There’s something slightly strange happening at the moment. On one hand, we’ve got access to more information than ever before. You can open your phone, ask a question about SEO, and within seconds get an answer that sounds like it’s come from someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about.
Clear. Confident. Structured. Almost too structured, if I’m being honest.
And I think that’s where things start to get a bit blurred, because when something sounds right, it’s very easy to assume that it is right, especially if you’ve asked the same question in a couple of different tools and they all come back with roughly the same answer. It feels like validation. But it isn’t always.
The issue isn’t AI, it’s the weight we give it
I’ll be honest, I use AI most days. It’s useful. Sometimes really useful.
If I want to sense-check something quickly, or look at a problem from a slightly different angle, it’s great for that. It speeds things up, it fills in gaps, and occasionally it even points out something worth digging into further. But that’s where it should sit. Alongside experience, not above it.
What I’m starting to see more of, and this is across quite a few clients now, is AI advice being treated as the final word. Not a starting point, not something to explore, but something to follow… even when it directly contradicts what’s already been done on the site.
That’s when it starts to feel a bit uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. Not because it challenges anything, that’s fine, but because it does so without seeing the full picture.
SEO doesn’t live in isolation (and AI kind of does)
The thing with technical SEO is that almost nothing exists on its own.
A page structure links into internal linking.
Internal linking ties into crawl behaviour.
That ties into indexing.
Which then affects rankings, which then affects user behaviour, which then feeds back into performance.
It’s all connected. So when someone drops a question into AI like “is this page optimised properly?” or “should I change this structure?”, the answer it gives is based on a very small slice of information.
A paragraph. A snippet. Maybe a URL.
What it doesn’t see is everything else that sits around that.
The decisions that have already been made.
The things that were tested and rolled back.
The parts of the site that are deliberately structured a certain way for a reason.
And that context… it matters more than people think.
A simple way to think about it
This is the example I keep coming back to because it just makes sense.
AI can tell you how to drive a car. It can explain positioning, awareness, braking distances, hazard perception, all of it. Technically, it can give you everything you need to understand the mechanics of driving. But that doesn’t make it a better teacher than someone who’s spent 20 years sitting in the passenger seat, dealing with real people, real mistakes, real nerves, and real situations that don’t go to plan.
Because driving isn’t just technical. And neither is SEO.
There’s judgement involved. Timing. Context. Knowing when something should be done versus when it technically could be done.
That gap is where experience lives.
Where things start to go wrong
What I’m seeing more often now is something like this.
A client runs their website, or a page, through a couple of AI tools. They compare the responses. They notice some overlap. A few “common issues” that all the tools seem to agree on. And naturally, that feels like a strong signal.
So they come back with a list of changes they’d like implementing. Sometimes small tweaks. Sometimes quite significant ones. And when you actually look at those suggestions in the context of the whole site, a lot of them either don’t apply, are already accounted for, or in some cases… would actually make things worse.
Not because the advice is completely wrong, but because it’s incomplete.
That’s the key difference.
The bit that doesn’t get talked about enough
Experience in SEO isn’t just about knowing what to do. It’s about knowing what not to touch. That probably sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare.
There are plenty of situations where something might look slightly off on the surface, maybe it doesn’t follow a textbook “best practice”, but it’s working. It’s ranking. It’s converting. It’s doing exactly what it needs to do. And changing it, even with good intentions, can knock that balance. AI doesn’t really have a concept of that. It sees patterns, compares them to what it’s been trained on, and suggests improvements based on probability, not outcome.
Whereas someone with experience might look at the same thing and think, “yes, I can see why that’s been flagged… but I wouldn’t touch it.”
That hesitation is valuable.
Where AI actually shines
To be fair, when AI is used properly, it’s a huge advantage.
It’s great for:
- exploring ideas you might not have considered
- getting a quick second opinion
- breaking down something technical into plain English
- speeding up research that would normally take a lot longer
Used like that, it’s brilliant. But notice what it’s doing there. It’s supporting the process, not replacing it.
Finding the balance
I don’t think this is about choosing sides. It’s not AI vs humans. That’s a bit too simplistic. It’s more about how the two are used together.
If you lean entirely on AI, you risk making decisions without context. If you ignore it completely, you’re probably slowing yourself down unnecessarily.
The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.
Use AI to ask better questions. Use experience to decide what actually matters. That’s where things start to feel a bit more grounded.
Final thought
The reality is, tools will keep getting smarter. But smarter tools don’t remove the need for experience, they make it more important.
Because when everyone has access to the same answers, the difference comes down to how those answers are interpreted and applied.
That’s where we focus our time.
At Infinity3, we look beyond surface-level recommendations and into how everything actually fits together, technically, strategically, and commercially. Not just what could be changed, but what should be changed, and what’s better left alone.
If you’re relying on AI to guide your decisions, that’s completely understandable. Just don’t rely on it in isolation.
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