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What the slow death of SEO means for anyone with a website

This Tuesday's Google I/O 2024 conference put the final nail in the coffin of SEO. To top it off, there are also rumors that OpenAI is making their own search engine, and I'm happy for it, sort of.

Out of the many articles I could have written off the back of that AI Google conference, I figured SEO deserved its own send-off. Fanfare and all.

“Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers,” reads the Washington Post headline on Monday.

The Slow Death of SEO

SEO has been on life support for a few years now. I get whiplash every time I see "SEO expert" on LinkedIn profiles. "Oh right, that was a phase we went through," I have to remind myself, "like bell-bottom jeans and slap bracelets."

It's a curious reminder of how quickly the digital world moves on.

How did we get here?

If you're a resident of the internet, but not a native, then you remember it was once fun and weird, and full of possibilities.

We used to go online to escape our real life, now we go into our real life to escape the online.

What used to be a playground for curious and creative voices became a battlefield where only the biggest players could survive. To make your website successful, you had to play the SEO game. This, generally, meant stripping your content of personality and cramming in as many keywords as possible while still maintaining some semblance of readability.

That was the extent of online marketing, back in the early 2000's.

And then came Google Adsense…

Those somewhat-readable-but-occasionally-helpful sentences were now packed with personal stories that were shoehorned in to add length while rarely adding value. We were all subjected to tales of great-aunt Maria's tomato garden when all we wanted was a straightforward marinara sauce recipe.

And then social media came along, turning every headline into clickbait and every feed into a frenzy of sensationalism. Those somewhat-readable-and-very-long-but-occasionally-helpful sentences had an enticing titles that got you to click and kept reinforcing this icky loop.

People still "surf" the web of course, but it's not the same - as evidenced by the fact that we no longer use fun words like "surf" to describe it.

To find anything remotely different and new, you have to scroll all the way down to page 64, and who's got time for that?

It's out of this mess that companies like Medium and Substack were birthed. Selling us on the idea that you don't have to search until the deep pits of Google to find interesting creators, we've brought everyone together right here. Ok, sure.

Google is to blame for this, of course.

By prioritizing certain types of content they inadvertently turned the web into a giant keyword-stuffed piñata.

Instead of crafting engaging, thoughtful content, writers found themselves churning out articles that read like they were produced by a particularly verbose robot (know any of those?) Every piece needed to be just long enough to sandwich in another ad, but not so long that it lost the reader entirely, although, let’s be honest, that ship had often sailed by paragraph three.

The charm and spontaneity of the early internet gave way to a mechanical grind, where originality was sacrificed at the altar of SEO.

And now we're here, today, a few days after the I/O 2024 developer conference, where Google unveiled their vision for the future, with AI at its core. Here's a good X Twitter thread that summarizes the many ways Google is going to incorporate AI into their products.

From search engine enhancements to personalized assistance, the advancements promise to reshape our digital interactions and, inevitably, marketing.

If you're looking for a general dive into how AI will influence marketing,

Andrew Chen

put out a post yesterday with his take. One of the main predictions he makes is a convergence of marketing and sales - thanks to the many data points we now collect and the rush to hyper-personalize everyone's internet bubble. This is something I've said in the past, that both intrigues and frightens me.

What I want to focus on, for now, is Google's Search Generative Experience. Which, according to Google, by the end of 2024, it will appear at the top of results for 1 billion users.

If Google used to be an entry point into the web, now they're proudly going to summarize it all for you, "let Google do the Googling for you" was the conference's slogan.

In real terms, what that means is that this new search engine will summarize and then obscure the original links, requiring users to click to see them. Meaning, all of the effort that went into creating the content goes unnoticed, and the sources don't get any credit. Analysts who have studied the company’s early experiments with SGE say a "bloodbath" is coming. Geeks can be very dramatic.

Tech research firm Gartner predicts traffic to the web from search engines will fall 25 percent by 2026. I suppose you could call it a bloodbath, assuming this trend will only exacerbate in time.

"Wait a minute, wouldn't Google also lose money?" you might correctly be wondering.

Maybe, maybe not. Google supplies advertising to the very websites they're about to cut all of this traffic from. However, because Google holds a dominant position in the digital advertising market, it seems to be betting that it can navigate this transition without too many hiccups by leveraging its various other revenue streams.

Also, if all of these years in marketing have taught me anything, is that we can insert ads on everything, websites, toilet seats, and these new AI-generated summaries.

It is unclear how Google will prioritize what content to summarize, whether or not it's going to hallucinate, and whether people are willing to trade convenience for accuracy. But if you're one of those unicorns that still works in SEO. Here's a few things you need to consider:

1. Pivot to a different sub-set of marketing, or a different career altogether. Marketing is in for a seismic shift in the next few years, we're about to face a brave new world, so make sure you're up for it.

2. Clickbait is out, high-quality content is in. I hope. If a blog post can be summarized in one short sentence, AI won't see a reason to reference it.

3. Improve your technical SEO skills. AI will become more sophisticated in evaluating these factors. Understand how to optimize site speed, mobile responsiveness, and structured data.

4. Optimize for personalization and localization. AI will enable more personalized and localized search results. SEO marketers will need to tailor their strategies to target specific audiences and regions more effectively.

SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz will also need to evolve. I suspect they will fight AI with AI and will integrate machine learning to provide deeper insights into content quality, user engagement, and overall user experience. This could include sentiment analysis, readability scores, and engagement metrics.

Given the growing importance of UX in search rankings, SEO tools might expand their offerings to include options that help optimize website usability, mobile responsiveness, and page load times. Perhaps most importantly, given AI's emphasis on personalized search results, these tools will likely introduce more robust features for personalizing and localizing SEO strategies. Data privacy be damned.

Both a relief and a new challenge

The prospect of not having to read about So and So's grandma every time I look for a recipe, brings me more joy than I'm proud to admit. To a degree, Google is cutting through the clutter (that they forced users to create, mind you) and delivering what we actually want.

For marketers and content creators, this means evolving once again. The focus must now shift from merely optimizing for search engines to creating content that both algorithms and AI recognize as valuable.

Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day summarized this well:

"If you really drill down into OpenAI and Google’s competing visions of AI, you start to see that they’re more or less the same. They’re both about trying to repackage what already exists into something either users, developers, or investors will care about.

With OpenAI, they’re literally just trying to jam everything we already do online into a new interface that they own. All while promising us that if they can commit just a bit more copyright infringement, they’ll build computer God.

While Google is just trying to repackage what Google already does and are calling it “AI” because no one would care if they said they were building Clippy 2.0."

The good news is that as AI begins to curate and present information, the playing field might level out, giving high-quality content a chance to shine regardless of the creator’s size. However, this also introduces new uncertainties. How will AI determine what is valuable? Can we trust it to be fair and unbiased?

The death of SEO as we know it might just be the beginning of a more sophisticated, AI-driven approach to online visibility.

What do you think?

What will happen to SEO now that Google is planning to infuse AI any and all of its products?

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