Is SEO dead? This time, for real??

Many an obituary has been written about the old and faithful SEO or Search Engine Optimization, over the years.

When the world went mobile, there was a feeling that people won't scroll so many pages and links on a mobile phone, so SEO is dead!

Then when apps became big and it was felt that people will use digital services directly from branded apps and won't need to go and search for stuff as much, there was again a fear that SEO will be less relevant.

When voice search became a thing, it was clear that to your voice search query of "what are the good places to visit in Mauritius", the phone was not going to respond in voice with the top 10 or 20 or even 5 search matches. It would just give you some options and be done with it.

So even then, when voice search was seemingly becoming popular, there was a concern that SEO will become less relevant as more and more search shifted to voice commands.

Well, that didn't quite happen. Not only did organic search volumes continue to grow, but SEO only grew in importance as being the means to drive organic traffic to websites. And of course, search and search based advertising income being the biggest revenue source for Google, their numbers continued to grow, their market cap kept going up!

So, what is the latest challenge now?

Traditional search engine volumes are dropping rapidly. Overall, it expected that search engine volumes will be going down between 20-40% in a year's time.

Indeed, increasingly, one's default search for information is getting addressed by your favourite AI engine - be it ChatGPT or Perplexity or Deep Seek or Claude or whichever. Why would you put a query to your search engine, get 100s of search engine results and then wade though each of them, one at a time, till you discover the information that you were really looking for, when a ChatGPT prompt can get you to that answer directly, and in a jiffy?!

That being the case, traffic to traditional search engines is going down.

So of course, Google, sensing this trend, is integrating AI results into its search engine. So now, when you do a search, what do you see?

This is what I get on my mobile screen:

Google also desires to offer the user a quick answer and rather than showing individual search results, it is generating an AI overview that answers the questions that user has.

Also in a first view, the AI answer takes up half the screen and then when I click on the "show more", it pretty much fills up the screen, with no more space for ads or the actual organic search results!

Unlike the promise of voice based search usage which didn't quite happen, GenAI options have already started to become the first go-to places for many, in their search for information.

The dynamics of search seem to be changing for good, this time.

One may have questions on the veracity of responses from GenAI tools. However, in comparison, if you clicked and read the content of one of the pages that showed up on traditional search engine results, there is nothing to vouch for the veracity of the information shared there either!

Does one continue to invest in SEO then?? Will it have a significant role to play in the days ahead??

While the jury can continue to be out on this, in my personal opinion, this time it is for real. And while SEO is not dead just yet, I do believe the days are numbered, and the relevance of SEO as also of Google search will go down rapidly!

On a different note, with the kind of dominance that some of these players have had, who would have thought that they would ever be challenged?

It was never going to be possible for a new search engine to come and challenge Google significantly. But here you have a new breed of content and information engine, in the form of AI, which is challenging the dominance of Google. No doubt, Google is fighting with its own AI tool, but that fight is a much more balanced fight, where they are not even the leaders at this time, unlike the humungous market share they enjoy in traditional search.

In the same way, Meta's big bets on Llama are far from paying off just yet, after 18 months, and they continue to fight to regain their foothold of dominance.

Who would have thought Amazon's hold on e-commerce could be challenged, especially given the huge moat in the form of on-ground distribution strengths that they had built. And here we are in India, where Quick Commerce brands are gnawing away at their market share!

In the extremely dynamic world of tech, with very high valuations, based on dominance and market share, the leaders are getting challenged, and we are in for volatile times, in the tools that we use as much as on the bourses, where these companies are listed!!