Learn how to use AI tools to improve your SEO workflows
Get ready to make your SEO workflows faster and more effective using the latest AI tools. Learn from SEO and organic growth experts from Lumar and Flywheel Digital in this on-demand webinar.
In this session, we cover:
- How AI can streamline technical SEO, content optimization & reporting
- The best ways to enhance—not replace—human expertise with AI
- AI tools & techniques to boost efficiency and results in your SEO projects
Watch the entire webinar (including the audience Q&A session) above.
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Meet the Webinar Speakers
- Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries, Director of Organic Growth at Flywheel Digital
- Anne Berlin, Senior Technical SEO and Lead Product Strategist at Lumar
The state of AI tools for SEO in 2025
“The number of AI tools, their capabilities, and their usage is exploding.”
– Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries
Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries wasn’t sold on the initial buzz of AI, which was very much focused on:
- Content creation
- Predicted rapid disruption of user behavior
- Fear-mongering about how it will replace jobs
- How it will kill off SEO (“SEO is dead…again!”)
“I was asking questions like: Is this actually better [than our current ways of doing things in SEO], or are people just excited because it’s new and interesting technology?” she says. “I was also thinking it often takes just as long to do things yourself as it does to actually get a quality result from AI.”
On top of this, she had questions about the quality and accuracy of AI-generated outputs. Can we really trust these tools? And, indeed, if it’s not as trustworthy as fully human-written content, does anybody actually want to read AI-generated content?
Ultimately, her opinion of using AI tools for her SEO tasks has changed.
The quality and accuracy of AI-generated outputs have improved. And AI is not going away.
Burtenshaw-deVries shares a few statistics that highlight that last fact, pointing to the prevalence of AI usage in 2025, just a few years after the public launch of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT Usage Statistics:
- ChatGPT had 3.8B site visits in January 2025 (Similarweb)
- ChatGPT weekly active users surpassed 400 million in February 2025 (Reuters)
- 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI products (Axios)
- 22% of survey respondents said there has been widespread adoption of AI into processes and tech stacks, with 47% saying AI is only used in limited use cases (Foundation Marketing)
“As SEOs, we have to understand how AI works… whether we like it or not,” she says. “I would not say I’m some raving AI fan, but I absolutely think it’s something you can and should be using because there really is a lot of value in it.”
AI tools you should be using for SEO
Burtenshaw-deVries highlights that it’s important for SEOs to understand the different specialties and data sets that AI models are trained on when exploring which ones to incorporate into their SEO workflows.
“If you’re looking to generate code,” she says. “You’re probably going to want to use a different LLM than if you want to generate images.”
Types of LLMs
| Type | Examples | Training Data | Specializations |
| General-Purpose LLMs | GPT-4, Claude | Web, books, articles, code, conversations | Conversational AI, text generation |
| Code-Generating LLMs | Codex, DeepSeek-Coder | Code repositories, documentation, Q&A | Code generation, debugging, explanations |
| Multimodal LLMs | GPT-4V, Gemini | Text, images, videos, audio | Text-to-image, captioning, understanding |
| Open-Source LLMs | LLaMA, DeepSeek | Public datasets | Research, customization |
| Domain-Specific LLMs | Med-PaLM, BloombergGPT | Medical, financial, legal data | Specialized industries |
| Retrieval-Augmented LLMs (RAGs) | ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity AI | Text + external databases | Real-time knowledge access |
Ways of working with AI tools
There are also a number of different ways in which we interact with LLMs.
Traditional prompt-based interfaces
Firstly, we have the traditional tool interface – such as going into ChatGPT and typing a prompt.
Integrating AI tools with APIs
Secondly, we can work with APIs from different LLMs and integrate them into our own applications. Burtenshaw-deVries points to creating functionality in a tool that we might be running or using it in a spreadsheet. This is possible, even for those with limited tech knowledge.
AI tools in third-party software
Finally, we can use AI-powered features in third-party software.
