What is Agentic SEO and Is It the Future of SEO?

Have you ever wished you could have someone else (or something else) handle executing SEO tasks automatically for you?

If so, agentic SEO might be for you.

It’s a new approach to handling your SEO strategy through the use of automated AI agents.

Okay, but what does that mean? How does it work? Is it a good thing or bad thing?

You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.

Let’s get into it.

What is agentic SEO?

Agentic SEO is a new approach to search engine optimization where AI agents plan and execute SEO tasks on their own. Instead of having to prompt a tool to do a certain action, agentic SEO focuses on using automated AI systems that go through SEO workflows to complete these tasks. 

Okay, but what does that really mean?

Basically, instead of having a human execute certain SEO tasks manually (or with the help of AI), you can set up AI agents that will automatically do these SEO tasks for you. 

So you can set it up as a system where it goes through the steps, without much human intervention, and completes all the tasks. This is more of an AI-managed SEO approach vs an AI-assisted SEO approach. 

How does agentic SEO work?

As I mentioned above, agentic SEO operates on a system. You create the system to determine what tasks it will do and at what point it will complete those tasks. Once you set up that system, the agent will go through those steps to complete each task. 

Here’s an example of how that might look:

Let’s say that you’re looking to use agentic SEO to help support your content marketing strategy. You create an agent and have it automatically execute tasks like:

• Identifying pages that are declining in performance so that you can update them to help them perform better
• Pulling in trending topics that you could create content on
• Recommending updates that you should make to current content to improve it
• Suggesting what content to rewrite

So, instead of you manually doing all these tasks, the agent would complete all of these tasks for you. 

Pros and cons of agentic SEO: The good, the bad, and the problematic

Since agentic SEO is new, there are a lot of people on the fence about whether to use it as part of their SEO strategy. Let’s break down the good, the bad, and the problematic when it comes to using agentic SEO. 

The good of agentic SEO

Agentic SEO has a lot to offer in terms of good things that it can do to help enhance your SEO strategy.

1. Scalability

Agentic SEO makes it easy for you to do dozens of tasks at once. Because AI can process millions of data points, it can also execute and understand that data, which saves you time.

For example, let’s look at keyword monitoring. If you were monitoring 500 keywords and decided to target 200 new ones, it would be difficult for you to scale that manually. With agentic SEO, you can easily scale to that level. AI agents can handle you adding more to the plate, which is a huge benefit to your SEO.

2. Proactive approach to SEO

With Agentic SEO, you can be more proactive with your strategy. Instead of discovering something after the fact and having to react to it and adjust, you can have agents continually monitoring your SEO strategy and catching things before they become truly problematic. 

These agents can do things like: 

• Monitoring your daily rankings to know what’s dropping
• Automatically detect pages that are declining in performance
• Find problems with your SEO and suggest fixes for them
• Adjust your strategy based on how the SERPs are changing

So with these agents continually working in the background on your SEO strategy, it can help you stay proactive and ahead of the game. 

3. Consistency

Another good thing about agentic SEO is the consistency aspect. Because everything is done by AI agents, everything is done exactly the same. 

The AI agents have the system in place and the rules to follow, and they follow them exactly as they are each time. They apply the standards of the system uniformly and don’t stray from what they’re supposed to do. 

So, as a result, your SEO becomes more consistent, and you reduce human error.

The bad of agentic SEO

Not everything with agentic SEO is good. There are some areas where it falls short, which creates hesitation with adopting it

Here are some drawbacks to agentic SEO: 

1. Extensive set up time

One bad thing about agentic SEO is that it requires extensive setup to get it launched and functional for your strategy. So while ultimately it will save you time and allow you to automate tasks that consume a lot of your time now, the initial setup is very time-consuming.

To have an effective agentic system, you need things like:

• Custom workflows tailored to your specific SEO needs
• Error handling to tell the agents what to do when they run into problems
• Integration with your content management system (CMS) or your analytics to have accurate information and data

All of this can make it really complex to set up, which means it can take a lot of time in order to get into a place where it’s functional.

2. Human understanding

Like with anything that involves AI, the human understanding aspect always falls short. AI interprets things as literal — it can’t recognize stuff like sarcasm, for example. 

As a result, there are some aspects where it can’t quite interpret things correctly, which can lead to misinterpretation if there isn’t a human overseeing the tasks that these AI agents are completing. 

While an AI agent could analyze search patterns, for example, it may not be able to detect things like search intent shifts or the human reasoning behind why the shift is happening. This is a shortcoming of AI and makes it difficult to rely on it to be fully autonomous — it still requires some level of human oversight to keep it in line.

3. Over-reliance

One of the biggest drawbacks of agentic SEO is that people misinterpret how much of it should be handling their SEO tasks. Many people will try to use agentic SEO to completely handle all of their SEO tasks with minimal human interaction.

The problem? Over-reliance on automation does more harm than good.

Agentic SEO is not meant to replace your search strategy or the tasks you handle. It’s meant to supplement and help you — it’s meant to handle tedious, volume-based tasks so you can save time.

Relying too heavily on this automation leads to:

• Instability of performance in search results
• Low content performance
• Misaligned keyword targeting
• And more

Ultimately, these agents are meant to supplement a strategic SEO plan, and not replace it. Over-reliance will lead to poor outcomes and performance.

The problematic of agentic SEO

There are some aspects of agentic SEO that aren’t necessarily bad, but if not handled properly, could become problematic if you opt to use this approach.

Here are some problematic areas of agentic SEO:

1. Misaligned output

A problematic area of agentic SEO is there’s potential for misaligned output. When you use agentic SEO, you have to have very strong and restrictive guidelines in order to ensure that the AI agents are producing exactly what you expect from them. 

If you don’t have strong guidelines or clear rules for what you want them to do, it can lead to things like:

• Your brand voice being misinterpreted
• Content being super generic and not meeting your standards
• Tasks being over-optimized (like having too many keywords in a content piece)

To avoid this problem, your guidelines need to be specific and focused to keep the AI agents on task.

2. Data dependency

One problematic area of agentic SEO is that the quality of the agents you build and how well they function is dependent heavily on data. 

These agents tend to consult things like your analytics, your crawl data, and other data sources in order to complete tasks. If you have low-quality or incomplete data, it keeps the agent from functioning properly, which can mean more work on your end to try and get it to a place where it’s functional. 

3. SEO mistakes

Agentic SEO also poses technical risks for your SEO. When you have agents set up to handle SEO tasks automatically, they can still make mistakes. They may push some unintended changes live or accidentally make duplicate content. They could also create schema with errors or create broken links. 

All these things negatively impact your SEO.

It’s important that, if you’re using agentic SEO, that you set up the proper guardrails to ensure that these mistakes don’t happen. You can also create an approvals process to ensure that, before anything the agent does goes live, you need to review it.

Is Agentic SEO the future of SEO?

Since agentic SEO is such a big and upcoming thing, you may be wondering if this is the future of SEO. 

The answer is maybe.

Like with anything else, it all comes down to adoption and how many people are willing to invest in agentic SEO in order to power their search. 

Considering that agentic SEO has a big technical barrier and also requires a lot of upfront work, it’s possible that it may not see mainstream adoption solely because the barrier to entry is difficult. 

But if more businesses start adopting it and seeing success with it, there could be mainstream adoption by more businesses looking to upgrade their SEO strategy while staying competitive. 

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