SEO Is Dead, According to Google

But it’s not a mistake. Or a surprise.

Let me connect some dots.

About 12 months ago, out of pure frustration, I started writing these very articles with a focus I dubbed “anti-SEO.” I didn’t start ignoring SEO strategy, because I’ve always done that, mostly by accident, but I started actively working against SEO strategy. The results were shockingly spectacular, and I’ll get into that.

About six months ago, I started publicly warning folks that SEO was dying. I got scolded by SEO gurus.

Two days ago at Google I/O, the world’s largest—and let’s face it, only—search engine, announced that it was mass launching updates built on its AI summarized search results. 

Yes, the AI that told users to use glue on pizza.

Dots connected. Coffin nailed shut. SEO is dead. Here’s what it means for you. 

Oh, and I’ve got good news if you’re in the pizza glue business!

Fight Me

Even if you don’t put glue on your pizza—hell, even if you put pineapple on your pizza—the news isn’t all bad, as long as you’re willing to accept it and deal with it.

So, you SEO gurus, if you’re here to lash out at me again, fine. I’ll tell you the same thing I told you back in December when the changes to Google’s search algorithms and Discover platform became clear. I’m not here to argue or to take a victory lap. That would be off-putting, and I want for all of us to be friends. 

What I will try to do is surface the trends I’m seeing in a way that will help people who really want to focus on meaning and purpose, for personal or business reasons, and not just hold a death grip on an obviously obsolete method of selling phone cases and shady mortgage loans.

I do have good news, but you have to read the whole article to get to it. Or you can wait for the AI summary and hope Google nailed it.

#Bananamode

Last April I almost quit writing. Writing is just something I do on the side, to try to help people, and it was becoming clear that the internets and the algorithms didn’t want me to help people any more.

My day job is many things, but all those things involve being a technologist, an entrepreneur, and a product developer, both digitally and in the real world. So I had spent my fair share of time trying to figure out how to digitally separate my needle of a message from the haystack of SEO fluff—the “articles” with the kinds of headlines we all recognize as clickbait but sometimes sheepishly click on anyway. 

And who knows, you may have sheepishly clicked on this very garbage right here. If you did, I wasn’t trying to get you to do that, I assure you. 

Because instead of giving up the message, I decided to give up on the algorithms. I got tired of writing stuff that might get found—in fact, I got so angry at the system that I started writing stuff that… purposefully wouldn’t get found. 

Yeah, I know that’s crazy. But it’s like when Nirvana released In Utero. The message was “please don’t buy this”—and 15 million people bought it anyway.

One of my readers dubbed this anti-SEO strategy #Bananamode after I randomly stuck the word “banana” in a post to confuse the AI scrapers. 

I’m rambling now—in #Bananamode I’m free to do that. My point is it worked. All the numbers went up at least 400 percent, pushing me over a million reads per month across a couple different publications. 

Go. Figure. 

Well, I did. I went and figured. Here’s what I came up with.

You’re Not a Writer, but Now You Are

When I first started publicly talking about the decline of SEO, I did so with data points behind me. Millions of data points, in fact. If you saw the amount of data I had been collecting, analyzing, and then summarily ignoring, you would again call me crazy. 

But there was a method to my madness. One of my claims to fame is being able to pull insights where the numbers don’t make the real answers obvious. When I saw that anti-SEO was working—and granted, I have built my own machine to serve my own audience, so don’t try this at home—I already knew why, and so I started sifting through the data and talking about it.

If we’re going to anthropomorphize tech (since we do so much of this with computers now anyway… he said snarkily), AI didn’t take out SEO like David taking out Goliath. SEO was already a creaky old man spewing word salad designed to surface links for… phone cases and shady mortgage loans. A lot of content was already automated and tailored, not to educate or emotionally lift, but to trigger a buy response.

When AI snuck up on SEO, content marketing had already gone full marketing, and content itself was also creeping scarily close to full marketing. Hell, I’m marketing myself right now, like the “Me” logo on Ricky Bobby’s race car. Like, three people are gonna get that joke and join my newsletter.

By December, I had discovered that tech had a role in the solution, and hell, AI could play too. Just not in the content. Instead, I decided to use data to track and strengthen the connection between the reader and the writer, something I had built a business on 25 years ago, using the two axes that matter most—educating someone or getting an emotional response out of someone.

In my case, I do the latter with jokes and righteous indignation, and the former I save for my private newsletter. 

Hey, marketers. Especially content marketers. That’s a bona-fide business model. Just replace “articles” with “content marketing” and “private newsletter” with product.

And then just write shit people want to read.

Vindication Isn’t What It Used to Be

Please someone tell me they get the reference in that section heading. It’s a deep cut.

Now Google just plain announced it’s putting more energy and effort into AI summarization of search and putting that mess of pizza glue at the top of search results on every search in the overwhelming majority of browsers and non-traditional search interfaces. 

Ironically, the message could not be clearer.

Your link that used to be in the top of the search results is now buried firmly under an avalanche of AI slop. Or your words will be buried within it alongside links and ads that probably aren’t yours.

So much for SEO “evolving.”

But there are finally green shoots, like this article where “[Carly] Steven [SEO and editorial e-commerce director for the U.K.’s Daily Mail] urged publishers to lean into branded searches and unreplicable content, such as columnists and live blogs.”

People are getting it. Pizza glue or #Bananamode. The choice is yours.

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