“Even if you maybe don’t identify as an AI user, there’s a good chance you’re already using it in some other tools,” she says. “It’s often just baked into the code of the software itself. We’re also starting to see a lot more tools kind of explicitly integrate generative AI features.”
One example of this is Shopify – where you can use AI to write product copy directly within the CMS.
Lumar itself has AI-powered features that SEOs and website managers can use to speed up day-to-day tasks, such as our:
Using AI in your SEO workflows
For Burtenshaw-deVries, the best practice use of AI in SEO is all about the value added on top of human experience and expertise.
She breaks down how to incorporate AI tools at three levels of the SEO workflow:
1. AI tools for ideation
Ideation: The process of generating and exploring new ideas from scratch.
AI can be useful in the ideation stage for creating content briefs and outlines, brainstorming solutions to technical problems, and suggesting schema types.
It can also be used for writing regex, spreadsheet formulas, scripts, and custom extractions – as well as for creating dev tickets where you need to explain a technical issue in plain language.
LLMs can also recommend ways to improve content quality, UX, and CRO.
2. AI tools for iteration
Iteration: The process of refining and improving an existing idea, product, or solution through repeated testing, feedback, and adjustments.
For Burtenshaw-deVries, this is where she spends most of her time incorporating AI into her SEO workflow. It can be used to help fix or refine code – particularly when faced with script or formulas that aren’t working or invalid schema.
In terms of content iteration, AI tools can help refine your tone of voice or make text better suited to a particular audience. It can also optimize written content for search engine – from shortening title tags to making text more concise.
3. AI tools for SEO execution at scale
Scaling Up SEO Execution: The process of efficiently implementing and managing a high volume of SEO tasks or processes without compromising quality or performance.
AI is useful here for redirect mapping, data cleaning and organization, as well as metadata and alt text creation and optimization.
Any ideation tasks that need to be done at scale can be more efficiently executed with the help of LLMs.
Burtenshaw-deVries notes that AI tools can be helpful for bulk analysis, for example, analyzing a large pool of data relating to such elements as indexation, canonicals, duplicate content, log files, and website performance data.
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Burtenshaw-deVries sees AI as a kind of executive assistant. It can summarize key takeaways and action items from your meeting notes. It can write out SOPs or other documentation from transcripts. It can organize and categorize information for you. And it can even put together slide decks.
Tips for using AI in your SEO workflows
Tip 1: Feed it context
- Give your AI tools clear, detailed prompts, including information such as:
- Background information for the task at hand
- Audience details
- Parameters to work within
- The format you want the answer in
- The goal you’re trying to achieve
- (Also consider using custom GPTs to further refine your outputs)
Tip 2: Treat AI like a junior employee
- Appreciate how they bring fresh ways of thinking with no prior bad habits. But…
- Require clear instructions (that you may have to repeat a few times).
- Expect some rounds of feedback and revisions to achieve a solid final product.
- Need to check their work thoroughly.
Tip 3: Remember the 80% Rule
- If AI is doing ~80% of the work – that’s usually the sweet spot between the efficiency of AI and human oversight and understanding.
- If AI is doing <80% of the work – it may be a task that’s not well suited to AI, or it may be a sign that you need to write better prompts.
- If AI is doing >80% of the work – this may be a sign you haven’t added enough human oversight. But it may also be a sign that a task is very well suited to AI and/or you have set it up well for success.
Key takeaways
For Burtenshaw-deVries, critical thinking is the most essential skill to polish when integrating AI into your SEO workflows. Fact-checking is definitely key.
Like SEO, AI is an always-evolving field, and we need to be able to adapt our workflows and use cases as it changes.
Only use AI when it makes sense for the task at hand, not just because it’s available.
AI won’t replace SEOs, but it may replace SEOs who don’t add it to their toolbox in genuinely effective, valuable ways. We need to leverage its strengths and aim for the 80% usage rule.
Get the latest Lumar eBook: 2025 SEO Trends to Watch
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