SEO really has changed:
- SERPs are drowning in AI-generated content.
- Google’s algorithms seem biased towards big brands like Reddit.
- AI Overviews are siphoning clicks away from creators.
- Google is losing its monopoly on knowledge management as more people turn to LLMs.
Talk to website owners, and you’ll even hear whispers that some companies are losing 20–40% of their monthly clicks from search. 1 2 3
Including some not-so-quiet whispers from research firms like Gartner.
This sounds like the end of the road for SEO. What marketing channel could stand to lose 20–40% of its return and still warrant energy and investment?
Well: SEO.
SEO has historically been such a stupidly lucrative marketing channel that even today, during AI search Armageddon, SEO is still the best marketing channel at your disposal.
When I first started selling content and SEO services some fourteen years ago, the main pushback I received was that it sounded too good to be true. With hindsight, maybe they had a point:
- It was predictable: you could generally make decent growth forecasts, estimating with some accuracy how traffic would grow. That was—and still is—rare in marketing.
- It actually improved over time: a one-off investment in content or links would generate better results over time. This was very different from the linear input-output relationship of paid advertising. SEO was an asset that compounded in value.
- It was precise: using keyword research, you could target particular people at a particular moment in time, and all but guarantee a steady stream of relevant visitors to your business.
- It had a very low barrier to entry: you could get started in small, incremental ways. A few links or blog posts were still beneficial, without any need for big set-up costs.
Are there any other marketing channels that even come close to these benefits?
SEO was an affordable, compounding asset that could be depended upon as the main growth engine of your business. And as a result, SEO became a near-universal marketing channel, used by small businesses and post-IPO giants, adopted in B2B and B2C. It was too good and too cheap to ignore.
In fact, SEO was so good that many companies engaged in SEO solely to monetize the traffic it generated. Affiliate marketing boomed, as did what we now call “site reputation abuse”. SEO traffic became the end, and not just the means.
Search interest for “affiliate marketing” peaked in 2023.
Today, generative AI has obviously changed SEO. It’s easy for companies to spam search results with thousands of mediocre blog posts, and just as easy for Google to skip the middleman and use AI to answer the searcher’s query directly. AI has simultaneously increased the supply of SEO content and reduced the demand for it.
AI is eating up clicks from informational searches. In our research, we found that 99.2% of the keywords that trigger AIOs are “informational” in their intent.
This is the SEO monkey paw: we can create SEO content virtually for free, but it’s now much harder to get clicks from it.
Some people are quick to cry about the “death” of SEO, but I think of these changes in a different way: SEO is being downgraded from a universal marketing channel to an extremely good one. All marketing channels have pros and cons—and now, SEO has acquired a few cons to complement the absurd numbers of pros it has always possessed.
Importantly, I think most companies won’t lose much from these changes. Even in a world of AI Overviews and AI-generated content, all of those absurdly great benefits of SEO still exist—albeit with some modification:
- SEO traffic is still predictable… but we should lower our expectations of what “good” performance looks like.
- SEO investment will still generate more value over time… just a little slower than before.
- SEO will still be precise… but we’ll have more competition to reach that same audience.
- SEO still has a low barrier to entry… but the best results will require more money and skill to achieve.
Clicks might decline. But for most companies, SEO will remain one of their biggest drivers of growth. They will still want to deny their competitors monopoly access to lucrative SERPs. They will still want to be the biggest player in a smaller search landscape. The tactics that worked then will still, largely, work the same today: content, links, technical SEO.
The contribution of SEO to the bottom line might reduce, but it will still contribute, and it will generate a significant return on investment. (This may not be a concern at all: who’s to say that LLM traffic won’t have a higher conversion rate, and contribute more to revenue than traditional search traffic?)
It’s early days, but our research found that almost ⅔ of websites already receive attributable referral traffic from LLMs. It’s not a stretch to think that referred traffic might have higher purchase intent than “traditional” SEO traffic.
There will be companies that find SEO too competitive or too expensive for their needs. That’s a shame, but it’s also true for every other marketing channel in existence.
It will also be harder to build businesses solely on monetized search traffic. Affiliate marketing is harder than ever. But that, too, should be expected. Affiliate marketing was a form of arbitrage, and all arbitrage opportunities are temporary. The window to easy profit has closed.
In many ways, we’re shedding the unhealthy and unsustainable expectations of SEO and learning to treat it more like a marketing channel, and not a magic money tap. The era of easy SEO has ended, and now we’ll have to work harder to earn those same disproportionate results.
I’m okay with that, and I think you should be too. Or as Alex Birkett put it in a discussion on LinkedIn:
And I agree with this—“SEO was too easy for too long”—and actually think it’s great that this isn’t the case anymore. Did we really want to spend the golden days of our careers publishing ultimate guides and pushing links to them to drive vanity traffic? Not me.
SEO is harder and less certain than before. But I am not going to stop doing SEO for Ahrefs.
If I was advising a startup, or helping a scale-up, or starting my own business, SEO is still the very first channel I would test. I would go into it with different expectations, and less certainty of outright success, but I would still expect it to be a major source of growth—and quite likely the best marketing channel at my disposal.
This is the only test that matters: even today, when it’s at its worst, is there anything better or more reliable than SEO?
