SEO is a corpse. We’ve been poking it with a stick for three years, pretending the smell is just another ‘core update’ and not the literal rotting of the search experience as we know it. If you’re still out here obsessing over keyword density or trying to manifest a featured snippet like it’s 2018, you’re basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Except the Titanic has already hit the iceberg, and the iceberg is a giant, hallucinating AI chatbot.
The 5,400-word mistake I made in 2021
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Chicago—Filter Cafe, specifically, before they moved—back in late 2021. I was working on this massive ‘ultimate guide’ for a client who sold high-end hardware. I spent three weeks on it. 5,400 words. I mapped out every semantic keyword, I linked to every high-authority source, and I even paid some guy on Fiverr to make a custom infographic that looked like a middle school science project. I was so proud of it. I thought, ‘This is it. This is the pillar content that wins the internet.’
It got zero traffic. Not ‘low’ traffic. Zero. For six months. What I realized too late was that I wasn’t writing for a human; I was writing for a version of the Google algorithm that had already stopped existing. I was trying to satisfy a checklist of ‘best practices’ that were actually just ghosts of strategies that worked in 2014. It felt like I’d spent a month building a really nice horse carriage right as the Model T started rolling off the line. I felt like an idiot. Honestly, I still feel a bit of a sting when I think about that Word doc sitting in my ‘Old Projects’ folder.
Anyway, that was the moment I stopped believing the ‘content is king’ lie. Content is just filler for the machine now.
The math just doesn’t work anymore
I track my own stuff. I’m not a data scientist, but I spent about 11 hours last month digging into 14 of my legacy blog posts that used to be my bread and butter. Between January and June of this year, the average Click-Through Rate (CTR) for those posts dropped from 4.2% to 2.1%. The crazy part? The rankings didn’t change. I was still in the top three for most of the primary keywords. People just stopped clicking.
Why? Because Google is now a giant answer engine that doesn’t want you to leave. If you search for ‘how to fix a leaky faucet,’ Google SGE or a featured snippet just tells you. You don’t need to click my beautifully formatted article with the 2MB hero image. You got what you needed in ten seconds without ever seeing my site. Google is effectively a waiter who eats half your steak before bringing it to the table. They’re using our data to train the AI that replaces us. It’s parasitic, and I’m tired of pretending it’s a ‘partnership.’
I hate SEO tools and I’m not kidding
I know people will disagree with this, but I think most SEO tools are basically legal racketeering at this point. I’m looking at you, Ahrefs and Semrush. I pay way too much money every month for a dashboard that tells me my ‘health score’ went down because I have a missing alt tag on a decorative image from 2019. It’s busywork. It makes us feel productive while the actual ground is shifting under our feet. I’ve started telling my friends to just cancel their subscriptions. Use that $200 a month to buy a nice dinner or literally anything else.
I especially hate Neil Patel’s blog. I’m sorry, but I do. It’s too orange, the pop-ups are aggressive, and it feels like it was written by a robot that was programmed to be ‘helpful’ but accidentally became ‘annoying.’ It represents everything wrong with the old way of doing things—hyper-optimized, soul-crushing content that exists only to rank. That era is over. AI does that better now, so why are we still trying to compete on that level?
Traditional SEO is about winning a game where the rules are rigged and the prize is getting smaller every day.
AI isn’t “searching,” it’s cannibalizing
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We aren’t optimizing for humans anymore, we’re optimizing for a giant math equation that doesn’t care if we live or die. When Perplexity or ChatGPT searches the web, they aren’t looking for a ‘great read.’ They’re looking for data points to synthesize.
I might be wrong about this, but I think backlinks are basically a scam now. Or at least, they’re 90% less important than they were two years ago. I’ve seen sites with zero backlink profiles outrank ‘authoritative’ sites just because they had a clearer, more direct answer to a specific question. The ‘authority’ we spent years building is being bypassed by LLMs that just want the quickest path to a coherent sentence. This is the part that makes people uncomfortable: your brand doesn’t matter to an AI. Only your information does.
I used to think that ‘voice search’ was a joke. I was completely wrong. It’s not about people talking to their phones; it’s about the fact that search is becoming conversational. If your content doesn’t sound like a real person talking to another real person, the AI isn’t going to summarize it. It’s going to ignore you. Total irrelevance.
What I’m doing instead (and why I might be wrong)
So, what’s the move? I’ve stopped caring about ‘keywords’ in the traditional sense. I don’t look at search volume anymore. If a keyword has a search volume of 10,000, that just means 10,000 people are going to get an AI-generated answer and never click my link. I’d rather go after the weird, specific stuff that an AI can’t fake.
- I’m writing shorter, punchier posts that take a stand.
- I’m leaning into personal anecdotes that an LLM couldn’t possibly know.
- I’m focusing on ‘Information Gain’—if I’m not saying something new, I don’t write it.
- I’m building an email list like my life depends on it, because it’s the only platform I actually own.
I have this theory—and it’s a bit out there—that we’re going back to the ‘Small Web.’ Remember when you had a few blogs you actually visited every day? Before Google told you what to read? We’re heading back there. People are going to crave human messiness because the AI-generated web is going to be so perfectly boring.
I recently tried to find a review for a specific pair of boots—the Red Wing Iron Rangers (I’ve bought the same pair three times, I don’t care if there are better boots, I’m loyal to the point of stupidity). Every single result on the first page of Google was a ‘Top 10 Boots’ listicle written by a content farm. It was all the same recycled specs. I had to go to page four and find a random guy’s personal blog from 2016 to find out how the leather actually ages after two winters. That is the only kind of content that survives the AI purge.
I don’t have a neat five-step plan for you. I don’t know if this strategy will result in a ‘paradigm shift’ or whatever the buzzword is this week. I just know that the old way feels like a lie now. I’m tired of trying to outsmart an algorithm that is designed to replace me. I’d rather just write things that I’m proud of and hope a few real people find them. Is that a viable business strategy? Probably not. But it’s the only way I can keep doing this without losing my mind.
Will anyone even read this, or will an AI just summarize it into a bullet point for you?
