By Cindy Gordon, Selective Visibility Strategist and Business Mentor
Chances are you have probably heard someone say SEO is dead. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself.
I want to push back on that today, because it is genuinely one of the worst pieces of advice going around right now. Not because SEO is fine exactly as it always was. Something did die. But it’s not what most people think.
What actually happened with Google in 2023 and 2024?
This whole thing traces back to something Google did in 2023. Google has a pattern: when they feel like something on their platform has gone wrong, they tend to drastically overcorrect. In September of 2023, they rolled out what they called the Helpful Content Update. The stated goal was rewarding content that actually helps people, and demoting content written just to rank.
It really was not very helpful. A lot of sites that were doing everything right, genuinely useful content, got hit hard anyway. Rankings that had been stable for years shifted in days. By March of 2024, Google folded the whole thing permanently into their core ranking system. It was not a phase. It became the new normal, and truthfully, it really did suck for a lot of website owners who had been relying on Google for their findability traffic.
That is the moment a lot of people started saying SEO was dead. And honestly, that makes sense. If you had built a business around the old rules and watched your traffic disappear almost overnight, dead is exactly what it would feel like.
What part of SEO actually died?
The old version of SEO died. Keyword stuffing. Writing for the algorithm instead of the person. Content built purely to rank, not to actually help anyone. That version is genuinely gone, and good riddance.
What did not die is the underlying principle underneath all of it: being clearly understood, being easy to find. That principle did not go anywhere. It just evolved into places most people are not thinking about yet.
Where did SEO actually evolve to?
SEO is not just a Google thing anymore. Instagram has its own version of it. TikTok has its own version. There’s an actual strategy to how those platforms decide what to serve up when someone searches, and it works a lot like Google search used to.
Then there’s AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. That’s the specific skill of getting your content picked up and cited when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question. It’s SEO’s newest child, and it uses a lot of the same underlying skills: being clear, being structured, actually answering the question instead of dancing around it. If you think SEO is dead, you’ve probably stopped paying attention to all three of these at once.
Why does this matter for AI visibility specifically?
Is this just about Google, or is there more to it?
is SEO dead
What should I actually do about this in my own business?
Go look at your own website with honest eyes. Was it built to answer a real question clearly, or was it built to rank for a keyword? Be honest with yourself.
Remember, SEO did not die. It evolved. Be the answer, wherever the question is actually being asked.
Prefer to listen?
No, but a specific version of it is. Old-school tactics like keyword stuffing and writing purely for search algorithms instead of real people are genuinely gone. The underlying principle, being clearly understood and easy to find, never went away. It evolved into new forms, including platform search and AI answer engines.
The Helpful Content Update was a major Google ranking change that rolled out in September 2023, aimed at rewarding content genuinely helpful to people and demoting content written primarily to rank in search. It significantly disrupted rankings for many sites, including ones producing quality content, and was folded permanently into Google’s core ranking system in March 2024.
AEO is the practice of getting content picked up and cited by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity when someone asks a relevant question. It relies on many of the same underlying skills as traditional SEO: clarity, structure, and directly answering the question rather than talking around it.
Yes. AEO is not a separate skill learned from scratch, it’s traditional SEO applied to a new kind of engine. Business owners who dismissed SEO entirely may have also dismissed the exact skill set that determines whether AI tools recommend them.
The Findability Audit is a free walkthrough from Cindy Gordon designed for female entrepreneurs who want to know exactly where they are and are not showing up across humans, algorithms, and AI. It takes a few minutes and gives a clear picture of the specific findability gaps costing visibility right now. It’s available at cindygordon.myflodesk.com/findabilityaudit.
About Cindy Gordon
Cindy Gordon is a selective visibility strategist and business mentor for female entrepreneurs. A 6x founder who has built six businesses and sold four, she holds a Masters in Special Education with a focus in Behavior Analysis and brings the discipline of individualized assessment to visibility work. She has grown a brand’s following to a million, built a 900,000 person community and a 250,000 person email list, and led a team of 11. As a business coach, she helps women diagnose what is breaking their content, where their visibility actually belongs, and how to show up with clarity instead of noise. Cindy is the founder of Exclusively Cindy and the host of The Strategic Entrepreneur podcast, where she explores selective visibility, proof of human, and what it takes to become unmistakable.
