The SEO Industry is Fu... errrmmm... Eating its Own Future
I'm going to say something that's going to piss off anyone currently building their entire SEO career on AI prompts: if you've never done the boring stuff manually, you can't tell when the AI is lying to you. There. I said it.
Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I'm talking about the thing that's actually keeping me up at night — not a Google update, not a dodgy agency tactic, but a slow-motion skills crisis the SEO industry is bringing entirely on itself.
It started with a LinkedIn post from the brilliant Jo Furnival at Sitebulb, about junior SEOs feeling like they're falling behind because they're not building elaborate AI workflows. She's right that the boring work still wins. But it got me thinking about something bigger: a whole generation of SEOs and copywriters are being handed AI tools before they've ever learned how any of this actually works — and that's a problem for all of us, not just them.
Here's what I'm covering:
- Why you can't judge whether an AI's SEO advice is right or catastrophically wrong until you've done the work yourself
- The difference between operating a tool and having actual judgment — and why only one of those survives contact with a messy real website
- Why the same skills gap is opening up in copywriting, not just SEO
- Where the "it's just a calculator" argument for AI falls apart if you don't understand the maths
- What happens to the industry in three years' time when a whole generation skips the learning stage
- Four practical things to do right now if you're early in your career (or managing someone who is)
And yes, there's homework. Not the "might get round to it one day" kind — the pick-one-thing-and-learn-it-properly-this-week kind. I walk you through exactly what to do in the episode.
If you're managing a junior SEO, or you are one, and you've been handed a stack of AI tools with no actual training — send them this. It might be the thing that stops a very expensive skills gap from becoming their problem in three years' time.
Get found. Make money. And for the love of all that is holy, learn the fucking basics before you let the AI do the thinking for you.
Links mentioned:
Non-Wanky SEO Toolkit (free for now, usually £200): https://nonwankyseo.com
Sitebulb (Jo Furnival's website crawler): https://sitebulb.com
Follow Nikki:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social
Mentioned in this episode:
ICN Network
Transcript
The SEO industry is about 12 months away from a skills crisis, and
Speaker:it's brought it entirely on itself.
Speaker:This is SEO Fucking What?
Speaker:I'm Nikki.
Speaker:I've been doing SEO for over 30 years, and today I want to talk about
Speaker:something that keeps me up at night.
Speaker:It's not a dodgy agency tactic.
Speaker:It's not another Google update.
Speaker:It's something slower and more insidious than that.
Speaker:Specifically, it's fucking its own future, and the way it's doing that is
Speaker:by letting a whole generation of SEOs and copywriters skip the bit where they
Speaker:actually learn how any of this works.
Speaker:So this episode started from a LinkedIn post.
Speaker:The absolutely amazing Jo Furnivall from Sitebulb wrote something genuinely decent
Speaker:about junior SEOs feeling like they're behind because they're not building some
Speaker:elaborate AI workflow in their spare time.
Speaker:And her point was a good one.
Speaker:The boring work still wins.
Speaker:Technical hygiene, decent content, audits, fundamentals.
Speaker:And I agreed with all of that, but it got me thinking about
Speaker:something slightly different.
Speaker:Something that didn't fit neatly into a LinkedIn comment, which is
Speaker:why it's ended up here instead.
Speaker:I posted that I think the SEO industry and the copywriting industry, and
Speaker:probably a few other disciplines, are about 12 to 18 months away
Speaker:from realizing there's a problem.
Speaker:And that problem is this: We have no new up-and-coming talent who know the basics.
Speaker:And these people aren't stupid or lazy.
Speaker:They've just been handed AI and told to get on with it before they've
Speaker:ever had to think for themselves.
Speaker:you cannot know if an LLM is talking bollocks about SEO until you know SEO,
Speaker:and that's what keeps me up at night.
Speaker:If you've never manually checked a robot's TXT file and understood what
Speaker:it's doing, you cannot look at what an AI spits out and know whether
Speaker:it's right or catastrophically wrong.
Speaker:If you've never done keyword research the slow, painful, slightly soul-destroying
Speaker:way and thought about what a person is trying to find, you cannot review
Speaker:an AI-generated content brief and spot where it's missed the point entirely.
Speaker:If you've never read a crawl report, written a redirect map, or sat and
Speaker:thought properly about site structure, an AI tool telling you what to do
Speaker:is just noise you can't evaluate.
Speaker:You're flying blind, and you don't even know you're flying
Speaker:blind because the AI sounds so fucking confident about everything.
