Is SEO Dead? Because That Would Make a Lot of Sense

If you go on the internet and ask the collective if SEO is dead, you’ll get one of three answers, summarized here in the form of expert blog post titles:

• Is SEO Dead? Of course not!
• Is SEO Dead? Not yet!
• Is SEO Dead? No, it’s merely evolving!

But if you have to ask the question, something’s up, right? 

It’s like when I was a little kid and my Dad would take me to PG-13 movies.

“Dad, is that guy dead?”

“No son, he’s just sleeping.”

So don’t worry friends, SEO is just sleeping. 

Now, when I ask the same question to the bunch of digital marketing and consumer product experts I know, they scrunch their faces and say, “Of course it’s dead. Where the **** have you been?”

OK. We’ve got a little disconnect here—enough to fire up the reckless speculation machine anyway.

Let’s go.

Did the AIs do it?

When I asked ChatGPT about the state of SEO, it gave me the same theory of SEO evolution as some of the human expert blog posts.

And why wouldn’t it?

I don’t think there’s anyone, human or artificial, who can (or will?) give an honest analysis of SEO, except for maybe that one old gray wizard behind Google’s curtain who constantly updates the search engine algorithms. And since he doesn’t, you know, exist, we’re going to have to speculate, and solve the problem from the answer backward.

SEO is dead. There. I said it. Now what the hell happened?

Did AI kill it?

AI might be to blame. But …

The conspiratorial among you (and my expert friends) will say, “Of course AI is to blame.” Because how could that not be true. Search was a process that was already plagued by low-grade, high-volume garbage content and black-hat ethical tricks to sell more phone cases, so it was already pretty primed for disruption by AI. 

But it’s not like SEO was universally lauded in the days before AI went mainstream.

To underscore that, I’ve got one word for you: clickbait.

And by clickbait, I mean the shenanigans employed by content publishers of all stripes to trick the wizard to game the algorithms to promote the content to sell the phone cases. If SEO had rules, people were going to break them. 

The result? As far back as a decade ago, you were unable to find the thing you were searching for on the internet, because there was too much juice being given to the content that kinda resembled what you were searching for but was really there to sell you a phone case.

AI just automated that crap. Scaled it, if you will.

So who is actually to blame for the demise of SEO? It’s gonna shock you—like a good murder mystery should.

It was the $2 trillion elephant in the parlor (with a lead pipe).

Of course it was Google.

Allegedly!

Disclaimer: I’m speculating from the answer backward.

Don’t forget, Google is one of the major players in the AI race. And the race isn’t for more AI, it’s for more AI market share.

Think about it:

• OpenAI and the others are all about letting you steal content from other people, so you can put that content on the internet where it can be found. 
• Google is the gatekeeper for finding that content.
• There is nothing – legal, technical, or otherwise – to stop Google from making its own magical content that serves its own purposes. 

The result? Google doesn’t need SEO anymore, at least not in the state that it was. It needs an entirely different mechanism to return results and bait clicks and take a percentage off the conversion.

And it doesn’t need you or me or anyone else to create that content.

You want to know why your clicks have gone down? It would look a lot like that. 

There’s a way out of this

And it’s been staring us all in the face since the beginning of time.

Create good content. Not SEO content or clickbaity content or even marketing content. Just good content. For whatever purpose you want it to serve.

About nine months ago, I started testing this theory, both in my writing, and my business. I’ve found, anecdotally at least, that the further away I get from AI, SEO, or any sort of marketing monkey business, the more people sign up, engagement gets higher, interaction gets stronger, and loyalty gets richer.

All because I’m “creating content” people want to “engage with.”

Or better put, I’m writing shit people want to read.

There is no shortcut for this. There is no magical AI that you can prompt with “Write me some shit people will like.” There is no algorithm or meta data or set of keywords that can replicate this. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. The internets are still the internets and even the most well-written content, be it prose, poems, or marketing blog posts, won’t get found. 

I have no idea if Google will even pick this article up. 

But I do know this. I’d rather put my money on a human-first approach. For you marketers and business-folk, that means a customer-first approach.

I’m only scratching the surface here and there’s a lot more to come. Now would be a good time to get on my email list. 

Because words are back, baby. And they mean things again. 

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