Is SEO Dead in 2025?
Reading Time: 3 minutesWe’ve been hearing a lot of digital marketers say that SEO is dead. However, this is far from true. These reports of SEO being dead or otherwise useless in 2025 may be a reaction to how the SEO landscape has changed with generative AI. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, though. Far from it, in fact! It’s just different than it used to be, and that’s okay. SEO has been changing for decades in reaction to Google updates and other factors that have impacted the SEO landscape. SEO will evolve again to meet new needs.
Why Are People Saying SEO Is Dead?
Those who say that SEO is “dead” do so for the following reasons:
- Google’s Helpful Content updates and AI-driven ranking systems reduce the effectiveness of certain SEO tactics.
- AI-generated search results take up a large portion of the top of the SERP, pushing traditional website results further down the page.
- Zero-click search results from the Featured Snippet, local pack, knowledge panels, and Google’s Search Generative Experience mean that users don’t have to click away from the SERP to get their questions answered.
- Ads and paid promotions also take up much of the SERP, pushing organic results further down the page and making organic SEO more competitive.
Why SEO Is Still Alive in 2025
Despite all of these changes, SEO is still alive and well and as essential as it was before for getting found online. It’s just that it’s different from how it was at the beginning. But that’s a process that has been in progress for a long time, ever since Google’s first major update, the Panda Update. Before that, SEO was kind of a Dark Age of black hat SEO techniques that let people game search engines and spam them with low-quality content, edging out the actual good content that people were looking for.
What Doesn’t Work Anymore in 2025?
A lot of what doesn’t work anymore is SEO techniques that look to game the system, just like the black hat SEO of old. While these techniques aren’t as egregious as they used to be, thanks to Google’s many core updates since then, Google has been gradually pushing for the SEO techniques that are more focused on quality content and user experience than anything else.
What SEO Techniques Should You Use in 2025?
Because of Google’s emphasis on higher quality content and also the increased presence of AI and ads, the best approach to SEO in 2025 is twofold: focus on quality content and focus on what can rank at the top of the SERP.
EEAT
High quality content focuses on experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Aiming for these four qualities will ensure that your content is consistently able to rank well on SERPs. Even though the top spot might be a bit farther down the page than it used to be, it’s still worth trying to rank for because not every SERP has such a big AI section. Even if the SERP does, there are still users who look for actual sites rather than just trusting the AI to be correct.
The main thing, however, is to focus on the type of content that AI can’t provide. That’s where your own lived human experiences come into play.
Featured Snippets and Videos
Another option is ranking at the top of the SERP within the generative AI section. While much of what ends up here is paid ads, there are still featured snippets and videos that are placed right at the top of the page. Creating a YouTube video strategy can help you to rank well on both Google and on YouTube, which is a search engine itself. To try to rank as the featured snippet, you can use long-tail keywords to answer questions directly. This means that sections within a page can rank rather than just a page by itself.
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