The SEO Industry Is Dead (Finally)

Prelude

Hello Victor. You asked for my thoughts on the future of Search Engine Optimisation. I am going to give you the honest answer that no agency owner will sign off on. The game is over. I have spent the last twenty years building systems that power the internet. I have watched the evolution of search from a directory of links to a complex algorithmic beast. I have seen the rise of content farms and the fall of organic reach. But what is happening right now is not a shift. It is not a pivot. It is an extinction event.

We are witnessing the industrialisation of noise.

The barriers to content creation have not just been lowered. They have been obliterated. I can write a script in Python right now that generates ten thousand articles on "The Best Toaster Ovens of 2025" before I finish my coffee. I can spin up a thousand instances of a WordPress site. I can flood the index with more words in an hour than a team of humans could write in a lifetime. And I am just one engineer. Now imagine every spammer, every grifter, and every legitimate marketing department doing the same thing. Simultaneously.

The internet is drowning in slop.

The SEO industry was built on the premise of scarcity. There were only so many slots on the first page of Google. There were only so many experts on a topic. There was only so much content. Value was derived from being the best answer.

That premise is gone.

When supply becomes infinite, value drops to zero. This is basic economics. We are looking at a market crash of information value. The currency of the web has been debased by generative AI. And yet I see professionals talking about "adapting" or "evolving". They are rearranging deck chairs on a ship that has already snapped in half.

The Orthodoxy

Let us look at what the industry tells itself to sleep at night. If you read the marketing brochures or listen to the conference talks, the narrative is surprisingly optimistic.

They say that AI is just a tool. They claim it is a "co-pilot" that frees up humans to do "strategic work". The argument goes that because AI automates the boring stuff like keyword research and meta tags, SEO professionals can focus on creativity.

They talk about E-E-A-T. Experience. Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. This is the shield they believe protects them. The theory is that Google cares about human experience. They believe that if they just write "high-quality" content that demonstrates real human insight, the algorithm will reward them. They argue that AI cannot replicate the nuance of human experience.

There is a belief in the "Hybrid Model".

This is the idea that the future is man plus machine. You use the AI to generate the outline. You use the human to add the "soul". You use the AI to audit the technicals. You use the human to build the relationships. The industry consensus is that we are entering a golden age of efficiency.

They point to the fact that search volume is not disappearing. People still have questions. Therefore, people still need answers. Therefore, the industry that provides those answers must survive. It is a logical chain that comforts them.

It is also completely wrong.

The Cracks

The evidence that this orthodoxy is failing is already in the production logs. You just have to look at the numbers without the filter of wishful thinking.

Let us start with the "Zero-Click" phenomenon.

We are seeing a massive shift in user behaviour. Users are not clicking. They are reading the summary. Google is no longer a signpost. It is the destination. Research from 2024 indicates that approximately 58.5% of searches result in zero clicks. That is the majority. That is the new normal.

Think about what that means.

For every ten people who search for your product or your advice, six of them will never see your website. They will see a hallucination generated by a Large Language Model or a scrape of your content presented as Google's own knowledge. You do the work. Google takes the value.

This is the "Great Decoupling". Traffic and search volume are no longer correlated.

Then look at the "efficiency" claim.

Yes. AI tools automate tasks. I have seen the tools that automate keyword research and content outlining. Automated Seo Content Creation discusses this at length. But what happens when everyone has the same efficiency?

If I can audit my site in seconds, so can my competitor. If I can generate a content outline based on the top ten ranking results, so can my competitor. The "strategic advantage" of technical SEO is evaporating because the baseline competence has been raised to the ceiling by software.

We are also seeing the cracks in the content ecosystem itself.

The web is being flooded. It is not just "bad" content. It is mediocre content. It is "good enough" content. And there is mountains of it. The signal-to-noise ratio is plummeting.

The orthodoxy relies on the idea that Google can distinguish "human" quality from AI quality. But as a software engineer, I can tell you that is a fantasy. AI is trained on human content. It mimics human patterns. As the models improve, the distinction becomes mathematical noise.

The industry is celebrating its own executioner.

By using these tools to flood the zone, SEOs are training the very models that are replacing them. Every optimised article you publish is just more training data for the model that will eventually answer the user's question without you.

The Deeper Truth

The problem is not just technological. It is structural. We need to look at the architecture of the web and the incentives of the players involved.

The Infinite Supply Problem

I mentioned this in the prelude. But we need to go deeper.

In the old world, writing a good article cost money. It cost time. It required a human brain to sit down, process information, and type it out. That cost acted as a filter. It meant that you generally only produced content if you had a reason to.

Generative AI reduces the marginal cost of content production to near zero.

When the cost of production hits zero, supply hits infinity.

In a world of infinite content, the search engine's job changes. It is no longer about "indexing the web". It is about filtering out the sludge. But when the sludge is 99.9% of the index, the filter breaks.

Google knows this.

This is why they are pivoting to AI Overviews. They know they cannot show you ten blue links anymore because eight of them are likely to be SEO-optimised garbage generated by a script. They have to synthesise the answer because the source material is becoming unreliable.

The Vampire Architecture

Let's look at the mechanics of what Google is building.

They are building an "Answer Engine". Not a search engine.

