Why Traditional SEO is Failing: The Death of SEO

In this webinar, we explore why traditional SEO tactics built around rankings, backlinks, and click-through rates are losing effectiveness as AI-driven search reshapes how information is surfaced. We break down how generative engines now prioritize context, authority, and first-party signals over keywords alone, fundamentally changing what it means to be “visible” online.



You’ll learn how GEO (generative engine optimization) helps new and growing businesses earn presence inside AI-generated answers, recommendations, and summaries where discovery increasingly happens before a user ever sees a list of links.

00:00:06

Hey everybody, my name is Omar Jenblat. I'm the president and founder here at BusySeed. I've been running BusySeed for about 12 years now and I'm excited to talk to you guys today about why traditional SEO is failing. So, what's going on with SEO these days? I'm sure you hear the news everywhere that, you know, SEO is dying off. Google results are getting lower and lower and and across the board. I'll tell you this from all the clients that you know I generally speak with as well as you know

00:00:32

Different companies across the US and the world we're definitely seeing a massive decrease in SEO. Normally I would say there's been about a 30% dip but it's actually been a little bit worse lately um where we're seeing even higher dips. Now why is this happening? Well, when we look at it, the natural evolution of SEO is going into what we call GEO, Gerine optimization. And you think GEO as we call it GEO, some people call it AEO. Simply put, you can just call it AI search if you want to. I'm

00:01:05

Going to keep referring to it as GEO. The reason why, you know, we're seeing the dip in, you know, search and in results there is because that's all tracking SEO methods. Google search, that's all SEO. The evolution is AI. People are finding businesses, are finding different uh pieces of content, different information, all that through their chat GBTs, their Geminis, their claws. All of those things are attributing to why naturally Google and other search engines are saying, "Hey, well, we know

00:01:36

People are using these more. We know this is the future. So, we're going to start shifting traffic." What this looks like for Google, for example, is that where you do a normal search, you start to see AI mode. AI mode is the a smaller version of Gemini that rests on Google search that's really starting to take more and more of it over. So what we're seeing a lot of is that people are just naturally Google's naturally starting to use AI mode more when suggesting results. And when you think about it,

00:02:04

Pretty simple. If you have a machine that's giving you all the answers right there, instead of having to do the manual leg work of the search and all of that, aren't you more likely going to go to that and do it there? It just makes life easier and that's the entirety of what AI is there to do. It's the the concept of it is to make lives easier, to make research easier, all of that. So naturally, everything is moving to there. So people are clicking less, they're scrolling less. If you were

00:02:30

Worried about people getting to the second or third page in the old SEO days, and now you have to worry about them even getting to the first few results because AI is just going to simply split that out. Now, it doesn't mean that you're not going to have some result in getting clicks and all of that through AI mode or other, you know, AI formats such as GPT and such. All it means is that the format is changing and you need to be able to adapt with it. To go back and to get a little history on this

00:03:00

Though let's take a look at what the times have looked like overall and how things have changed since the old school days of SEO to now, where we're at with GEO. SEO originally back in the early 2000s was very much about all right, we just need to find some basic pages. There's no verification. Nobody cared about the usability of the content. And nobody really, you know, that Google didn't really care so much about all the elements that we, modern-day SEO takes into account. Old school SEO, hey, if

00:03:30

You just took a bunch of keywords, you made them invisible using some HTML and CSS, they would still get indexed, and your page would still work. The black hats were going crazy by doing all these fun little uh methods and taking all these small little hacks and making it so that they would rank at the top of Google. Obviously, Google didn't like that people were keyword stuffing, were hiding all the keywords there. So, they started to wisen up and they started to add in new ways that their algorithm and

00:04:00

Their crawlers were indexing to focus more on usability of the content, reliability of the content, aspects of backlinks, all of that started taking more of a significant role to, quote unquote, assume authority. Now we hit the early 2010s where we start seeing Google implementing a lot more of this core updates start becoming more and more frequent. They start punishing people with a negative uh page score or domain authority for using these black hat methods to try to increase their actual page rank, you know, on Google. And so

00:04:36

They start getting a lot smarter. They invest in a lot more systems. they start getting very quiet about their actual algorithm. And so now there's the game that gets played with everybody like, "All right, well, how do we beat Google?" But how do we beat Google on this level? So that's where you have, you know, a lot of people that start to focus in on the quality. You start to see quality, more quality in blogs, more quality from the different pieces of content that are getting posted out

00:05:04

Thereby publishers. And all of that was still focus around keywords though, you know, with more longtail keywords starting to play a role in it. Now we get to the 2020s where we're at right now. SEO was going up and then you know AI has been there for a while. AI has been existing you know for a while quietly with chat GPT coming out and such a push for consumer AI. A lot of these platforms start to see the end of what we know as search. Think about it. If you can get all that information simply put right there for

00:05:42

You. You don't need a search anymore. It's all done for you. So, Google naturally starts saying, "Okay, well, sure, we're going to lose ads money. People aren't going to search as much, but we need to own this before other companies like ChatGpt, I mean, Enthropic, some of the other ones, Perplexity, and such, start really taking a hold of this and start taking all the traffic away." So naturally what we start to see happen is AI mode is starting to take over most of the

