01 Jun 2025

Is SEO on shaky ground?

Filed under: SEO | tech | AI

I was reading an article this morning that used the line “but does SEO matter anymore anyway?” and thought “wow, that sentiment never dies, does it?” but it triggered something in my head. You may have heard about AI Mode, a new way of searching with Google:

[…] we’re introducing an early experiment in Labs: AI Mode. This new Search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions. You can ask anything on your mind and get a helpful AI-powered response with the ability to go further with follow-up questions and helpful web links.

This, along with AI Overviews, is making basic search behaviour so warped I can’t even begin to discuss it here. But it’s sent all the SEO entrepreneurs and AI freaks into a foaming frenzy. We have new tools that can make sense of it all (no they can’t because not even Google can), industry directors and tech bros striking the death knell on SEO using the most dystopian language imaginable which is, of course, a great tactic for user and colleague adoption. And I genuinely don’t know how people are excited by this. For me, it’s tiring and a little frightening.

Helpless discontent

But then I remembered that people have financial investments in this stuff. They know they can sell things to people who don’t know any better and make millions through inconclusive evidence. And if it fails, well your business is set up wrong and we have an extra strategy package to help with that. As for the regular SEO—the real content optimisation where E-E-A-T and helpful content are supposed to reign supreme—that is also in an “adapt-or-die” situation. Now writers and strategists are asked to think how about optimising for AI search agents. The official line from Google has generally been to continue doing what you’ve always done and write unique and helpful information although that seems to be less specific by the minute given their push towards more AI-focused processes. However, new discoveries about AI tech lead to alleged tricks that spread like wildfire and become new rules without evidence (or you can ignore the test results because it worked for you and that’s all that matters).

Nothing that I’ve seen written or discussed has convinced me that we absolutely need to be writing or working so different to how we have been in the last few years from a content perspective. There are things we should have been doing by now, such as focusing less on individual keywords and broadening our work with topical coverage, answering common questions (not necessarily verbatim), and things like entity salience and unique, more personable prose to keep people reading and sharing (nothing smarmy though, I hate that stuff).

“Hello! How can I hinder you today?”

But it feels like there’s a shift towards “what can we do to optimise for this AI search agent? What specific phrases and paragraphs can we write to get them to feature us when someone searches for a relevant term?” I remember when I started out in 2019 and we were asking questions like this too and I found myself using snake oil tech to try and make it happen. Keyword density with hard numbers for how any times a word should be used, strategic use of bold and italics, use the keyword in the first sentence to get a boost, write at least 1,000 words or it probably won’t rank.

How far have we really moved on? We might not be doing these exact things but are we still looking for quick-win tricks without a robust strategy or test to back them up? And how conclusive is any of what we’re thinking of doing? You can’t build a strategy on a small sample that doesn’t represent what you’re doing.

It’s video content. Video content! Remember that one?

All of this takes me back to that infamous video pivot where it was falsely claimed that video was the future and viewership figures were so high that you didn’t need writers anymore and there were lots of journalist layoffs to back the claim only for it to come out that the stats were fake. Those people didn’t get their jobs back. People just shrugged their shoulders and left with the cash. AI is even more invasive as there are more layoffs and more money at stake. And all the environmental crap that comes with it.

Moving goalposts

In the title, I asked if SEO is on shaky ground and I know a lot of people would say no and give a cookie cutter spiel about how this is actually the best time to get involved but la la la I’m not listening. I’m also not doomposting and saying it’s dead, we’re so over, look for another job or die in an unmarked grave. I just think we’re chasing something that doesn’t have a solid foundation, most of its inner workings are in a black box that even the providers and engineers don’t fully understand, and have extreme biases that they control and can change at any moment to serve shareholders.

What happens if Perplexity or OpenAI decide to employ new, unique algorithms or rules about what can or can’t appear in a chatbot response based on something arbitrary or biased towards making money for one sector over another? Legislation on this kind of thing is notoriously slow or they go in the opposite direction and we’ve seen how share prices plummet and rise within days or weeks. The rules change and people lose jobs and companies lose millions.

Here are a few more metaphors to emphasise my point

We’ve also seen Google make changes that benefit them for years but with more players in the game and the time going from something working to not working within SEO getting shorter and shorter, there’s no consistent form of adaption for it all. It’s like running up a downward escalator that starts getting faster over time. If you somehow get to the top, I have no idea if there’s an end goal or another flight of stairs. But I do know that there isn’t a cheat code or doom-filled rhetoric to skip leg day either.