Speaker:I've been in this industry since before it was called SEO, and the way you got
Speaker:good at it was by wading through it.
Speaker:You ran experiments.
Speaker:You watched what happened.
Speaker:You got things wrong and worked out why.
Speaker:You built up a mental model of how search actually works through doing the
Speaker:work, not by outsourcing the thinking to a tool and hoping for the best.
Speaker:That process is slow.
Speaker:Sometimes it's fucking tedious, but it's absolutely, completely, non-negotiably
Speaker:essential because what comes out of the other end of that is judgment.
Speaker:Not a checklist, not a prompt, actual judgment.
Speaker:The ability to look at a situation and think, "That doesn't seem right.
Speaker:I want to understand why." The ability to tell the difference between
Speaker:an SEO recommendation that makes sense and one that sounds plausible
Speaker:but is actually going to cause problems three months down the line.
Speaker:And we're currently producing a generation of people who haven't built that because
Speaker:they haven't had to, because there's always been an AI tool to do the thinking,
Speaker:generate the output, suggest the fix.
Speaker:And when those people hit a situation the AI handles badly, or the AI confidently
Speaker:gets wrong, they won't know because they've never had the reference point
Speaker:And I wanna be clear, it… this is not just SEO.
Speaker:I see it with copywriting.
Speaker:I've spoken to copywriters who are entirely reliant on AI output and have
Speaker:never really grappled with what makes a piece of writing actually work, who
Speaker:haven't spent years writing stuff that was a bit shit and learning from it, who
Speaker:can't look at AI copy and tell you why it sounds like AI copy because they don't
Speaker:have enough experience of what good human writing feels like to spot the difference.
Speaker:It's the same principle, just a different discipline.
Speaker:It's
Speaker:The same gap opening up in the talent pipeline.
Speaker:And I know, I can already hear it.
Speaker:"But Nikki, AI is just a tool." And you're right, it is just a tool.
Speaker:And you'll tell me, "It's like a calculator. You still need to understand
Speaker:the maths." And that's it exactly.
Speaker:You still need to understand the maths.
Speaker:. If you don't understand the maths, you can't use the calculator sensibly.
Speaker:You can't sense check the output.
Speaker:You can't tell when it's given you something that looks right but isn't.
Speaker:And in SEO, the stakes are not abstract.
Speaker:Bad SEO recommendations implemented without question tank websites,
Speaker:kill traffic, lose revenue.
Speaker:I've spent years fixing problems that were caused by someone following
Speaker:advice from an agency, from a tool, and now from AI, without having the
Speaker:knowledge to interrogate it first.
Speaker:That's already happening, and it's going to get much, much worse as people
Speaker:doing the work have less and less baseline knowledge to bring to it.
Speaker:And part of what's driving this is the LinkedIn panic machine.
Speaker:And I touched on this back in episode one, so I'm not gonna spend long on it,
Speaker:but the noise at the moment about AI workflows and LLM integration
Speaker:and vibe-coded whatever the fuck is completely overwhelming.
Speaker:And if you're early in your SEO career and you're spending all your mental
Speaker:energy trying to build an AI-powered audit tool in your bedroom to prove
Speaker:you're relevant, you are not spending that mental energy on understanding what
Speaker:a good audit actually looks like and why.
Speaker:You're optimizing for looking competent rather than becoming competent,
Speaker:and those two things have very different outcomes over five years.
Speaker:And what worries me, it's not the juniors, bless them.
Speaker:They're just responding to the incentives they've been given.
Speaker:What worries me is where the midweights are going to come from.
Speaker:Because the way SEO works, the way any skilled discipline works, is you
Speaker:have people that have been doing it for years and have developed real
Speaker:expertise, and you have people coming up who are learning from doing, making
Speaker:mistakes, developing that judgment.
Speaker:And in a few years, those people become the mid-weights.
Speaker:And in a few years after that, some of them become the seniors.
Speaker:That pipeline works because each stage involves learning.
Speaker:If the learning stage gets skipped because AI is handling all the thinking,
Speaker:what do you get in three years when those people should be mid-weights?
Speaker:You get people with three years of experience and 18
Speaker:months of actual knowledge.
Speaker:You get people who can operate the tools but cannot think independently of them.
Speaker:You get people who will be completely lost the next time something significant shifts
Speaker:in how search works because they haven't built the foundation that lets you adapt.
