Interviewing SEOs in an AI-first world

The search engine optimization (SEO) job market is experiencing a significant shift, with the supply of talent now exceeding demand, a phenomenon attributed to artificial intelligence, economic factors, and the commoditization of traditional SEO tasks. This has led to an increase in SEO layoffs and a decrease in job openings, making the market more competitive than it has been in over 15 years. Many skills previously considered essential for SEO professionals are becoming increasingly automatable or generatable by AI. The core of this change is not that AI is eliminating SEO jobs entirely, but rather that it is altering the skills for which employers are willing to pay a premium. Historically, a substantial part of SEO work involved information gathering and generating recommendations, such as technical audits, content briefs, keyword clustering, schema markup, metadata suggestions, and competitive analyses. While these tasks remain important, AI tools can now produce initial versions of these outputs in minutes, tasks that previously took hours. The value is shifting from the mere generation of these recommendations to their prioritization and implementation. Organizations are moving away from viewing audits, roadmaps, or presentations as the final deliverable, recognizing that recommendations only create value when they are acted upon and lead to tangible improvements. The focus is now on the strategic application and execution of SEO strategies rather than the manual production of foundational reports.