Is SEO Relevant in the Age of AI Search? 

“Is SEO relevant anymore?” This question is something we encounter all the time when we’re talking to people in our line of work. Business owners watch AI Overviews appear in 13.14% of all Google searches, up from just 6.49% in January 2025. They see headlines declaring “SEO is dead” and wonder if they should abandon their search optimization investments entirely.

We’ve spent the last few months analyzing the data, working with clients across Thailand, and tracking real campaign performance. We have found that SEO is still relevant and it plays a big role in AI search’s results. But SEO has evolved dramatically, and understanding why SEO is important in 2025 requires looking beyond the headlines at what’s actually driving business results.

Why Everyone Questions SEO’s Relevance (And What the Data Actually Shows)

The skepticism is understandable. Businesses watch AI-generated summaries answer questions directly in search results. Users get information without clicking through to websites. Major publishers report traffic declines and then you have Industry headlines that declare the end of traditional search optimization. For companies that built their growth on organic traffic, these changes feel threatening.

The content landscape has intensified as well. AI tools make content creation faster and cheaper, flooding the internet with new pages. Competition for rankings has never been fiercer. Google’s algorithm updates create volatility that can wipe out years of SEO investment seemingly overnight. When the rules keep changing and traffic becomes less predictable, questioning SEO’s value is a natural response.

The key is understanding that SEO hasn’t died. It has evolved. And this evolution actually strengthens the case for strategic SEO investment.

Industry-specific data from global studies tells a compelling story. Real estate businesses achieve exceptional ROI from SEO over multi-year periods. Financial services see strong returns. B2B SaaS companies experience substantial growth. Healthcare providers report impressive performance within their first year. These are performance metrics from real campaigns and they seem to suggest that SEO is still making things happen.

More importantly, organic search leads convert at 14.6%, nearly nine times higher than traditional outbound methods at 1.7%. For e-commerce, SEO traffic converts at 3.8% compared to 2.4% for paid ads. Traffic quality matters more than volume, and SEO consistently delivers higher-intent visitors who actually convert.

The question isn’t whether to invest in SEO. It’s whether your business can afford to ignore a channel that generates these returns while competitors capture market share.

Why Is SEO Important in the AI Search Era

Understanding why SEO is important in 2025 requires examining how AI search actually works. We must start this discussion knowing that SEO is not replaced by AI search but rather AI search draws from SEO. 

Multiple studies consistently show that 75 to 92% of pages appearing in AI Overviews already rank in Google’s organic top 10 positions. The median ranking of cited URLs sits at position 3. This means traditional SEO remains the primary filter determining which content AI systems even consider for citation.

Think of it this way: AI doesn’t eliminate the need for SEO. It adds a second layer on top of it. Google uses its traditional ranking systems like PageRank and Helpful Content alongside AI models to first identify quality pages. Only then do AI systems extract relevant text to create answers to user queries. Without strong organic rankings achieved through backlinks, technical SEO, and quality content, pages never enter the consideration set for AI citations.

This is why we urge our clients to focus on integrated strategies. We maintain traditional SEO excellence while adding AI-specific optimizations. The businesses thriving right now aren’t choosing one or the other because they’re just mastering both.

The Signals That Actually Drive Results in 2025

Working with Thai businesses across industries, we’ve identified the factors that separate winners from losers in the current search landscape.

Brand authority has become the critical differentiator in Thailand’s fragmented search landscape, but local brands face unique structural challenges. Branded web mentions correlate with AI citations at 0.664—three times stronger than backlinks alone at 0.218—yet only 2 Thai brands (Kasikorn Bank and Mama) appear in the country’s top-20 AI-visible rankings. The Thai language creates severe disadvantages, requiring 2.62 to 3.8 times more tokens than English to encode the same content, while constituting just 0.5% of AI training data (Typhoon: Thai Large Language Models).

