SEO Isn’t Dead - It’s Everywhere
Insights from Two Decades in Search
As someone who’s been in the search industry for over twenty-five years, I’ve heard the “SEO is dead” chorus more times than I can count. Every few years, a new technology or trend emerges and pundits start writing SEO’s obituary. When social media rose to prominence, some claimed it would eclipse search. When voice assistants hit the market, we heard voice search would kill SEO. Today, the buzz is that AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews (SGE), Perplexity, and Bing’s new AI “Copilot” will finally drive the last nail in SEO’s coffin. Well, I’m here to tell you: SEO is not dead. In fact, it’s more important than ever . It’s just evolving and expanding.
In this series, I’ll explain why, drawing on my journey from founding an AI-driven search startup (Engenium) in 1998 to my current role as Chief Strategy Officer at Altezza, a leading SEO technology firm. I’ve watched search reinvent itself many times, and each time, SEO doesn’t die. It adapts. Let’s cut through the hype and explore how search engine optimization remains a critical strategy, even (and especially) in the age of AI.
Part 1: The “SEO Is Dead” Chorus. Why We’ve Heard It All Before
First, a little perspective. The claim that “SEO is dead” is nothing new – it’s a recurring theme in digital marketing whenever big changes hit search. In the early 2000s, when Google cracked down on spammy tactics with the Florida and Cassandra updates, some SEO old-timers threw up their hands and declared the game was over. It wasn’t. The game just changed to reward quality over tricks. In 2011 and 2012, Google’s Panda and Penguin updates penalized low-quality content and shady link schemes, prompting fresh “SEO is dead” panic from those whose tactics stopped working. But again, SEO wasn’t dead. It was evolving, pushing practitioners towards better content and ethical strategies.
We saw the same cycle with new search features. When Google introduced featured snippets (the answer boxes at the top of results) and zero-click searches started rising, people worried that if users didn’t click results, traditional SEO would wither. Indeed, by 2020 around half of Google searches ended without a click, as Rand Fishkin’s research showed an increasing proportion of zero-click queries. That was alarming, but what actually happened? SEO adapted. Marketers learned to optimize for featured snippets and other rich results, aiming to have their content appear directly in the answers. The dynamic of the search page changed, but the need to earn visibility did not. In fact, those snippets created new opportunities for smart content creators to boost brand visibility even when no click occurs, (More on that later).
The rise of voice search a few years ago was another supposed SEO killer. If people just ask Siri or Alexa for answers, would they ever visit websites? Again, the panic was overblown. Voice search did introduce new challenges – like optimizing for conversational, long-tail queries – but it didn’t make SEO obsolete. It simply added another interface through which content needs to be discovered. Predictions that voice assistants would end “keyword-based” SEO never materialized. Instead, SEOs started focusing on natural language content and FAQ schemas to accommodate voice queries. The core mission stayed the same: ensure our content is what those voice assistants recite.
This historical perspective matters because today’s AI-driven search tools are just the latest evolution. Yes, ChatGPT and Google’s AI can synthesize answers for users without direct clicks, but we’ve been here before in spirit. Each time search technology has leaped forward, whether through algorithm updates, new SERP features, or new modalities of search, the fundamental need for optimization endures. As a recent analysis put it: “SEO has been declared dead many times… However, SEO has not died each time, but has evolved and adapted.”. I’ve witnessed this first hand throughout my career. Every “death” of SEO was really a rebirth: a challenge to refine tactics and refocus on delivering value and relevance.
Search Interfaces Change, But Discovery Remains King
Let’s step back and define what we’re really talking about. What is SEO, fundamentally? In my view, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art and science of getting content discovered through search interfaces. It’s about visibility: making sure your information, product, or message surfaces when someone looks for answers or solutions. That core mission hasn’t changed in 25 years. What has changed dramatically is the interfaces and algorithms through which people search.
Think about how people find information today. It’s not just ten blue links on a Google results page. It’s:
- Typing a query and getting a rich answer box or an AI-generated summary at the top of the page.
- Asking a question to ChatGPT or Bing Chat and receiving a conversational answer with cited sources in-line.
- Using voice prompts with smart assistants in cars and kitchens.
- Searching within platforms, from YouTube to Amazon to Reddit, each with their own algorithms.
- Querying new AI assistants, like Perplexity or Google’s SGE, that combine search and generative AI.
In all these cases, there is an underlying search mechanism retrieving and ranking content. Whether the result is a classic web link, a spoken answer, or an AI-written paragraph, the content comes from somewhere. My job (and passion) as an SEO strategist is to make sure the source of that chosen content is mine, or my client’s.
In the early days at Engenium, the AI-powered enterprise search company I founded, we worked on “concept-based” search, trying to match users’ questions with documents by meaning, not just keywords. It was cutting-edge at the time. But guess what – even the best conceptual search algorithm couldn’t find answers that weren’t in the document corpus. That is, if the content wasn’t there or wasn’t crawled, the engine had nothing relevant to retrieve. Today’s generative AI search works the same way: the AI can only remix knowledge it has ingested. If your content isn’t part of that knowledge base, either in training data or indexed sources, you’re invisible. Thus, the essence of SEO: ensuring your content is present, accessible, and relevant in the places people look, remains absolutely critical.
So is SEO dead because the interface is now an AI chat instead of a list of links? No. SEO is fundamentally about content discovery, not the specific interface. Call it search discovery optimization or content visibility, the goal is unchanged: get found. If tomorrow everyone starts using brain implants to query an AI directly, you can bet I’ll be figuring out how to make sure my content is the one the AI brings back!
To put it succinctly, SEO isn’t defined by Google’s old interface; SEO is defined by user behavior. Wherever users hunt for answers, we must ensure our content is in that hunt. A savvy marketer at a major conference recently said, “SEO will be around just as long as the platforms we use for search exist, because it helps pinpoint what a person wants.” Exactly. As long as humans seek information (and I don’t see that instinct going away), we will need to optimize content to be found in whatever search medium or AI assistant they use.
Next Time: New Acronyms, Same Core Mission (SEO vs AEO vs GEO vs AISO)
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