Does SEO Still Matter If Buyers Use AI Assistants?

Yes, and arguably more than before. AI assistants are trained on, and grounded in, the same web content search engines index. If your site is not crawlable, clearly structured and specific, you are absent from the source material an assistant draws on when someone asks it to recommend a supplier. The work has not disappeared; the destination has changed.

What changes

Optimising for a ten-blue-links page and optimising to be quoted are different jobs. Assistants extract passages, not pages. They favour content that answers a question directly, states specifics, and is structured clearly enough to lift a passage out of.

• Answer the question in the first sentence, then expand. Buried answers do not get extracted.
• Use real numbers, named methods and concrete detail. Vague claims are unquotable.
• Keep heading structure honest, so a machine can tell where one idea ends and the next begins.
• Publish structured data, so your entity, services and answers are machine-readable rather than inferred.

What has not changed

Technical health still gates everything. A page an assistant's crawler cannot fetch, or a site that contradicts itself about its own canonical URL, will not be cited no matter how good the writing is. The fundamentals became more valuable, not less.