Is SEO dead now that everyone asks AI?

The short answer

If you’re being told that everything you’ve done is obsolete and you need to start again under a new acronym, you’re being sold to.

Assistants that cite sources work by searching, fetching pages, and reading them. That means the things that decide whether they can use you are the things that have always decided whether a page works: can it be fetched, does it say plainly what you do and where, and do your business details agree with each other. A studio that gets those right is in good shape for both, and a studio that gets them wrong is invisible to both.

What genuinely did change

Three things, and I think they’re real.

Which pages are worth writing. The general explainer post is worth much less than it was, because a general question now gets a general answer without a click. A page about one treatment, in one place, at a price, is worth more, because that question can’t be answered without naming a business.

How a paragraph should be shaped. Content gets lifted now. A page that buries its answer three paragraphs into a warm-up doesn’t get quoted, and a page that puts the answer directly under the question does. That’s a genuine change in how to write, and it happens to make pages better for people too.

Being readable by machines matters more than it did. Structured data used to be a nice-to-have that got you a slightly prettier search result. Now it’s how something decides whether you’re a med spa in La Jolla or an ambiguous blob of text. The cost of being unclear went up.

What didn’t change

Everything else, more or less. Your Google Business Profile still does most of the heavy lifting for local searches. Your address and phone number still need to match everywhere. Pages still need to load on a phone. Somebody still has to be able to book in one tap. None of that has an AI version.

I’d add one thing that gets lost in the noise: the majority of the searches that bring people to a studio are still ordinary searches, typed into Google, by someone standing in their kitchen. That’s what I see in Search Console across the studios I work with. The shift is real and I’m not dismissing it, but the base of the business is still the base of the business.

How to tell a real service from a rebranded one

You’re going to get emails about this. Here’s the filter I’d use, and it works whether the acronym is SEO or something invented next quarter.

Ask what changes on the site. A real answer names pages. “A page for each of your six treatments, structured data on all of them, your address corrected on the four directories where it’s wrong, and your services rewritten so each one opens with a direct answer.” That’s a scope. You can check whether it happened.

Be suspicious of a score. Plenty of tools will sell you a proprietary visibility number that only they can measure and only they can move. That’s a closed loop. Ask what it’s derived from.

Ask who owns the work. If the pages, the code and the account all live with the provider, then whatever they achieved leaves when they do.

Watch for urgency. “The window is closing” is a sales technique, not an observation about search engines.

What I’d actually do this month

If you want a concrete list, in the order I’d do it:

1. Claim and fill your Google Business Profile if you haven’t. It’s free and it’s still the biggest single lever for a local business.
2. Make your name, address and phone identical on your site and everywhere else, copying whatever your Google profile says.
3. Give every treatment you want more of its own page, with the treatment name and your neighborhood written in ordinary text on the page.
4. On each of those pages, put the question people ask as a heading and the answer right under it.
5. Add structured data, or have someone add it.

That list is the answer to “what should I do about AI” and it’s also the answer to “what should I do about Google”. It was the answer three years ago. The reason to do it now is that a second set of machines started reading, and they’re less forgiving of a page that doesn’t say what it is.

Most people won’t spend the weekend on it. That’s the honest reason a service like mine exists, and it’s the only reason. Not a secret.