Field Guide › Is SEO dead?

Is SEO dead?

No. SEO is not dead. Search engine optimization means making your website easy for search engines to find and understand, and that work still pays. What changed is the payoff. Instead of only winning a link people click, you now want to be the source the answer gets built from.

If it isn't dead, what changed?

For twenty years the game was simple. Somebody typed a question, got a list of links, and clicked one. Your job was to be high on that list.

Now a lot of searches end before the list. The answer is written out at the top of the page, or a chatbot types it out, and the person has what they needed. A 2024 study by SparkToro that measured what people actually do in their browsers found that 58.5% of Google searches in the United States ended without a click to any website.

So the list still exists. Fewer people get down to it. That's the whole change. The prize used to be a good spot on the list. Now the bigger prize is being the business the answer mentions by name.

A cold-caller told me SEO is obsolete. Was he right?

No, and it's worth noticing what he was selling.

We sell the newer kind of work, and we're still telling you your SEO isn't wasted. That's because the thing that gets a page picked up by an AI answer hasn't turned out to be exotic. It's a site that loads, says plainly what you do and where you do it, and answers the questions customers actually ask. Search engines wanted that too.

What's genuinely obsolete is the narrow version some people sold: cramming the same phrase into a page thirty times, buying links, treating one ranking number as the only score that counts. That stopped working on Google years ago. It never worked on an AI assistant.

Does the work I already paid for still count?

Most of it, yes. The overlap is bigger than anyone selling you the new thing wants to admit.

• A site that loads fast and works on a phone. Counts for both.
• Pages that say what you do and which towns you cover. Counts for both, and matters more now, because an assistant repeating you can only repeat what it can read.
• Correct hours, phone number, and address everywhere they appear. Counts for both.
• Real answers to real customer questions, in plain words. Counts for both.
• Good reviews. Counts for both.

A search engine and an AI assistant are reading your page for slightly different reasons, but they want the same thing from it: clear text that says something specific about a real business. Nothing you did to make your site clearer was wasted.

So what should I do differently?

Three things.

Change what you look at. Visits to your website used to be the score. Now your visits can fall while more people than ever are seeing your name, because they got the answer without coming to your site. Judging yourself on visits alone will make a good month look like a bad one.

Write down what customers ask you on the phone, and answer it on your site. Short paragraphs. Plain headings. One question per section. This is the single highest-value hour you can spend, and it costs nothing.

Go check what the assistants say about you. Ask ChatGPT who the best window washer, dentist, or whatever you do is in your town. Whatever it says is what your customers are hearing. If it names four competitors and not you, that's not an opinion about your work. It just means nothing it has read describes you well enough to repeat.

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