The short answer is absolutely.
But here's a caveat: It won't exist in a form that we're familiar with.
This is what throws off a lot of people.
SEO is all about getting content on a website you own to get processed easily and painlessly by Google so it gets included in their index as well as controlling on-page and off-page factors so that your content appears near the top of search results for your target keywords.
If you pay close attention to my description, all of this is external to Google.
The future of SEO is going to be spoon feeding direct information to searchers.
You got a glimpse of this in ChatGPT.
I'm convinced that ChatGPT is not the final iteration or version of this format.
But even with ChatGPT, we can see that the traditional search result of a bunch of links with some descriptions is over.
This is going to be the future of SEO.
The format is going to change.
But the operations of trying to get your information to rank and trying to get it into the index are still going to be the same.
The battle for SEO will be how you can get your dataset included in the data source indexes of search engines of the future.
Do you see how this works?
This is not as easy as you think.
Google or its successor will have high requirements regarding their admission or acceptance of your dataset.
At the very least, they would ask:
"Do you really know this stuff?
Can you prove your expertise?
How long have you been in the industry?
Who do you know?
Have you published books?
Do you have certifications?
And so on and so forth."
It's going to be interesting how costly this shift from open data in the form of websites to closed databanks will be.
But you best believe that there's still a tremendous amount of money to be made.
When they present information from their databanks, they're going to have to show citations.
They're going to have to show that this is legit, and that's where your links come in.
And when people click on those links, since it has already been vetted as "authoritative," you can then advertise to those people.
I truly believe that with a ChatGPT format makeover, search results will actually do a better job when it comes to convincing searchers to buy than current search models.