Has SEO changed with AI?

SEO has changed substantially with AI, and 2024 to 2026 brought the fastest shifts in a decade. Google's AI Overviews now answer many informational queries right on the results page, cutting clicks to top-of-funnel blog content.

AI is impacting SEO on the production side too. Content is cheaper to create, so Google leans harder on authority, originality, and user signals to separate useful pages from generated filler. Being quoted in AI answers is now a channel of its own.

The fundamentals held. People still search before buying, and buyer-intent queries still send clicks. What changed is where informational traffic goes and who gets cited by assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

BlazeHive was built for this shift, with AI SEO automation that targets the buyer searches AI answers still send out.