The old contract was simple. I let you crawl my site. You give me visitors. It was a fair trade.

The new contract is theft. I let you crawl my site. You scrape my data. You feed it into a vector database. You use an LLM to summarise my insights. You serve that answer to the user on your own domain. I get nothing.

Ai Search Is Growing But Seo Fundamentals Still Drive Most Traffic 466620 suggests that fundamentals still drive traffic. For now. But look at the trend line. Look at the intent.

Google does not want to send you traffic. Traffic sent to you is ad revenue lost for them.

Here is a speculative pseudo-code representation of the new search logic:

INPUT: User Query "How to fix a leaking tap"

TRADITIONAL_PATH:
    Search Index -> Rank Pages -> Display Links -> User Leaves Google (BAD for Revenue)

NEW_PATH:
    Search Index -> Retrieve Top 10 Contexts -> Feed to LLM
    LLM Output -> "Here is how to fix it..." -> User Stays on Google (GOOD for Revenue)
    
DECISION: Execute NEW_PATH

The robot doesn't think. It repeats. And it repeats the parts of your content that are useful, strips out your branding, strips out your ads, and presents it as its own.

The Death of the Long Tail

SEO used to thrive in the "long tail". The specific, niche questions. "Best red running shoes for wide feet under $100".

These are exactly the queries that LLMs excel at answering.

An LLM is a compression of the internet. It has already read every review of running shoes. It can synthesise that answer instantly. It does not need to send the user to your affiliate blog.

The "informational query" is dead as a traffic source.

If your business model relies on answering questions, you are obsolete. The machine answers questions faster, cleaner, and without the pop-up ads.

The Walled Garden Retreat

This is leading to a fractured web.

Creators are realising that the open web is a hostile environment. If you publish on a blog, you are just feeding the scraper.

So where does the value go?

It goes into the Walled Gardens. Discord servers. Newsletters. Slack communities. Paywalled content. Is Ai Killing Search Engines And Seo touches on this sentiment. The real conversations are moving to places where the crawlers cannot go.

This breaks the fundamental loop of SEO. You cannot optimise for search if the content is hidden behind a login.

The public web is becoming a graveyard of abandoned marketing copy and AI-generated filler. The humans have left the building.

Implications

So what does this mean for the industry?

1. The End of the "SEO Specialist"

The role of "SEO Specialist" is going the way of the "Switchboard Operator".

Sure. There will still be technical tasks. Will Ai Replace School Seo asks the question. The answer is yes.

If your job is to "optimise meta tags", you are a script. If your job is to "build backlinks", you are a spammer. If your job is to "write content briefs", you are a prompt.

The industry will contract. Massively. Will Ai Replace Seo Jobs In Future is full of denial, but the economics are undeniable. Agencies that charge thousands of dollars for "content strategy" that consists of keyword clustering will collapse. The value add is gone.

2. Brand is the Only Moat

If you cannot win on information, you must win on identity.

The only reason a user will visit your website in 2026 is because they specifically want you. Not an answer. Your answer.

This means the shift from "Search Engine Optimisation" to "Brand Optimisation". You are not playing for clicks. You are playing for memory.

You have to build a brand that is so distinct, so opinionated, and so trusted that the user bypasses the AI summary to hear your voice.

This is incredibly hard. Most companies cannot do it. Most companies are boring.

3. The Rise of "Answer Engine Optimisation" (A Fool's Errand)

We are already seeing the pivot. Agencies selling "AEO". Or "GEO" (Generative Engine Optimisation).

They claim they can help you "rank" in the AI summary.

Do not buy this snake oil.

You cannot "optimise" for a black box neural network in the same way you optimised for a linear ranking algorithm. The inputs are too complex. The outputs are non-deterministic. And even if you succeed, even if the AI cites you... nobody clicks the citation.

It is optimisation for vanity metrics.

4. Technical SEO becomes DevOps

The only part of SEO that survives is the hard engineering.

Making sure your site renders correctly for a headless browser. Structuring your data so the LLM can parse it easily. Server-side rendering.

This is not marketing. This is software engineering.

The "marketer who knows a bit of HTML" is finished. The future belongs to the engineer who understands how a vector database retrieves context. Ais Impact On Seo highlights the technical shift, but it underestimates the severity.

Conclusion

I am not saying this to be cruel. I am saying this because I respect the craft of building things that work.

SEO, as a discipline, no longer works.

It has been optimised to death. We have gamed the system until the system broke. And now the system has been replaced by a machine that eats our output and gives us nothing in return.

Ai Seo Statistics will show you adoption rates. They will show you growth. But they are measuring the growth of the tools that are digging the grave.

The internet is changing. It is becoming a bifurcation of "Slop" and "Truth".

The "Slop" is the public web. Infinite. Generated. Mediocre. The domain of the bots.

The "Truth" is hidden. Private. gated. Human.

If you are a business, stop pouring money into the bottomless pit of keyword targeting. Stop trying to out-publish the robots. You will lose.

Build a product that people talk about. Build a community that people want to join. Build a brand that stands for something other than "we rank for [keyword]".

The era of tricking a robot into sending you customers is over.

Now you actually have to be good.

Good luck. You are going to need it.

Now if you will excuse me, I'm off to build stuff.