5 reasons why SEO is not dead
and won't die.
10 days ago, I read Elena’s Verna newsletter about which channels work for growth now. I respect Elena and always read her articles with interest, but this time, one statement triggered me.
She said that SEO & paid search don’t work anymore as acquisition channels.
Here is my response to it. You can send it to somebody who will use this statement as the 100% truth.
5 reasons why SEO has evolved, but has not died
1/ The impact of AI is very different for different SEO niches.
AI chats killed or almost killed some companies, but it doesn’t kill the entire industry.
It has the biggest impact on news/media and content/affiliate sites, but it’s not that big for B2B / SaaS, e-commerce, and local sites.
This shift highlighted how many websites wrote almost the same content with no additional value. LLMs just fixed the gap.
Here is a good study from Graphite on which websites and industries declined and which grew.
2/ Businesses can create a lot of AI-generated content now, but it’s not easy to index it, rank it, and keep in the top for a long time.
Usually, people who don’t know the history of Google updates and what scanning, indexing, and ranking are talking about the rise of AI-generated content.
Yes, many websites publish AI-generated content, but Google has been fighting with duplicate content and low-quality content for decades.
The only way to get at least some success with AI-generated content is to use an old, authoritative domain name with many backlinks. If you do it with a new website, your pages will stay in Discovered - currently not indexed, or Crawled - currently not indexed statuses in Search Console constantly.
Even if you index and rank your page in the top 10, it’s hard to stay at the top if users visit it and bounce. And they will bounce, because people quickly identify AI-slop.
3/ Search, as an important element of user behavior, has not gone anywhere.
People can change WHERE they search for something, but they search anyway.
Google made a statement that people even search more on Google.
Yes, we see a reduction in clicks for top rankings of almost 30%. But if people get better and faster answers to their search queries, they are motivated to use search more.
4/ People switch more to searching in LLMs, but how do LLMs decide which product or brand to recommend to them?
They look for information that somebody has published, updated, or linked. This is SEO. The fundamentals of getting visibility in AI chats are very similar to old SEO:
you should know your audience to find the relevant search queries
you have to write something, on your website and update it regularly
you have to build your presence on other websites
etc.
For most commercial queries, LLMs have to use Google or Bing indexes to find relevant, fresh, and unique information to write a better answer.
5/ SEO is one of the few scalable channels.
Communities, built-in-public posts on social, employee-led social: these are good examples of channels you have to use when you start and try to do things that don’t scale. But it’s hard to grow a business with them only.
If you need growth, anyway, you need to invest in:
outbound (email, LinkedIn, phone calls)
paid social (influencers, ads on LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Meta)
search (organic and paid, search engines and LLMs, Google and Reddit, etc)
Moreover, when you invest in the first 2 channels and don’t invest in the search, you lose a lot of the value that your demand generation campaigns created.
Do you have a lot of brand searches and only a homepage or a couple of product pages? It may look okay for OpenAI or Lovable, but it’s a bad decision for the majority of startups.
SEO has changed. These changes vary greatly by niche. But SEO as a channel is not dead and is only growing.
Am I wrong?
Try my templates, if you are tired of the non-friendly interfaces of GA, GSC & GAds: