The Death of SEO: Debunking the Internet's Favorite Marketing Myth

I can't tell you how many YouTube videos I've seen with gravestones and people dramatically falling backwards onto the grave of SEO. It's become the internet's favorite scandal, and honestly, I'm exhausted by it.

You've heard them all: SEO is dead. No one searches on Google anymore. Traditional search is completely behind us. GEO is just good SEO—except no one actually knows that. Keywords don't matter. AI content is inherently bad for SEO.

The internet has done what it does best: over-dramatized the situation to the point where the average person can't understand what SEO is now, what it means, or why they should invest in it.

What the Data Actually Shows

Let's look at what's really happening. Google still has 89.84% market share. Yes, their traffic share decreased 16.5% from January to November across 60,000 websites—that's significant. But they're way above everyone else right now.

And here's what nobody wants to talk about: Google is innovating alongside everyone else. They're not just sitting around watching traffic decline and doing nothing about it. If you look at the SERP now versus what it was in January, it's not the same thing. We've got AI overviews, AI Mode, Google Shopping kicking up, disguised ads everywhere, forums gaining popularity. Everything is changing over there too.

ChatGPT's traffic share has increased 177% this year. But let's be honest about the numbers—we're talking 0.07% increased to 0.25%. The percentage growth is huge, but the overall numbers are still tiny.

Why Google Still Controls How We Live

Think about how Google influences the way we actually live our lives. Let's break it up into how we learn, how we work, and how we shop.

Seventy percent of schools in the U.S. use Google products. They use Chromebooks, Google Workspaces for teachers. It's just a matter of time before kids are using Gemini in the classroom, learning how to use it, getting hooked on it, making it part of their lives. They own so much of the education market.

Then there's how we work. As of 2025, Google owns 50.34% of the overall productivity software market. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies use Google products. So optimizing for Gemini, optimizing for AI Mode, AI overviews—all of this stuff is going to be so important for us and our customers.

And in how we buy? Google is top of mind. Google Shopping has increased so much. All the ads on the SERP features. They're doing so much work with VR, virtual try-on, purchasing directly through Google without having to go to other domains.

They're far from dead. I think they're going to be growing, especially based on how they're going to essentially infiltrate all parts of how we develop as humans.

The Real Shift Is Multi-Channel

For the first time ever, I'm watching SEOs and industry experts talk multi-channel strategy. Before, it was always 85% website is where your search value comes from. Now multi-channel is becoming the gong everyone's hitting.

There was that massive shift maybe five, seven years ago of "host everything on the website, we don't want to give any information to third-party folks, I don't want to rely on Facebook for my leads, I want to own everything." That's just not going to be possible in a multi-channel ecosystem. We're going to have to learn to play nice with these other avenues of search because that's where our people are, that's where our customer base is.

We can't own everything anymore.

What This Means for Your Strategy

SEO isn't a scandal. It's a shift. It's a shift every year, but I had to keep the alliteration.

The important thing is to understand what the internet is saying, what clients are consuming, and then combat all of that with real data and statistics from actual websites, from trends we've seen across entire client benches, and from actual real industry experts doing large-scale studies.

Listen to the real voices who are doing the real work. Not the people with gravestone graphics trying to get clicks on YouTube.

Stop Chasing Ghosts—Start Building Real Search Presence

SEO isn't dead. Your strategy just needs to evolve with how people actually search. At Winsome Marketing, we help brands build authentic search presence across every channel that matters—not just Google, but everywhere your audience actually shows up.

Ready to move beyond the myths? Let's build a search strategy grounded in real data, not internet drama.