For Thai brands, success requires a three-fold approach: building bilingual web presence to overcome tokenization penalties, earning third-party media mentions across Thai and English sources (which drive 40-60% of AI citations versus just 1-7% for brand content), and maintaining visibility across Thailand’s fragmented discovery ecosystem spanning marketplace algorithms, Google search, LINE Official Accounts, and social platforms—with winner-takes-all dynamics demanding top-quartile performance for meaningful results.

This winner-takes-all dynamic means building genuine brand authority is the foundation that makes both traditional rankings and AI visibility possible. What we want to help clients do is build this authority.

The content structure of pages must enable machine parsing as AI Overviews use Text Fragment technology to extract specific passages. This requires technical formatting with short sentences, single-point paragraphs, white space between sections, and proper HTML5 semantic elements. We implement schema markup using JSON-LD format, which controlled studies show significantly improves AI Overview appearance rates.

E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) have intensified as the gatekeeper for AI search. AI Overviews overwhelmingly favor authoritative domains. The top 20 linked websites have 6.7K to 25.1M referring domains. For web page content in medical, financial, and legal topics, authority requirements are highest. Healthcare queries show AI Overviews 63% of the time, with authoritative sources capturing the majority of citations.

The ROI That Proves SEO’s Continued Relevance

When Thai business owners ask us “is SEO relevant for my company,” we can point to concrete performance data and performance trends from 2024 to 2025. The numbers tell a clear story about why SEO is important for sustainable growth.

Organic search still generates 53.3% of all website traffic, more than any other channel. For B2B companies, organic search generates twice as much revenue as any other source. Google’s total search volume grew 21.6% from 2023 to 2024. Search simply continues to expand and while people are using AI services such as ChatGPT for search queries, this is miniscule fraction of the overall search audience.

Perhaps most telling: 83% of companies plan to increase their SEO budget in the future, according to Gartner. Nearly 90% of organizations are focusing more on SEO, not less. The global SEO market reached $72.31 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $106.15 billion by 2030, a 7.98% compound annual growth rate.

These aren’t businesses clinging to a dying channel. They’re doubling down on proven performance. And interestingly, while some sites lost traffic volume, conversion metrics improved. This shift toward quality over quantity actually strengthens SEO’s value proposition for businesses focused on bottom-line results.

How Spyder Helps Thai Businesses Stay Ahead

At Spyder, we work with companies across Thailand to implement integrated strategies that capture opportunity in both traditional and AI-powered search.

We maintain traditional SEO excellence with quality backlinks from authoritative sites, technical SEO fundamentals including fast load times and mobile optimization, and high-quality content that serves user intent. These remain non-negotiable for achieving the top-10 rankings that make AI citation possible.

Once SEO is addressed, we add AI-specific enhancements. We structure content with answer-first formatting and comprehensive depth, optimize for semantic understanding over keyword matching, and ensure content is technically formatted for machine parsing.

The timing advantage won’t last forever. AI Overview adoption continues growing exponentially. Google launched AI Mode in March 2025 with plans to make it the default experience soon. Early adopters gain disproportionate visibility, with top brands capturing exponentially more AI citations than competitors.

The Clear Answer: SEO Is More Relevant Than Ever

So is SEO relevant in the age of AI search? The evidence is unequivocal. SEO isn’t just relevant. It’s more essential than ever for businesses serious about online visibility and revenue growth.

Why is SEO important in 2025? Because it remains the foundation that makes AI visibility possible. Because it generates high ROI and converts at rates nine times higher than traditional marketing. Organic search still drives 53.3% of all website traffic and continues growing year over year. And finally, businesses that master integrated SEO strategies capture market share while competitors panic.

The businesses that thrive won’t be those who abandoned SEO when AI emerged. Success belongs to organizations that maintain SEO fundamentals while adapting to AI-specific requirements.

For Thai businesses navigating this transition, the strategic imperative is clear: invest in integrated strategies that optimize for the complete search landscape. The evidence shows this isn’t optional. It’s the price of entry for online visibility in 2025 and beyond.Ready to future-proof your search strategy for both traditional SEO and AI-powered visibility? Contact Spyder at spyder.co.th to learn how we help Thai businesses achieve measurable ROI through integrated search optimization that works in the AI era.