Eric Siu and Neil Patel push back on VCs calling SEO dead, showing that while health sites like WebMD lost 20-40% traffic to AI overviews, other sectors hold steady. They reframe SEO as "Search Everywhere Optimization" across Google, social platforms, and AI chatbots, especially as Gen Z searches on TikTok and Instagram instead.
Did you see how Bill Gurley and Brad Gessner, they declared SEO is effing dead now?
If you're one of these humans that thinks SEO wasn't dead already, which I would have declared it dead a while ago.
Yes.
It's really fucking dead.
Really effing dead. Did you listen to that podcast?
I listened to that piece because someone sent it to me and I said, I don't know where they're getting their data from, but I have data that is very different than what they're showing. Not because I'm in SEO, I just have more data points than them. They took some of the SERP data And they said, yeah, now publicly traded companies are reporting sometimes like 20%, 40%, I'm paraphrasing here, their SEO traffic is down and it's just crushing their business. And I was just like, yes, for some people it is down 20%, 40%. A lot of them are in categories like health, but like ex-WebMD, I don't know what WebMD's traffic at, but I'm assuming it got hit pretty hard from the AI overviews. But there's a lot of categories where we're seeing companies still do extremely well in traffic and the traffic that they're getting, even if it's somewhere down or somewhere up, The conversions are still good. And the reason I say that is for some of the people that we work with, they're in categories that got more affected by AI overviews, but a lot of those visitors were never converting into revenue. One customer specifically that I saw, AI overviews impacted their traffic negative 13, 14%. No joke. Nothing really changed in revenue from SEO.
Well, it was—
Their conversion rate from SEO went up, but it was a lot of the, Keywords that they were getting weren't converting, but they're not getting as much brand awareness. Quote unquote.
Yeah. So let me set some context around this one too. So Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner—they're very successful venture capitalists. Brad Gerstner actually started with three million bucks in 2008, I believe, and built up to what he has now. You know, they're investors in OpenAI. Bill Gurley famously pushed Travis out of Uber. He's the one that started that.
He also gave Travis his. money early on for Uber as well.
Yeah. So, you know, they're both very— I love what they say. And to me, they're kind of like the new All-In podcast. When like All-In first started, they just focused on their investments and talked about technology. Now All-In's a little more political.
All-In's a lot more political.
It basically is politics now. But Bill Gurley and Brett— so Bill said this, he's like, you know, SEO, he's got this really, really deep voice. So, you know, SEO is really fucking dead now. And if you didn't think it was dead, it's really fucking dead now.
If you're one of these humans that thinks SEO wasn't dead already, which I would've declared it dead a while ago.
Yes.
It's really fucking dead.
But so, so anyway, what they're saying is basically what we've been saying. SU as we know it is dead. And so you can't just optimize for the same blue links anymore. AI overviews are taking more real estate and all that. But it's no different than what we've been saying. Some people like to call it Omni-SEO. We call it search everywhere optimization. It's just that behavior has changed and you need to adapt to it. And that's what we really mean by this. Like, I think that's what these people are trying to say when they say SEO is really dead. It's not dead, it's just, it's changed.
It's evolved and changed.
Yeah.
And now when we talk to companies, they want to optimize for Google, Instagram, Pinterest, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and all the solutions out there. And when we're running campaigns where you're doing search everywhere optimization, we're seeing really good growth in numbers, specifically on social, because not enough people optimize for social corporations yet. Some of them are catching onto it. Most people, the data will show you don't use social to search, but the younger generation does. And depending on the data or the survey data you're looking at, a lot of people don't have the younger audience in their pool when they're surveying, but it is really a lot of those Gen Zers who are using social to perform searches.
Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid search, paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. And the cool thing about search engine optimization, if you're an agency and you sell this stuff, is you get to bundle a lot of these services together and your, your LTVs go higher. And so, and people like it when they, when you see it, their eyes pop. Oh, that's different, right? Yeah. So you better figure out if you're, if you sell SEO, you're gonna have to Diversify. It can't just be you're reach— you're doing outreach and you're producing content.
And this form of SEO has been going on for a while, well over a year. It's been a few years, but more and more focus on it in the last 12 months, I would say. And like at our agency, NP Digital, we've not only seen good results, but we have a lot of case studies on Search Everywhere Optimization. It just works. It's just like, oh, you're going to ignore Instagram and TikTok when they're, you know, have so many users within the United States or even globally? You just can't ignore them.
Yep. Alright guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow.
