SEO: It’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.

In today’s edition of “You can observe a lot just by watching,” we observe the imminent passing of traditional SEO.

Remember Search Engine Optimization? That secret sauce of just the right keywords, hashtags, classifications, and overtly-stuffed product titles that determined where your product or service would appear in a Google search?

We’ve burned untold millions of lines of code, not to mention dollars, trying to ‘game’ SEO. Our SEO skills determined whether we appeared at the top of the page and lived, or were buried on page 17 and never seen again. SEO created armies of consultants devoted to figuring out search engine algorithms – and monetizing their research.

Meanwhile, we users honed our Google-Fu skills to tease out that specific thing we were looking for – but we still had to click through screens full of blue links.

And now, Poof! It doesn’t matter. Search as we knew it is on life support.

More and more, we don’t search by keywords. We search by asking AI questions and having a back-and-forth conversation to find what we are looking for. ChatGPT and the like don’t just use word searches – they use conversation context, our past interactions, and machine intuition to create the response. Now the machine does the search, and we don’t get links – we get answers.

So how do you optimize your web visibility in this new world of conversational search? How do you convince an LLM that it should put your product as the first mention in a conversational response?

I don’t know the answer to that (perhaps I should burn a few tokens and let Gemini figure it out for me). But I do know that everything we knew about how to optimize search is rapidly going out the window.

Traditional SEO might not be dead yet, but the grave has already been dug.