

With its pros and cons, this balance was working and nobody complained (much). Why?, because many people earned a lot of money with that traffic.

Keep in mind that in a SEO search there is a clear intentionality to which you can be responding. It is hunger with a restaurant offering exactly what you are looking for.

The company wins, the media outlet wins, the SEO agency or the marketing company behind it wins, the developer who improves crawling wins. Everyone wins.

Even in the face of clearly economic decisions, such as when they tried to shoehorn AMP technology on us, for smoother navigation on mobiles, they were actually fighting to guarantee navigation in their Chrome browser and that the application experience would not eat their ground.

We already know where AMP ended up, in the Google project cemetery. But they really broke our balls with this issue. 😉

But beware, as I have always said, Google doesn’t give a damn about your content. Your website is not their client.

They organize the information in the world and offer it to their client (all of us), who are giving them all the information of our lives, to always give us a result, with an advertising cost that has made them the largest advertising agency in the world.

Let’s not forget that they do not do this, only, as their axiom says, for:

«Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful»

They are not charities.

They have an infrastructure that costs a lot of money and they seek to make money, as a company. This is reasonable and cannot be discussed.

Investigating (thanks to AI, which makes this much easier) and looking only at the official sources of both Google and the documentation provided to the SEC, (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), in the most recent fiscal year until closing, year 2024.

Total revenue: $350,018 M.

Audited annual breakdown in Form 10-K 2024:

Item (USD M)	FY 2024	% of total
Google Search & other	198,084	56.59%
YouTube ads	36,147	10.33%
Google Network	30,359	8.67%
Google advertising (subtotal)	264,590	75.59%
Google subscriptions, platforms & devices	40,340	11.53%
Google Services (subtotal)	304,930	87.12%
Google Cloud	43,229	12.35%
Other Bets	1,648	0.47%
Earnings from hedges (FX hedging)	211	0.06%
Total Alphabet	350,018	100%

From these data, we can conclude that Google’s spoiled child is, of course, advertising, representing 75.59% of its revenue.

• Total revenue: $350,018 M
• Advertising (all sources) = $264,590 M → 75.59% of the total (Includes Search & other, YouTube Ads and Google Network). Securities and Exchange Commission
• Other revenue = $85,428 M → 24.41% of the total.

It is logical and evident that they found, as many bloggers analyzed it in the launch of ChatGPT in its first version, a great threat, which was none other than the classic innovator’s dilemma of Clayton Christensen (1997).

If they (Google) launched a search engine with AI very quickly, beyond the economic cost of each search with the previous algorithm vs. the real cost of giving an answer with AI to the end user, how to reflect the advertising in the results so that their golden goose continues to give money?

In relation to the cost of serving data, AI was 10 times more expensive: the chairman of the board of Alphabet Inc, John Hennessy, said in 2023 that an exchange with an LLM could cost 10 times a standard search. Surely these costs have decreased a lot, as they are becoming cheaper, as their development and implementation increase.

It is for that reason that there are many companies that use AI, and sell it at a lower cost (they lose money), in order to attract customers and be profitable in the future, when that cost of use becomes cheaper.

The future of search is conversational

It’s my opinion as an in-law.

And we, as users, realize that the searches in the AI of our preference have multiple advantages before the eternal list of 10 blue links of Google in the results of any query.

I, as a user, realize how much the searches, documentation, and access to information in any AI of your preference have improved.

So Google as a company, faced with these threats, had to act quickly. And it did very well.

The introduction of IA Overview (IAO) lowered even more the organic results that, already by themselves, were quite punished between advertising, the verticals of local packs, videos, shopping, etc.

As Carlos Molina analyzed well in his excellent newsletter, MultiVersial, on May 22, 2025, when he talked about Google I/O, he also had an advantage, that of being the main distributor, which already has millions of users.

Why switch search engines if you already have it incorporated with Gemini in the AI Overview, where it gives you the answer without the need to read large amounts of content from a website?

Where, in addition, the more specific you are, the better the quality of the response tends to be.

