There’s no other way to begin this blog other than opening myself with you. It is important since I’d like to take you through the experience that I had, which ultimately led to imagining how the near-future of the web looks.

I usually like to divide my life between 3 stages; pre-internet, rocking the internet, and the last (and current) feels like a payback to the internet (I guess that over the years, I’ve released so many user-unfair websites/products that I think I owe them). I suppose that like almost all of my contemporary internet colleagues, I ended up working on it accidentally; I simply didn’t know where to fit, but when I finally found my place on the internet, I focused all my efforts on it (though very well I could have ended up as a chef or even a fisherman). I was iron ore, and over the years, SEO tempered me; it was my passion, my definition of success was keyword rankings, and it has formed my way of understanding the internet and its system.

That being said, when I first dreamed of a self-sustainable website, which didn’t require the support from an SEO specialist to grow organically, I was scared. The same relentless fear that every professional feels going up to his neck when he reads about the 63% growth in RPA adoption in 2018 (Robotic process automation); Is my job (everything that I know) at stake?

Before going any step forward, let’s jump back to the self-sustainable website piece for a moment. Try to imagine what requirements need to meet a website designed today to still be relevant in 10 years; challenging, isn’t it? Now Imagine 20 years! How should it be made to meet today’s SEO requirements structurally and the ones to come in 15 years (and add a layer of complexity for any other channel)? Well, in a way, there’s a straightforward answer to that, and we only need to take a closer look at what has happened on sites that have already made it through their second decade; we are talking about examples like eBay or Amazon, amongst many others (damn, they’ve been going around before Google itself!).

The answer to how a website gets to survive 20 or more years is inevitably bound to the user; as long as the website can interpret and adapt to the user’s needs and meets his expectations, the site will still be relevant. The channel (SEO or any other) will need to change too, so necessarily, the website will always be compliant with it, and there you have the golden combination for any unicorn: product-channel-fit (no offence, sales guys). UGC (user-generated content websites) or UAC (User adaptive content sites) are clearly in a better position than any other blog that I could ever make since my vision (or the one from any other blogger) will always be deciduous, and at a given point in time will not meet the user expectation.

Moving forward now, with a perfectly suitable website to resist any ‘weather’ condition in regards to product and market fit, we need to take a look at how does the growth piece look like; If we truly aim to own our market share in 20 years ahead, we need to develop a website that can adapt himself to both user and channel requirements. We are referring (of course) to a smart website.

This is how my vision starts; how do we automate the SEO process of scaling and growing a website efficiently without human interaction of the decision making? It might look impossible from the point we’re standing from. Still, an SEO consultant only needs to analyse data and extract conclusions that turn into an actionable output due to a particular set of rules or knowledge. The challenge then is to gather the necessary smart data and then define the set of actions that will ultimately turn into a specific action in a particular environment; in fact, it doesn’t seem too challenging, isn’t it?

Before panicking and start thinking that our jobs are at stake, we need to keep in mind that human-creative intelligence will always have a role in guiding and supporting an AI relentless intelligence to make the right decisions; not only as a QA process but also as a necessary actor to scale the impact of the actions.

An AI-powered engine focused on SEO should provide the capacity of scaling our SEO efforts while maximising efficiency. Essentially, we as SEO’s know that we might have our limitations when facing a million-URL website; we need tools, but those tools must necessarily be native to a specific environment to be useful.

An SEO (or growth) consultant would end up being an alchemist that would add different data sets or decision models to the test tube and then validate the results. And this isn’t an example taken from the latest Blade Runner movie. It turns out that this is right behind the corner: AI will transform the way we work with the websites (as narrow intelligence do now); we need to start preparing for the smart websites and their necessities.

Dynamic web expanding is a way of understanding how those websites would react like a living been to the challenge of growing and gathering more organic traffic; understanding the data, they produce through the users or other competitors (websites). A vision of a better internet, better-providing value through their product to the users.

In following articles, I will be tackling how AI SEO provides opportunities and how do human SEOs interact with it while scaling their capabilities.

For the time being, thanks for your time; I’d be very thrilled to discuss any of those points sharing a good pint or coffee, so don’t hesitate on reaching out to us!

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Marc Herrera - Head of Product and Co-Founder @ DWX