Is SEO dead now that AI answers most questions?

SEO is not dead, but the finish line moved. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews still build their answers from crawlable pages, business listings, and reviews, so the same signals that rank you also get you quoted in an AI answer.

What changed is that fewer people scroll ten blue links, so being merely present is worth less than being the source the model picks. That means clean entity data, question-shaped pages, schema markup, consistent NAP across directories, and real review volume in your service cities. Contractors who ignore this do not lose slowly, they simply stop being mentioned.

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