Become a specialist to thrive in the dawn of AI

Pedro says: “The dawn of artificial intelligence systems has arrived, and they are quickly catching up with reality.

We need to seriously consider the role AI will play for whoever produces content for the web and whoever does SEO to improve websites – and how much those roles can be disrupted by it.”

How is the role of AI changing?

“When you hire someone, if they are a newbie at what they do, they start at a lower level and become more efficient and valuable with time. They start at a junior position and progress to become more senior. The same thing is happening with AI.

AI started in a junior position, where their corpus of data was limited, and their ability to parse strings and consider context was limited. As we progress, it becomes more efficient and better at what it does. This means it can do more complex tasks than before. Now, it’s competing directly with professionals in areas that can be easily disrupted.

That’s areas like content production, graphic design, and music production – all areas except where, for now, human intervention is needed, like a mechanic or a doctor. These are not yet on the borderline of being disrupted, but I’m not sure that they won’t be.”

How do you see the future of SEO work evolving?

“The future of SEO work will become more open to professionals who have deep knowledge in areas that are not as widely explored. Everything that is more tied to product, technical, and strategy is more tangible and has more complexity attached to it than content production, photography, or other areas that only require being creative and generating something from that.

It also depends on whoever consumes and wants these services. You have people who want an in-depth piece of research content, and that’s probably not going to be done by AI. That requires a lot of work and involves potentially counter-intuitive things that an AI wouldn’t be able to do.

However, for everyone who just wants a quick piece of content to put on their website but doesn’t have the skills to do it themselves, where before they would pay someone to do a quick and dirty job, now they can pay AI. This transaction will go to the AI system and not to the person who would usually do it.

If your job is related to writing about, talking about, and optimizing for products, then that will still be important for the foreseeable future. However, if you’re only creating general content to rank for a keyword phrase just to drive initial traffic, then that role is less secure.”

What does someone do if their role is largely in generic content creation?

“You need to specialise yourself. If content is what you like to do, then learn more about specific areas that you are passionate about, where you want to do research and in-depth work, rather than just having very superficial knowledge about everything. That probably won’t cut it.

The key is specialisation. We need to become specialists in whatever we love to do. You are never satisfied with the quality of something that you really enjoy. That’s a good driver.

For example, I love trying to figure out why something works the way it works, how it can be improved in terms of efficiency and the technical way that it’s put together, and the ways that it can break. I love those technical areas of SEO.”

Is original content key?

“Original is a dangerous word because, if I drop my hands on my keyboard, I’m going to produce original content.

Original and valuable are two things that shouldn’t be disassociated from each other, and we tend to treat them separately. To put together unique or original content, you can spin words out of place, and it becomes original because it doesn’t exist anywhere else in that order. However, the meat of it is the same.

What it means, the new ideas that it brings, and what it’s unearthing or contributing to the whole ecosystem should make it worth its server time. Sometimes, it isn’t. That’s why we need to make the distinction. Are you producing something that a content spinner or AI could produce? If so, maybe you need to rethink your approach.”

Do we need to protect unique, valuable content from AI?

“Don’t let AI consume everything that you produce. We need to be more thoughtful.

That’s a growing concern around AI. As it currently exists, more often than not, you’ll see it producing an answer and not telling you where it found the facts it came up with or where the data was derived from. You can’t go back to the source. I hope that, with the evolution of AI systems, whoever is developing them thinks a little bit more about that and allows us to go back to the source.

It’s complex because some questions don’t have a source; they’re common knowledge. They became common knowledge over time. As humanity evolves, our collective common knowledge evolves with us, and some things just become human behaviour. You can go back to whoever has done a study around human behaviour, but some things are certain within human behaviour.

With that being said, we need to be more conscious about how we put content on the web and what we put on the web. Once it goes into the AI ecosystem, it gets diluted in there. You can’t remove that piece of content that is yours because it has now become part of the knowledge of the AI network. It’s no longer just a piece of content that was yours, it now has its own ramifications, and it has become something else that doesn’t depend on what you initially put there anymore.

We need to be more aware of the content that we want to give away for free. How we want to compete within the industry is key. We are always putting out pieces of content to upstage someone else who then puts out a better piece of content, and we keep competing.

It’s almost a race to the bottom sometimes. If you are putting out everything of value that you have then, once you run out of value, what else is left? If you can keep doing research, then good for you. Other businesses might not be able to catch up, so that might be a good strategy.”

How do you differentiate between the piece of content you want to distribute and make available and the piece of content you want to protect?

“It ties directly to how valuable it is to your business. If it’s something that you invented or something that you discovered, do you want to immediately make it available for free? Is it better to draft out little pieces of content, put out hints around it, or promote this knowledge in a way where you don’t instantly give it away for free, and you invite people to want to know more?

Then, if they want to know more, they will have to hire your services. The distinction between what you want to put out and what you should put out can be very blurred. You need to think, if you put this out, are you going to be at a disadvantage? Then, your competitors are going to have the same knowledge that you have and you’re not going to be at the forefront of what you do.

The SEO community has always been driven by sharing knowledge amongst ourselves, on social and on forums. Within the SEO community, that’s how we grew, but a different player has come in, and they’ve picked the ball up and they’ve run with it. We’ve always said that you are supposed to kick the ball, but AI has come in and changed the rules.

You have to be a bit more careful and self-aware with how you put things out nowadays.”

How do you protect a piece of content to ensure it doesn’t appear in AI searches and LLMs?

“Don’t put it online.

You can provide it in a way that is not accessible to AIs and LLMs, but it’s becoming more difficult to have something that cannot be read by an AI system. Before, if you put something in an image or a video, search engines wouldn’t be able to get it because they can’t get to the content. Now, it can listen to a video and parse the content out of it. There are AIs that are built solely for video content.

We need to find creative places where AI can’t go. I doubt using standard exclusion protocol will be able to control it, like robots.txts and things like that, because there will always be rogue AI, and some say that they respect the standard exclusion protocol but then don’t.

Forbes put some content out and specifically blocked Perplexity AI from their website. Then, they started probing, and it still went around and fetched that content in multiple ways, despite it being blocked via robots.txt, IP, etc. They tried a lot of ways to block it, and it always found a way through. They say that they respect these exclusion standards, but can you trust them?

We are seeing more and more AIs coming out, changing, and putting out more crawlers and more bots. Google just launched their new Vertex AI crawler for AI ingestion. One thing they did well is that you have to verify your website in Google Cloud to enable Google Vertex to come and read your content. That’s an opt-in rather than an opt-out. However, a lot of businesses that are competing with Google might not do this.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Specialise yourself, and get out of social a little bit.

You always want to make your mark or be seen within your community. A lot of folks mistake this social visibility with true SEO knowledge or with being at the forefront of SEO knowledge – and sometimes it’s not the same thing. I know a lot of folks who are not visible in SEO, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Some of them blow my mind with the things that they do.

Don’t get distracted by social. Stop being afraid of not surfing the latest wave of updates or AI systems. Keep exploring the AIs, but think about specialising yourself and knowing something in-depth so that you become the person people go to when they think about a certain topic, area, or way to build something.”

Pedro Dias is a Technical SEO Consultant, and you can find him over at Visively.com.