Search changed. Ask a question today and the engine often answers it directly — an AI summary at the top, sources tucked politely underneath. For website owners the consequence is blunt: informational queries produce fewer clicks than they used to, because the answer got delivered without the visit. So is SEO dead? No — but half of the old playbook is.
The thousand-word blog post that says what fifty other posts say, written to rank rather than to help, exists to be summarised. An AI reads it, extracts the one useful sentence, and the visitor never arrives. Content whose only virtue was existing has lost its business model.
None of the above works on a slow, muddled site. Clean semantic markup, fast loads, schema for your organisation and services, one clear topic per page — the unglamorous engineering is now also how machines decide you’re quotable. Technical SEO used to be a checklist for one crawler; it’s become your interface to every AI reading the web.
The strategy in one line: stop writing content that answers questions a machine can answer, and start publishing things only your business could say — then make them fast and structured enough to be the source that gets named.