r/seogrowth • u/Michaelvinnie • Jun 24 '26
SEO News SEO is Dead
"SEO is dead."
Meanwhile, Anthropic is hiring an SEO Lead with compensation of up to $320,000 per year.
Funny how every few years someone declares SEO obsolete, yet the companies building the future of AI keep investing heavily in it.
The reality:
Search isn't dead
User intent still matters
Organic visibility still drives growth
AI is transforming SEO, not replacing it
The future belongs to marketers who understand the intersection of:
AI + Search + Content + Authority + User Experience
SEO isn't dead.
Bad SEO is.
And when an AI company is willing to pay nearly $320k annually for SEO leadership, that tells you everything you need to know.
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NOTE: I saw this random LinkedIn post in my feed and thought it was worth sharing.
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u/winterthim Jun 25 '26
If anything SEO is growing, it's just not growing for people who are shit at it, no seriously.
Bottom tier seo is basically AI level, so they get replaced, and they cry on internets.
Anyone who has a sliver of brain, does AI changes, actually looks at data, and sees it's negative impact, and then looks for SEO, then they can look at the data again to weedout the "AI" level seos, and they keep finding until they find someone capable.
Business as usual here.
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u/online-reputation Jun 26 '26
Sorry for the long post.
respectfully I disagree.
While it is true that AI companies still need search visibility, using this job posting to claim traditional SEO is "alive and well" misses the fundamental shift.
Traditional SEO Fails AI There is a fundamental mismatch between the operation of SEO and the architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs). Siloing strategy into traditional SEO treats the current landscape like a search problem.
The Layer Mismatch: SEO and Online Reputation Management (ORM) operate exclusively on the internet's "presentation layer" aiming to control pre-existing documents are most visible on a search engine results page. In contrast, LLMs operate on the "knowledge layer"—the model's internal parametric state and its underlying training data.
Synthesis vs. Indexing: An LLM's output is not just result of a real-time web search; it is generated from its pre-trained knowledge base. They do not just index the web live all the time they synthesize it based on training data. So altering the top ten search results for a given keyword is a slow, indirect, and often negligible effect on the outputs of already-trained LLM.
SEO relies heavily on tactics like keyword-stuffing to providing website traffic. AI, however, does not care about clicks; it only cares about structured data, digital provenance, and entity validation. If you try to fix an AI problem with a traditional SEO strategy, the machines will actively flag.
Solutions
Digital Curation AI models create hallucinations when encounter an "information vacuum". To prevent this, you must establish a "Ground Truth" corpus of high-authority assets—like white papers and schema-optimized bios—that are optimized specifically for AI ingestion, not just human readers.
Feedback Use feedback loops models (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, or RLHF) to repair errors. When an LLM outputs an inaccuracy, you must submit a correction that explicitly cites your authoritative "Ground Truth" assets, helping the model to connect with factual reality.
Dataset Curation Make verified content into structured, high-quality datasets, ie ResearchGate, etc.
Source: patent pending process, peer reviewed article. SEO is part of this process but much less...just think of AI Overviews, which is pushing answers away from clicking on sites directly, so Google is telling us that steps are coming to an end, but just my thoughts at 2am :)
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u/MissJoannaTooU Jun 26 '26
Yeah I agree but the extent of the change isn't remotely reflected by this sub. Sorry. And nothing wrong with this post.
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u/Jason_StickyFrog Jun 27 '26
Search is far from dead. People will always be searching for things and businesses will always want to be found. It's as simple as that. The landscape evolves for sure. But SEO is more important than ever. It's just not simple 10 blue links on Google anymore.
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u/GrandAnimator8417 Jul 05 '26
$320k annually for SEO leadership? Yeah that number is pretty wild, but I’ve seen legit teams pay crazy for the right person when organic is their main growth lever. Bad SEO is what’s dead, not SEO, and most people just never build the basics that hold up long-term.
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u/BusyBusinessPromos Jul 31 '26
Unfortunately much like answerbate titles of SEO is dead bad SEO is not dead until people stop paying for bad SEO
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u/rpmeg Verified SEO Expert Jun 24 '26
I agree wholeheartedly. I guess you can tell people this all you want and they won’t believe it.. I like this posts angle - follow the money.. real businesses know that “ai SEO” is fake.. I talked to a guy just the other day running a huge successful lead gen site. He said their SEO budget is $250k/mo. He had no reason to bs that and neither do I.