SEO professionals are happy to give the appropriate and expected answers to questions about climate change and green energy. But to what extent have they actually considered their industry’s role and responsibilities when it comes to environmental issues?

It’s difficult to say.

In a recent article at Search Engine Land, Matt Tutt presented the results of a survey which asked SEO professionals how their companies and clients might help to address climate change and make the internet more of a green place overall. But it’s easy to question the significance of that survey, because it mostly presents the respondents with a set of pre-fabricated solutions and asks them to choose among them.

To some extent, this might reflect the genuine attitude of SEO professionals. But their ability to rank different ways of “reducing the environmental impact of a website” does not necessarily tell us that much. It doesn’t signify that they believe such reduction is their own responsibility, and it doesn’t address larger questions about the environmental impact of online practices, especially within their industry.

It seems fair to say that this omission is probably by design. Tutt’s article actually starts with the premise that SEO professionals are “in a great position to help shape traffic on the web” so that it prioritizes websites that have a lesser carbon footprint. The survey thus seems to be designed specifically to bolster an environmentally-friendly image of SEO professionals, without really considering whether or not this reflects reality.

The data that Tutt collected is still valuable in its own right, and we don’t have comparable data to contradict it. But anecdotally, from a perspective inside the digital marketing industry, we can say that there’s just about as much reason to view SEO professionals as potential environmental villains, as opposed to environmental saviors.

This is largely because it’s so easy for SEO marketing to devolve into a sort of arms race among competitors, and recent additions to their toolkit have made it easy for that arms race to ramp up very quickly, and rather destructively. Specifically, the advent of generative A.I. has made it possible to generate massive amounts of keyword-dense content for massive numbers of client sites, in practically no time. And while it’s not clear how prevalent that practice is, there’s no doubt that some SEO professionals are exploiting it to its fullest.

In so doing, they’re also turning a blind eye to the long-term impact of their practices. And because A.I. is shockingly resource-intensive, part of that impact is a dramatic increase in carbon emissions and water consumption.

In light of this trend, it might be worth surveying SEO professionals again, to ask them whether they think speedy content creation is worth this cost. We should hope that the vast majority of them would say no – not just for the sake of the planet but also for the sake of the internet itself, which would become a much less pleasant and much less functional place amidst regular, massive dumps of low-quality content.

Unfortunately, though, there is just no way to know how such a survey would turn out. Even more unfortunately, there’s no doubt that there is at least a small percentage of SEO professionals who are unscrupulous and would embrace destructive shortcuts even when called out on it.