If you go on the internets and ask the collective human expert brain if SEO is dead, you’ll get one of three answers in expert blog post form:
- 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 movies and the PG rating suddenly went PG-13.
“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.
The AIs Tell a (Not Much) Different Story
When I asked ChatGPT about the state of SEO, it gave me the same SEO is evolving theory as some of the human experts.
And why wouldn’t it?
Because I don’t think there’s anyone, human or artificial, who can discuss the current relevance of SEO from the question forward, 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 backwards.
SEO is dead. There. I said it. Now what the hell happened?
Did AI kill it?
Yes, AI Is To Blame, But…
The conspiratorial among you 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 you more phone cases, so it was already pretty ripe for AI to come in and just turn the whole science into a smoldering dumpster.
But it’s not like SEO was universally lauded in the days before AI went mainstream.
To underscore that, I’ve got one relatively new word for you: clickbait.
It couldn’t be more obvious that the term “clickbait” was born of 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 no longer able to find the thing you were searching for on the internets, 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.
The $2 Trillion Elephant In The Parlor (With a Lead Pipe)
Of course it was Google.
Allegedly. Please remember, all you attorney types, that I’m speculating from the answer backwards.
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.
So the battle plan would look something like this:
- OpenAI and the others are all about letting you steal content from other people — I mean, make magical content out of thin air — so you can put that content on the internets where it can be found.
- Google is the gatekeeper for finding that magical content.
- There is nothing — legal, technical, or otherwise — to stop Google from making its own magical content that serves its own purposes, and put that as the first search result.
The end game? 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, magical or otherwise.
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 businesses. And I’ve found, anecdotally at least, that the farther away I get from AI, SEO, or any sort of marketing monkey business, more people come, the engagement gets higher, the interaction gets stronger, the loyalty gets richer.
All because I’m “creating content” people want to “engage with.”
Or better put, I’m writing shit people like.
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 — prose or 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 our email list.
Because words are back, baby. And they mean things again.
