Every couple of years someone announces that SEO is dead. This time the argument is better than usual. People ask an AI assistant and get an answer. Search results put a generated summary above the links. Fewer people click through. All of that is true, and I’ve watched it in client data.
What I don’t accept is the conclusion. Search hasn’t stopped mattering. A particular way of doing SEO has stopped working, and I’m not sorry to see it go.
What actually got hurt
Look at which pages lost their traffic. Mostly it is the content that was written for a spreadsheet: the 1,500 word article answering a question that needed two sentences, the “ultimate guide” that says what the ten other guides say, the page that exists because a tool said the keyword had volume.
That content was never for a reader. It was there to catch a click on the way to somewhere else. An AI summary answers the question without the detour, so the click disappears. If your SEO plan was a production line of those articles, the decline is real and it isn’t coming back.
What still works, and works harder
The assistants need sources. They have to get their answers from somewhere, and they favour pages that are clear, specific and trustworthy. That is a description of good SEO from fifteen years ago.
What I see doing well:
- Pages that say plainly what you do, for whom, where, and what it costs or involves. Not hidden behind a contact form.
- Things only you can say. Your own numbers, methods, prices, photos and opinions. A summary can’t replace a source it has to cite.
- Straight answers to real customer questions, written the way a customer would ask them.
- A site that machines can read. Fast, properly structured, with the facts in text and not buried in images or scripts.
- A reputation beyond your own site. Reviews, mentions, directories and coverage that agree with each other about who you are.
The measurement problem
Here is the lax part. Plenty of businesses are still judging SEO by one number, organic sessions, and that number now misses a lot. Someone can read about you in an AI answer, type your name into a browser a week later and show up as “direct”. The work did its job and the report gives it no credit.
I’d add three checks:
- Ask the assistants about your category and see whether you are named, and whether what they say about you is right. I often find they are describing a business as it was three years ago.
- Watch branded searches and direct visits, not just organic clicks.
- Count enquiries and sales from organic, not visits. Fewer, better visitors is a fine result.
What I’d do
Stop publishing to a keyword quota. Take the ten or twenty pages that describe what you sell and make them the clearest, most complete version of that information anywhere. Fix what the assistants get wrong about you by fixing the sources they read. Then write only when you have something to say that isn’t already on a hundred other sites.
That is less content than most SEO retainers produce. It is also more work per page, which is the point.