JEEV TRIKA

Digital marketing and AI · 3 min read

SEO Isn't Dead. The Results Page Changed.

Optimising for search still matters. What changed is where the searcher's attention stops.

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Every few years someone announces that SEO is dead. It is a good headline and it has never been true. It is not true now either. But something real did change, and dismissing it is as much of a mistake as panicking about it.

What changed is the discovery surface. For twenty years a search meant a page of links, and the job was to be one of the first few. Increasingly a search returns an answer first, written by the search engine, with sources attached. Below it are the links.

What the numbers say

One careful outside measurement comes from Pew Research Center, which tracked the actual browsing of 900 US adults through March 2025. About one search in five produced an AI summary. When a summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits; when there was no summary, 15%. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on 1% of visits. And they were more likely to end their browsing session right there: 26% of the time with a summary, 16% without.

Google disputes the conclusion people draw from studies like that. In August 2025 its head of Search wrote that total organic clicks to websites had been “relatively stable year-over-year,” that “average click quality has increased,” and that people increasingly click on “authentic voices and first-hand perspectives”: forums, video, in-depth reviews, original analysis.

Both can be true at once. Fewer people need to click for a simple answer. The ones who do click want something the summary could not give them.

What I saw from the operating side

In 2025 I was writing to a partner agency that organic results “keep getting pushed down,” and that AI Overviews had “some value” but were “still early.” I told the story of that year in Built for Google, Rebuilt for Answers. The short version: a site built to be one of ten links was not automatically useful to a page that leads with an answer.

What it means

Rankings are no longer the whole scoreboard. Being the third link under an answer that already satisfied the searcher is worth less than it was. Being one of the sources the answer cites, or the place someone goes when the answer is not enough, is worth more.

The commodity page is the one that loses. If your page restates what everyone else says, the summary will say it for you, and nobody needs to click. Pages with first-hand data, real prices, real cases and a named expert are exactly what Google says people still click on.

Traditional SEO is still the entry ticket. Google says its AI features have no special requirements beyond ordinary indexing and snippet eligibility. If you are not crawlable, indexed and trusted in search, you are not in the pool the answers draw from.

Measure what reaches you. Rankings, citations and impressions are inputs. Enquiries and revenue are the result. A drop in clicks with a steady number of enquiries is a different problem from a drop in both.

SEO is not dead. It now has two audiences on the same page: the person, and the system answering the person first. I wrote about where I would put the money in SEO, AEO, GEO: Where the Money Goes.

Splitting a budget sensibly across those two audiences is the search and AI visibility work.

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