Forget SEO. Everyone Does RAO.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short, has been around ever since Altavista took the Internet by storm. That was in the mid to late 90s, long before Google appeared. Everyone wanted his or her website ranked up highest in the search results for specific keywords and topics. With SEO, online marketeers got free traffic to their websites directly from the search engines. But with ChatGPT and Google Gemini now, search is dead, and so is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Say hello to RAO.

People aren’t hammering search queries into search engines anymore. They’re now using ChatGPT or Google Gemini to find what they want. Both Large Language Models (LLMs) use a process that is called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). They use “Retrieval Augmentation” (RA) to retrieve information from the Internet for use in their reasoning and within their results. You can flush all the keyword tools down the toilet, because human keywords no longer matter. Agentic keywords matter.

How Retrieval Augmentation works

When you prompt an LLM with “Where can I get Döner Kebab in Bonn, Germany after 11pm on weekends?”, it’ll go on and search various Internet sources to find the answer to your question. That is retrieval augmentation.