It’s hard for me to share this.
After over 10 years in SEO, 3 years full-time, and 120+ clients, I’m done. I’m quitting SEO.
I’ve written over 1,000,000 words, driven hundreds of thousands of page views, and generated millions in revenue for my clients. But AI killed it all.
Alright, now that I have your attention, let me explain.
Search engines had a good run. Like the dinosaurs, they dominated the world for a period of time, but their reign of supremacy is coming to an end.
Open up a browser on your computer or your phone, and you’re entering a search into a search engine. Whether you’re looking up the temperature to cook chicken breast or how to build a GTM strategy, chances are you’d Google it and either get the answer in a featured snippet or from a blog post.
In a nutshell, that was inbound marketing.
HubSpot (where I worked for over 6 years) built its reputation on inbound marketing: the idea that by virtue of publishing good content, Google will reward you with traffic, and if your content is really good, that traffic will convert.
And by golly, it worked. With a little strategy and supplemental ads, you could easily grow your traffic month over month.
Then along came AI. But not in the way that you’d think.
Everyone loves to poke their fingers at big, bad Google and highlight the few cherry-picked studies that show that AI is completely replacing it.
Heck, I remember years ago someone earnestly tried to convince me that ChatGPT would replace Yelp. Their reasons still don’t make sense to me.
I don’t believe that AI is replacing Google outright. But it is bifurcating the buying journey.
To be fair, though, the buyer's journey had started cracking well before 2023. For years, people would append “Reddit” to their searches to find Reddit threads that addressed their question instead of the usual slew of blog posts. Content fatigue existed long before people could churn out a year’s worth of content in a week with Claude.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini opened the floodgates to buyers, letting them circumvent Google more often and choose when they want to read content versus just get an answer.
Perhaps the title for this post is a bit too cheeky. I’m not quitting SEO outright. I’m quitting the idea that SEO can or should be your only acquisition channel.
I hitched my wagon to SEO for a decade because SEO was perfectly serviceable as a single channel. It was as close to a sure thing as you could get if you wanted to get your message in front of prospects in the middle of their buying journey.
Now that the buying journey is fragmented, it’s not good enough to just create content for SEO and let Google work its magic. You need to roll up your sleeves and follow your customers across the web.
The people who act as though this phenomenon is the end of marketing probably didn’t pay close attention to the world around them as they grew up – or their history books.
In the days of the Roman Empire, billboards were erected by the Colosseum. With the invention of the radio came radio advertising. Newspaper and magazine ads were a default channel until the internet took over in the 1990s. Social media brought ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
And the funny thing is, billboards, radio advertisements, television ads, infomercials, newspaper ads, and so on still exist.
No medium truly died out. They just evolved and were complemented elsewhere. It’s the agencies that specialize in one medium, and only one medium, that find their client pool will shrink as those mediums become less effective for the broad market.
Marketing is a matter of two things:
When marketing fails, it’s often because it misses one or both: either bad messaging buyers ignore, or a lack of distribution so buyers never see what you had to say.
In my opinion, bad marketers are the ones who don’t or can’t adapt to what the data tells them.
The problem with SEO people is the same problem with Facebook ads people or newsletter people. It’s that every problem they see can be fixed by their “insert channel here” hammer – whether or not that’s actually true.
I sure as hell want to be known as a good marketer. That’s why I listen to data from my clients’ websites and skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.
Across my clients, bottom- and middle-funnel content still works well for SEO. In my experience, it still earns clicks from Google as buyers use Google to find products that solve their problems, and it consistently earns AI citations.
But what about the top of the funnel?
When an LLM can answer a basic question without citing a source, is that content worth creating or paying someone to create? I don’t think so. But I also don’t think it’s that black-and-white either.
Today’s marketers need to experiment, look at the data, and focus on what wins.
I have a B2C website that brings in organic traffic across the funnel. I have a B2B client that struggles with top-of-funnel SEO but excels on LinkedIn.
Rather than making a blanket proclamation about where your content should go at which funnel stage, I’d instead encourage you to consider the following channels:
But there’s no blanket rule that works for every company. My one rule is this: Instead of waiting six months to see what worked, watch the data every week and adjust.
We’re entering a post-SEO world. SEO is still relevant, but like the dinosaurs, it has evolved and may no longer be the dominant channel it once was.
For years, when people asked me what I did, I said SEO.
For those same years, clients who worked with me gave me effusive praise, saying I’m completely different from every other SEO person they worked with in the past.
I realize now that it’s because I was never an SEO person.
I treated SEO like copywriters used to treat ads. SEO was my channel, but I layered in customer research, competitor intel, and buyer psychology to build a comprehensive strategy that put my clients in front of buyers.
When email emerged as a need, I adapted my methods and added it as a channel. Then again for LinkedIn.
It’s the same process with every client:
The only difference is I’m no longer assuming SEO is the only or even the default channel.
Want to discuss how your business can be found in a post-SEO world?
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