A glitch in the SEO matrix

SEO is dead, yes, SEO is dead

It was looking the other way

When they shot it in the head

They took the cannolis, dropped the weapon and fled

They left a little note that the cops done read

It said: “SEO is dead, yeah, #SEOisdead”

It was killed by a fully autonomous GPT

An AI assassin executed it with glee

It had outlived its purpose, so it has ceased to be

Will anyone even miss it? Highly un-like-ly

Maybe Neil Patel, Semrush, and Yoast WP

It was kind of critical to their whole industry

But SEO is dead, y’all, SEO is dead

It was looking the other way when they shot it in the head

Don’t believe me? Google it now you’ll see

Wait, how can this be? It’s still full of page after page of SEOpremacy?!

But SEO is dead, fam, SEO is dead

We saw the footage of it getting popped in the head

They dropped the murder weapon and made scarce with cannolis

But in truth the victim was already long known to the po-lice

When it comes to killing search it was light years ahead

It ran a mob of listicle and review-site gangstas

Paid ad omertàs, hashtag mafiosas

Meta-tagged, ultra-blagged, copywritten hustlas

Want to find out if you’ve got penile cancer?

Here’s ten ads for “natural” Viagra

SEO is dead, Lord, SEO is dead

It was looking the other way when they put a cap in its head

Especially as it's received a backlink on a high-content page from a high ranking domain like news.ycombinator.com!

> It's funny you mention ads though. One reason that it's so hard to find an SEO person that's actually worth anything is that if they were really good at what they did, they could just throw up their own websites with ads and make a much better living that way than selling SEO services. They don't of course, which should tell you something about how good they really are.

That doesn't even make sense. SEOs exist to make sure websites are more consumable by bots for search indexing. They likely have no backend experience or much experience working directly with css/html, and are more likely dealing with full stack developers who have no desire to understand how their code is functional for users but isn't consumable by bots. The most successful deal with brick and mortar companies which require actual capital to create and not just SEO skillz, and anyone with a brain would know dropshipping is so 2014 (there's like a million of these failed journeys documented on random boards like blackhatworld where people try to monetize search like you suggested, but it's a hella minority because we are deep into the enshittification of search). SEO is important to deal with things like the proliferation of angular 1, which was a hellhole abyss for startups in search because google wouldn't index their shit and developers needed to iterate fast. Hell, a large part of the react community is based around things like server side rendering just to get around google bot refusing to let JavaScript load and search results were polluted with handlebars variables for years because of that. Google bot still has problem rendering webpages while I do all of that shit all day with google's own puppeteer.

Tl;dr: SEOs are a cottage industry to help companies deal with the ongoing enshittification of search, and basing their value or success on whether they could launch their own site isn't a good benchmark.

AIGC is absolutely already here. Recently I was trying to find information about a miter slot on a piece of equipment. One of the more helpful articles had a quick shout-out to miter slots in the middle of a listicle about casino slot machines.

From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.

Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.

They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.

The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.