91³ÉÈË

Last month, a founder I’d just signed asked me the question I now hear at least once a week: “Is SEO dead? Should we even bother?”

She had a point — sort of. Her competitors’ traffic had dropped. Google was answering more questions directly inside the search results page. Half of her industry’s content was being summarized by AI tools before anyone clicked anything.

I run a digital agency that has handled SEO for clients across e-commerce, B2B services and direct-to-consumer brands. After watching the past 18 months unfold, here’s the honest answer I give every founder who asks me this question.

Why SEO isn’t dead  — but the old version is

The reason this question keeps coming up isn’t paranoia. Google rolled out AI Overviews across its core search experience, and are now the norm for informational queries.

If you sold “ranking #1 for keywords” as a service for the past decade, your business model is in trouble.

But ranking was never the point. Customers were the point. And customers are still searching — they’re just searching differently, and they’re buying from brands they recognize and trust.

What’s actually changed about search

Three things have meaningfully shifted, and any honest agency should be telling you this.

First, top-of-funnel informational content has lost most of its commercial value. If someone Googles “what is a CRM,” they’re now reading the AI summary and moving on. Writing 2,000-word explainer articles to capture that traffic is a strategy from 2019.

Second, search engines are weighing brand signals more heavily than ever. Google’s own guidance has shifted toward rewarding , and brand mentions, reviews and direct traffic now correlate more strongly with rankings than they did three years ago.

Third, the buying journey has fragmented. Customers research on TikTok, ask ChatGPT, read Reddit threads and check Google Maps before they ever land on your website. SEO is one channel inside that journey — not the whole thing.

What hasn’t changed at all

Here’s what I tell clients to focus on, because none of this is going anywhere.

People still have problems they need to solve, and they still type those problems into a search box. The difference is in which problems still drive a click. “Best CRM for a five-person sales team in real estate” still gets clicked. “What is a CRM?” doesn’t.

Trust still wins. A founder who shows up consistently with helpful content, real case studies and a credible point of view will outrank a faceless content farm — even one publishing 10 times more articles. Google has gotten better at telling the difference, not worse.

And local intent is more valuable than ever. If you sell anything to anyone within 50 miles of your business, your Google Business Profile, reviews and local landing pages are doing more work for you than they did five years ago.

What I’d do if I were starting today

When clients ask me how to invest their first marketing dollar in 2026, here’s the order I give them.

Build the brand first. Spend the first six months making sure people who hear your name recognize it. Podcasts, partnerships, founder-led social content — anything that gets your name in front of your customer in a context that isn’t search.

Then layer on bottom-of-funnel SEO. Write the comparison pages, the alternative-to pages, the city-specific landing pages and the case studies. These pages convert. They also tend to be ignored by because they require specific, current information that a generative summary can’t reliably produce.

Treat your Google Business Profile like a second website if you serve a local market. Get more than 50 reviews before you obsess about anything else. One client went from 12 Google reviews to 87 in four months — and the calls started coming in without us touching a single page on the website.

And finally — measure outcomes, not rankings. The clients who survived the past year’s algorithm changes were the ones tracking qualified leads, branded search volume and revenue. The clients who panicked were the ones staring at a keyword position report.

The version of SEO that’s actually dying

Cheap content, keyword-stuffed pages, link-buying schemes and “100 articles a month for $500” packages are dying. Honestly, good riddance. The version of SEO that survives — and grows — is the one closest to actual marketing: knowing who your customer is, understanding what they need and meeting them with something genuinely useful.

So when a client asks me if SEO is dead, my answer is the same one I gave that founder on our Zoom call last month. SEO isn’t dying. The shortcuts are. And if your business has been built on shortcuts, the algorithm change you’re worried about already happened.