So what we have today is:

• A vitamin-enriched search engine that brings together the databases and indexing of years of experience
• Use of entities
• Structured data that enriches the SERP
• Google Business, Google Maps, YouTube
• Our user data and preferences
• And now an AI that gives us the answer to many queries without having to enter any website

How to rank in the AIs? What is the data behind all this?

It amuses me that thousands of professionals, suddenly, overnight, all become experts and gurus of AI.

Damn them all! They’re fast, the bastards.

Now, of course, given the obvious changes in the SERP and that, as hundreds of professionals have analyzed and many studies have been done, there is a significant decrease in clicks from Google.

A lot of traffic, especially informational, that came from the satisfaction of the search engine results to our websites, now stays on the path of AI, with all the logic in the world.

But if we analyze each and every one of the factors that the supposed experts value, they are all damn SEO tips that we have been doing for years.

But like a drowning man clutching at a straw, we cling to being cited by the AIs, because even if they don’t generate the visit and the click for me, which is what I’m interested in, at least I appear as the source so that some bored person clicks and visits my website. (How lucky we are!)

Let’s turn to the only official Google publication: “AI features and your website” – Google Search Central.

In the post, it summarizes the requirements and good practices for your content to be displayed in AI Overviews (AI Mode). Key points:

• You can control visibility with nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex, and manage access with robots.txt
• There are no additional special requirements or optimizations: apply the same best SEO practices as always. Google for Developers
• To be eligible, the page must be indexed and suitable for displaying a snippet in Google (meeting the technical requirements of searches, let’s say).
• You don’t need files, or new markups (there is no «special schema» for AI).

Many professionals get excited about obvious truths, which, let’s be honest, are the same old crap: being useful to the user, and complying with quality SEO guidelines.

And it seems that we have to keep following behind (without any critical spirit), even though we see that for many websites and projects the decrease in clicks is outrageous.

I have many projects from companies that we have not noticed any impact, but blogs and informational websites, travel, etc., have massive drops.

Some websites (companies, products or services) that had articles in top positions that brought a lot of traffic, and that ended up making the companies known, no longer have to enter the website.

It doesn’t make the slightest sense, since the Gemini responses are great.

Studies like the one from Ahrefs by Ryan Law, who coined the term, or talk about the great decoupling, which demonstrates a correlation of 34.5% less click-through rate when an AI Overview appears.

There was always a positive correlation between clicks and impressions, but pages that appear cited in AI show increases in impressions, but this does not imply the visit, generating that separation.

You have the complete Ahrefs study and, in Spanish, the great Fernando Tellado also analyzes it, in Ayuda WP.

Investigating in ChatGPT, there are several studies (of different methodologies) that measure drops in clicks and traffic attributable to AI Overviews. The most cited in 2025:

• Pew Research (Jul 22, 2025): Athena Chapekis comments that when an AI summary appears in the SERP, users click on a «classic» result only in 8% of visits, compared to 15% when there is no summary; and barely 1% of visits click on a link within the AI Overview itself.
• Ahrefs (Apr 17, 2025): Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan point out that in 300,000 keywords, the presence of AI Overviews is associated with a 34.5% drop in CTR in position 1 (informational).
• Amsive (Apr 16, 2025): analysis of 700,000 keywords: 15.49% less average CTR when AI Overview is activated (more damage in (non-brand) searches and low positions).
• BrightEdge (May 14, 2025): one year after launch, search impressions rise 49%, but clicks/CTR fall 30% since May 2024.
• Similarweb (May 22, 2025): in searches with AI Overview the rate of «zero-click» skyrockets to 80–83% (vs. 60% without AIO).
• Digital Content Next (Aug 14, 2025): in 8 weeks (May to June) there is a median of 10% less in referral traffic from Google; most report decreases between –1% and –25%.

Ah, and of course, as it could not be otherwise, Google disagrees and states that AI «generates more queries and higher quality clicks», but without offering auditable breakdown. Of course, this is totally believable, just like drunk unicorns increase in beer and orgies in the clouds.

But of course, I understand that if you are reading this long text, you are wanting me to give you the «magic» steps and it is there where I separate myself from the optimism of many professional colleagues.

In a sense, it’s the same old crap (which we’ll see), but with a great addition that I think is key: The authority and linkbuilding that have acquired a new dimension.

