While it’s true that search engines are moving to models which answer questions in their entirety, that does not make SEO anachronistic.
If you read about online marketing beyond this daily blog, the first week of 2025 will almost certainly have thrown you at least one “this is the year that SEO becomes redundant” article. It’s all to do with AI, you see, and, oh I don’t know, other stuff.
These articles appear every January. The justification is the only thing that changes. Google ‘seo dead’ and look at the range of dates for the results returned. They go back nearly 20 years.
While it’s true that search engines are moving to models which answer questions in their entirety, that does not make SEO anachronistic. Which sources do we think the so-called ‘AI’ is choosing to get its answers from? The indexing, crawling and ranking process still exists. It’s still Google making a judgement.
While ‘ten blue links‘ are becoming just the old-school preference of web nerds, the Q&A service of the future will still require on-topic content. The problem is that it may be less easy to predict what will be successful.