Is the SEO industry teaching the wrong skills?

Duane Forrester's article https://lnkd.in/dw8jnVVp featuring RankBee is a timely wake‑up call: traditional ranking metrics are no longer sufficient in a world dominated by generative Ai search engines. It highlights the new SEO reality - to win in ChatGPT and Gemini, brands need to optimise for how LLMs process data.

Duane argues that SEO training is stuck in the past, still focused on title tags, link building, and keyword targeting, while the reality of search has shifted to generative Ai systems like ChatGPT and Gemini. These models don’t rank pages—they assemble answers from semantically rich, structured, and trustworthy content that can be easily retrieved and cited. Duane lays out how SEO professionals must adapt by learning new practices such as semantic chunking, embedding alignment, trust-signal engineering, and retrieval simulation. It highlights why the disconnect persists—educational inertia, outdated hiring, and legacy tools—and proposes a roadmap for practitioners to self-educate, run retrieval audits, and establish AI-SEO leadership within their organizations.