But well, let’s see what, apparently, are the relevant SEO factors to appear cited in the AIs and that, by miracle of destiny and luck, some geek wants to click and reach our website.

How nice… we settle for the crumbs of visits, saying to ourselves (as the Ahrefs article or Google itself says) is that they are more qualified visits with better conversions (manda carallo!, we continue to believe in Santa Claus after we are old).

SEO Factors (of a Lifetime)

1. Crawling and indexing
   • Ensure that Googlebot can crawl (robots.txt, CDN/firewall) and that the page is indexable.
   • Must be suitable for displaying snippet: avoid blocking with nosnippet, data-nosnippet or max-snippet:0 if you want to be cited. Source: Google for Developers
2. Useful, reliable content thinking about people
   • Complete coverage of the topic, first-hand experience, sources and clarity. Avoid spam patterns.
3. Good user experience (UX) and do not forget the Core Web Vitals
4. Architecture and internal linking
   • Facilitate discovery and thematic relationship («clustering» (I always hated that SEO word), contextual links).
5. Structured data that matches the visible content
   • There is no «special schema for AI»
   • Use the relevant types (article, product, organization) to help track the entity and reinforce visual appearances such as the data in the knowledge graph (Google Knowledge Graph).
6. Freshness and clear temporal signals
   • Visible dates and consistent markup (datePublished / dateModified).

Specific Factors to be Cited in AI Overviews

1. Technical eligibility (the only «mandatory» thing)
   • Be indexed and suitable for snippet. There are no extra requirements, no AI files, no special schema.
2. How does AI Overviews choose sources?
   • Uses query fan-out (video) to expand subtopics and find more and diverse support links; they are shown when they provide extra value over the classic search. Google for Developers
3. What correlates with being cited (industry data, not official «factors»)?
   • Organic ranking: 76% of citations come from pages that are already in the organic top 10 according to Ahrefs.
   • According to Ahrefs, brand mentions (brand mentions) correlate more than pure linkbuilding for visibility in AI Overviews.
   • Informational and complex trigger AI Overviews more frequently, according to Semrush.

Authority and Linkbuilding

The linkbuilding of a lifetime has been fading long before the introduction of AIs.

I agree with many SEOs that the pure and hard purchase of links in media, no longer works as it did a few years ago.

I have been studying the methodologies of Sico de Andrés and his wonderful public relations tool for a long time: LinkAffinity and the shots are heading more towards this.

Achieving a real authority from a more strategic linkbuilding, getting links and brand mentions of great quality. It is for that reason that I have been pivoting more and more to that linkbuilding service for some time.

There is the difference.

Many travel blogs, for example, some time ago with the impact of the HCU update, went down the drain.

Many failed to recover, a few did, but the big difference, from my point of view, without any statistical data to prove it, beyond my experience, is the brand search.

That it was not just another blog, which follows the same SEO and monetization strategies; there are so many and so similar, that it is sometimes difficult to see the difference between them (by user experience, design, content, etc.).

Social and brand signals are a powerful signal for search engines and AI.

All the stuff about llms.txt and full-lms.txt, seems fake to me, Rick!

Of course, I have no statistical data to support me, it is a brother-in-law’s opinion.

But it is not an accepted protocol, but a recommendation, and the robots.txt of a lifetime is still the gateway to talk to the crawlers (user-agent).

I think it’s fantastic to be able to implement the LLMS.txt thanks to the SEO plugins (in WordPress) that keep the file updated and don’t bother anyone.

If you want a good guide to llms.txt, as always Fernando Tellado worked on a mega post on the implementation of this file.

Now, if you ask me if you are going to improve the citation in the AI for having it?, allow me to suspect it.

If you notice, many citations are used on websites that do not have this protocol implemented. So it is a good recommendation, but it is not a sine qua non relationship to obtain it.

Spam and a Reflection on the Open Web

One of the things that worries me most about the use and abuse of AI is the amount of spam that is being produced today.

As Carlos Molina pointed out in the already mentioned MultiVersial, on May 13: «The spam of the 21st century already has a name: AI content.»

