Search Off the Record

In a recent episode of the "Search Off the Record" podcast, the topic of "Is SEO obsolete" was discussed, and Gary Illyes was optimistic about it. He believes that the statement "SEO is dead" has been discussed since 2001, but in fact SEO still exists today. RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which adds a step before the original large language model (LLM) generates text: retrieving information from an external specific knowledge base. For example, AI customer service will first call the company's policy documents through RAG, and then generate the corresponding answer.John Mueller also talked about the topic of RAG. John Mueller said that although the SEO process is still important in the generative application of artificial intelligence, search engine optimization still needs to focus on crawling, indexing and ranking. Because the website still needs to be crawled, retrieved and included in the ranking system by artificial intelligence, but this ranking produces integrated content rather than original web links. Artificial intelligence has profoundly changed search engine optimization (SEO) in three aspects: The traditional natural search results page (that is, the previous 10 blue links) is no longer applicable. Users query through daily conversations, which changes the way the relevance algorithm…