Evolving, and the evidence is concrete. A February 2026 study tracked what happened to AI citations after sites lost their organic Google rankings. Every site that dropped in Google also lost visibility in ChatGPT, with an average citation decline of 27.8%, steeper than the Google traffic loss itself. That means the AI tools people are calling "the replacement for Google" actually depend on Google's organic rankings to decide who to cite. SEO isn't dying; it's becoming the infrastructure layer underneath AI search. The businesses that show up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation are, overwhelmingly, the ones that already rank well on Google. What's changed is what SEO looks like. It's less about keywords and more about building clean, verifiable trust signals that both search engines and AI models can read. The foundation didn't change. The surface did.
SEO FAQ