Speaker:And you get a talent gap that the industry will spend years trying to
Speaker:understand, wondering where all the good mid-weight SEOs went, having absolutely
Speaker:created the fucking problem itself.
Speaker:This is not me saying AI is bad or people shouldn't use it.
Speaker:I use it.
Speaker:It has genuinely useful applications.
Speaker:But if you are new to SEO or you're managing someone who is, please hear this.
Speaker:Do the boring stuff first.
Speaker:Do it manually.
Speaker:Do it the slow way.
Speaker:Understand what you're looking at before you let a tool interpret it for you.
Speaker:Run a crawl and read the report yourself.
Speaker:Don't just let a tool prioritize it for you until you understand
Speaker:why things get prioritized.
Speaker:Do keyword research with actual thought behind it.
Speaker:Understand search intent from first principles before
Speaker:you outsource the thinking.
Speaker:Write content yourself.
Speaker:Struggle with it.
Speaker:Work out what makes it good.
Speaker:Then when you use AI to help, you'll know whether what it's produced is any good.
Speaker:Test things.
Speaker:See what happens.
Speaker:Get things wrong and learn from it.
Speaker:That's not time wasted.
Speaker:It's literally how you build the knowledge that makes you valuable in five years.
Speaker:And if you're managing junior SEOs, give them the space to do that.
Speaker:Don't just hand them AI tools and a list of prompts and
Speaker:tell them to get on with it.
Speaker:That's not training.
Speaker:That's outsourcing your training budget to a language model after the break,
Speaker:I want to get a bit more practical because this isn't just a rant for
Speaker:the sake of it, much as I love that.
Speaker:There are things to do if you're early in your career that will set
Speaker:you apart from everyone who just went straight to the AI tools.
Speaker:Stick around.
Speaker:Okay, practical stuff 'cause I'm not here just to be grumpy at you,
Speaker:even if I am quite good at it.
Speaker:If you are early in your career in SEO or if you're a business owner
Speaker:who's handed SEO responsibility to someone junior, here's what I suggest.
Speaker:First, pick one thing and understand it properly.
Speaker:Not every SEO thing, one thing.
Speaker:Internal linking, keyword research, meta titles.
Speaker:One thing.
Speaker:Learn it without AI.
Speaker:Read about it.
Speaker:Do it manually on a real website.
Speaker:See what happens.
Speaker:Then use AI to assist once you've built the foundation.
Speaker:Second, get curious about why things work, not just whether they work.
Speaker:The junior SEOs who will be brilliant in five years are the ones asking, "Why
Speaker:do we do this?" Not just, "What should I do?" The ones that build judgment.
Speaker:Chase the why.
Speaker:Third, break things deliberately.
Speaker:Set up a test site, mess with the robot's text and see what gets de-indexed.
Speaker:Change a title tag and watch what happens to the click-through rate.
Speaker:You learn SEO by watching it respond to what you do.
Speaker:You don't get that from a textbook or a prompt.
Speaker:And fourth, find someone who will tell you when you're fucking wrong, whether
Speaker:that's a mentor, a more experienced colleague, a community, whatever.
Speaker:Find someone who knows more than you and will actually push back
Speaker:on your thinking, not someone who just validates everything you do.
Speaker:That's not useful.
Speaker:Because that's what I got coming up in SEO, people who had more experience
Speaker:and told me when I was getting it wrong, and it was uncomfortable,
Speaker:but it was an… And yes, it was uncomfortable, but it was essential.
Speaker:The SEO industry doesn't have a surplus of people who will tell you difficult things,
Speaker:but the ones who will are worth finding.
Speaker:If you're listening to this and you're thinking about your own career or you're
Speaker:thinking about how you're developing the people around you, I hope this has
Speaker:given you something to think about.
Speaker:And if this has been useful, make sure you're following SEO Fucking
Speaker:What wherever you're listening so you don't miss the next episode.
Speaker:If you want to learn on-page SEO properly, the fundamentals, the stuff that matters
Speaker:from someone who's been doing it for 30 years and will abso-fucking-lutely
Speaker:tell you where you're getting it wrong, go and have a look at the Non-Wanky
Speaker:SEO Toolkit at nonwankyseo.com.
Speaker:I've made it free for now.
Speaker:It was 200 pounds, but now it's free.
Speaker:Give it a go.
Speaker:10 modules, perfect on-page SEO.
Speaker:It's worth a try.
Speaker:Until next time, Get found, make money, and for the love of all that is holy,
Speaker:learn the fucking basics before you let the AI do the thinking for you