Following the SEO logic, we flood the search engine with AI content with the aim of positioning and monetizing, and the worst of all is that now, with the IAOs, they move us away from even that click and profit.

The problem is that the open web is faltering due to a monetization logic, which, once again, I quote Carlos Molina. He reflected on this on May 27 (2025) the following:

For decades, the internet has worked without users paying for content (only for the ADSL connection or fiber). News, blogs, tutorials, encyclopedias, memes… Everything was a click away. Free. And that was not by chance.

The question is that the media and the advertising model are not what they were years ago. The economic model has been faltering:

• People consume content on networks, not on media websites
• Advertisers prefer platforms with greater segmentation
• Google’s results are full of spam (and now AI), which, in a kind of irony, have improved the results with the overviews

Carlos Molina raised this very interesting question-reflection:

The big question is: Can a model that combines open access to content, economic sustainability and quality be built (or maintained)? It is an almost impossible triangle, since one of the vertices falls. You can do:

• Profitable quality content with a payment model
• An open model to everyone, profitable with very poor quality
• You can make open media with quality but with deficits.

Now put the AI in the equation (and in each vertex)…

It is logical that neither Carlos, nor Google, nor any of us has a clear answer about it.

It is an open debate, which is far from having an answer. I would love to know your opinion in the comments. 🙏

I teach communication and journalism students, and the role of the media in our society, and their way of generating a profitable ecosystem, is something that interests me a lot. I always wanted to believe that the economy of content creators came to stay, but at present, I have my doubts.

As SEO, blog, company, what can I do? Final reflections

I have always refused to demonstrate my value as an SEO consultant only as a person who puts you in a Google ranking.

I believe that if you are passionate about your profession, you provide your clients with much more value than a ranking for certain keywords.

We have to be aware that our sector is in turbulent and changing times like we have never seen before, and this does not have to be a negative thing.

As the title of this article indicates: “Pink elephants, black swans.” We cannot predict the future.

My monthly plans and SEO audits are maintained and I have not lost clients or billing, but I have been incentivizing my linkbuilding services for some time, as I see many future prospects, given these changes in the SERP, as I mentioned earlier.

For me, one of the best SEOs in the world is Aleyda Solís. I admire her, and when I was lucky enough to meet her, I learned a lot talking to her, her talks.

I shared a reflection on LinkedIn these days, where I asked that they please stop killing SEO, that, beyond the typical joke and that they have always killed it, the principles and pillars of SEO remain to optimize the search with AI, changing only certain optimization criteria. And he concludes (own translation):

LLMs are expanding and evolving (not killing) search as a discovery/marketing channel, and yes, some changes will be necessary, but if you’ve been doing SEO for a while, like me since 2007, you know that search platforms and user behavior always change.

The SEO I do now has nothing to do with the one I started in 2007 (…)

Let’s move forward together to continue evolving responsibly as an industry, contributing impact and results to clients/companies, and avoiding noise.

I like that perspective.

I think the noise helps some people, and digital media favor cacophony and that everyone has an opinion. It’s like an ass, we all have one.

But SEO will continue to exist, with nuances, changes, but searches and ways of searching will evolve as technology grows with us.

AI is here to stay and change our paradigm, and thank goodness, otherwise how boring it would be to always do the same thing.

What I have doubts about is the evolution that websites will have to have, or how things can change with AI browsers like the one developed by Perplexity, Comet, which I really want to try (I’m on the waiting list) and see if it’s a clear change in the way we access information on the web. But this is another very big melon.

Just as when I analyzed the impact of the HCU taking the example in travel blogs, I am convinced that the future (of monetization) of traffic involves diversifying your income sources.

Anyone who lives in the digital world has this axiom very much assumed. Don’t depend on a single channel.

I know many people who relied on SEO traffic as the only monetization channel, especially through affiliation. And if it worked for you for years, great, but you have to pivot. Nobody is going to wait for you.

If between the algorithm updates and the impact of IAO on the search engine results you are noticing less traffic and clicks, change your perspective, look for new traffic channels, work on your authority and brand search. But never forget that a pink elephant can surprise you. Just because you don’t know it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or can’t happen.

Have fun along the way, yes, otherwise how boring life would be. 😉

Live long and prosper!