Is SEO dead now that people use AI? What changed and what didn't

Short answer: no. SEO isn't dead, but it changed, and the change hits some businesses much harder than others. Google now answers many questions at the top of the page with an AI summary, and some people skip Google and ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity instead. That cuts clicks on some searches. It doesn't change the basic job, which is to be the business that search engines and AI tools can find, trust and quote.

El Paso owners ask us this a lot, usually after a headline about website traffic falling off a cliff. Here's what the research actually shows, what still works for a local business and what we'd do now.

What Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode change

AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries that now sit above many Google results. AI Mode is a separate, chat-style search tab that Google began rolling out to everyone in the U.S. in May 2025. Both answer the question right on the page, with a few links to sources, so the searcher often has no reason to click.

Several studies have measured what that does to clicks:

• Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When a Google search showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits.
• Ahrefs looked at 300,000 keywords and found that an AI Overview was associated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page. A later update using December 2025 data put the drop at 58%.
• Seer Interactive followed informational searches across 42 client organizations. Where an AI Overview appeared, organic click-through rate fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025, a 61% decline. Brands cited inside the AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks than brands that weren't, though Seer says it can't prove the citation caused the difference.

Google reads it differently. In August 2025, Liz Reid, Google's head of Search, wrote that total organic clicks from Google Search had been relatively stable year over year and that the quality of those clicks had gone up. Her post didn't include figures to check that against.

Notice what those studies mostly measured: informational searches, the “what is” and “how do I” questions an AI summary can answer on the spot. If your website depended on that kind of traffic, it got harder. That part of SEO really did change. One thing didn't: Google says a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to appear as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no extra technical requirements. The groundwork for classic search is the groundwork for Google's AI answers too.

What hasn't changed for local businesses

Searches for a business nearby work differently. When someone types “dentist near me” or “AC repair El Paso,” Google still shows the map pack: a short list of Business Profiles with stars, hours and buttons to call or get directions. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that review count and rating factor into local ranking. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, published in November 2025, said local search had “remained somewhat insulated” from the AI upheaval, and review signals gained weight again.

People also still pick up the phone. The performance report in your Google Business Profile counts the calls, direction requests and website clicks that come straight from your listing, and a call from the map pack doesn't depend on anyone clicking through to your site. Reviews still carry the decision, too: BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey found 97% of consumers use reviews to guide what they buy.

How ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity choose businesses to mention

There's no secret list behind these answers. For current, local questions, the assistants search the web and summarize what they find. OpenAI says ChatGPT search rewrites a question into one or more targeted queries and sends them to its search partners. Perplexity says it searches the web and attaches numbered citations to the original sources in every answer.

What they read is mostly material a business can influence. Yext analyzed 6.8 million citations from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity collected in July and August 2025: 44% came from businesses' own websites, 42% from listings and 8% from reviews and social posts. Gemini leaned hardest on websites, and OpenAI's models leaned on listings. BrightLocal found AI tools pulling business details from directories in every industry it tested. Yelp showed up in about a third of searches, and Google Business Profile accounted for 28.5% of all citations.

Keep the sources in mind: Yext sells listings management and BrightLocal sells local SEO tools. Still, the two studies point the same way, toward your website, your listings and your reviews. And more customers are asking these tools. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found the share of consumers using ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations jumped from 6% to 45% in a year.

What we saw in our own research

In October 2026, we ran some of these searches ourselves while working on our own site. Two things stood out:

• For “inteligencia artificial para negocios El Paso,” Google's AI Overview cited a page on our site within about a day of that page going live.
• For “best marketing agency in El Paso,” Gemini and ChatGPT built their answers mostly from Clutch listings and reviews.

That's one agency's observation, not a study. It does line up with the research above: a page that answers a real question, in the language people search in, can be cited quickly, and “who's the best” answers lean on third-party directories and reviews.

What to do now as a local owner

• Finish your Google Business Profile. Choose the right categories, keep hours current (holidays too), list your services and service area, add real photos and post updates. It feeds the map pack, and AI tools cite it as well.
• Ask every customer for a review, not only the ones you think were happy, and never offer anything in exchange. A short link by text after the visit makes it easy. Reply to each review in the language it was written in.
• Write pages that answer real questions, in English and Spanish. Say what you do, where, for whom, what a first visit looks like, whether you take walk-ins and how to book. Write the Spanish for people on the border, not as a word-for-word copy of the English.
• Get listed where assistants look: Yelp, the directories for your industry, Clutch if you sell to other businesses, Apple Maps, Bing Places and your chamber of commerce. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere.
• Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt file and security settings don't block Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Keep key details in text on the page, not only inside images.
• Measure calls and bookings, not just rankings. Watch calls and direction requests in your Business Profile's performance report, count form fills and booked appointments and ask new customers how they found you. “ChatGPT recommended you” is an answer worth writing down.

The honest summary

SEO isn't dead. What's shrinking is easy traffic from general questions that Google or an AI tool now answers on the spot. What matters most to a local business, showing up when someone nearby is ready to call or book, still runs on a complete Business Profile, a steady flow of reviews, clear pages in both languages and accurate listings. Those are also the things AI assistants read when they decide whom to mention. Do the basics well, measure the calls and bookings they bring in and adjust from there.

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