SEO Is Dead. Again. For the Ninth Year Running.

Somewhere on LinkedIn today, someone is announcing that SEO died, this time because of AI Overviews, last time because of voice search, before that because of mobile-first indexing. The eulogy gets rewritten every year. The patient keeps showing up to work.

What actually changes is where the click happens, not whether relevance and trust still decide who earns it. An AI Overview summarizes the obvious question so a searcher can skip straight to the page that answers the harder one behind it, which rewards depth, not less content.

The recurring mistake is treating each shift as an extinction event instead of a redistribution. Pages built on thin summaries lose traffic to the summary itself. Pages built on original evidence, a clear point of view, and answers no summary can compress become more valuable, not less.

Pages built on original evidence, a clear point of view, and answers no summary can compress become more valuable, not less.

Takeaway: stop asking whether SEO is dead and start asking which of your pages could survive being replaced by a one-paragraph AI answer. If a page's entire value is restating public information, that's the leak, not the algorithm.

This week: pick your highest-traffic page and ask what it says that a search engine couldn't already summarize. If the answer is nothing, that's next week's rewrite.

If you'd rather trace a metric to an actual decision than a screenshot, a Commercial Diagnostic is a 90-minute session built to find out what your numbers actually mean. More SEO myths worth retiring are in Insights.