00:06:12

Search. Same thing what we see with GPT. GPT now searches the web. When GBT came out in back in the early 2022 and 2023, there was no internet connectivity with a lot of the AIS, but now they're actively indexing different pieces of the internet and they're live indexing as well. So, it's important to keep in mind that as we enter into this new age of search, of being found on the internet, the old methodologies of SEO, while they still have some good histories to learn, there are new

00:06:46

Methodologies that you need to put into place in order for your business to be found using AI. For anybody watching this video, especially the people who have, you know, a good understanding of SEO, you may have been seeing, especially in the past few months, how volatile it's been getting. These past 3 years were absolutely crazy when it comes down to ranking in SEO, but these past 6 months have been absolutely bonkers. The ranks have been going up and down like a crazy wave, and this is simply part of the

00:07:23

Conversion over to the next step. And again, GEO is that next step. So, it's important for us to actually look into and understand GEO. The best way to think of GEO is really SEO with a massive massive thinking intelligent brain to it. It does much more understanding of brands rather than just understanding lates and such. You know, when we talk a lot about SEO, we talk about individual pages, we talk about anchors, we talk about how those, you know, links are found on different high authority websites and such. And yes,

00:08:00

That some of that still is true, but when we think about GEO, there are four main pillars that we need to constantly consider. Authority, content, indexing, and social. And I'm going to explain all of those. Authority, just like I was mentioning a little bit earlier, authority is the idea of trying to figure out from the point of view of these AIs and these LLMs, is this brand is this piece of content that the brand writing, are they authoritative? Are they somebody that can speak on what they're speaking on?

00:08:35

Ultimately, one of the biggest things, and I I sometimes hear this from clients, too, is, "Oh, well, you know, in SEO, you get a bunch of garbage, and it's hard to anybody can throw something out on the internet." And yes, you know, those pieces are true, but the beauty behind GEO is that it uses trust and sentiment signals in order to separate those. So, when we think about authority, what showcases authority? Is this brand established? Is this brand, how long has this brand been around for?

00:09:04

You know, if we're talking about your business, how long has your business been around for? How long has your business been putting out content on the internet? Has your business been listed on other sites? And let's say high authority sites, let's say Forbes, yeah, let's say uh Harvard Business School, some of those. Has your site been written on and been reviewed by others? A lot of that will go into how these different LLMs view your authority. And something really important to mention is

00:09:35

That each of the LLMs look at things a little bit differently. Obviously, when you have Google's, which is Gemini, and with AI mode as well, they will look at a lot of their other Google services to try to assume and get an idea of your authority level, of your trustworthiness. uh looking at Claude for example. Claude really takes a lot of time in looking at citations in your work to see if that what you're saying is factually true. Next up we have content. And you know like I mentioned the 2010s content was

00:10:12

You know absolutely that content is king. And you started hearing more and more of that. And that is more true than it's ever been before. When it comes down to content content reliability is important. You think the EAT methodology or the revalence to modern day topics? How comprehensive is your content? And is your content just simply put? Is it easy to read from the perspective of a human? And is it easy to read from the perspective of a crawler such as an AI crawler? When we think about how content

00:10:44

should be formatted, a lot of times when I look at content, and I look at content a lot when it comes down to, you know, our different clients and such, the amount of content is very, very important. And the best way I can put it is this way. Old school SEO, maybe you had 500 words on there and you stuffed it with keywords. The, you know, the 2010s SEO, well, maybe you made that a little bit longer. Maybe you're doing a thousand words and it has some information, but these LLMs in AI, it's

00:11:14

a different beast entirely. Essentially, these LLMs have indexed the entirety of the internet. And when you have indexed so much information and you vectorized it and so you can make easy connections, well, it wants more information. So the old days of, you know, running the small blonds, they just don't work as much anymore. What AI wants to see when they're indexing you is long content. So, for example, for our clients, we do 2,000 words, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, but around there. We

00:11:49

Focus on how that content is produced, how it's read. Uh, we want to make sure that we're putting in deep research and we're putting new opinions, new thoughts. Remember, AI isn't creative in of itself. It builds off of what already exists, the creativity of humanity. What AI is really good at is taking all of that, mixing it together, and giving you an output. When you're writing your content, your pieces have to be unique. Deep research helps with that. Making sure that you blend

00:12:21

different ideas and topics together and really letting the creative mind go wild is very, very important for I. It's going to help with indexing. The other important aspect about content to remember is that when it comes down to citations, you have to make sure you are linking to other relevant topics and especially it's good to know where your place is and where you are in the world of GEO and authority. If you're not uh if you're a new brand, if you're not necessarily a brand that has been

00:12:47

Established, you really need to make sure youare showing that what I'm saying isn't made up, isn't fake, and that these are all the citations I'm using. If you're listing a fact, if you're listing a claim, you need to have those citations. And it's smart. You can't link to your own site. You can't be showing off, you know, things that that exist within your own realm of influence. It has to be shown on other authoritybased sites or other thought

00:13:13

leader sites. That's when you start to see more and more of your content getting indexed and taken seriously by AI so that when somebody's prompting it and potentially looking for your service or looking about something having to do with your business, you start to show up. The other thing that is very important to keep in mind is that when you are producing this content, and this has been true since probably 2014, you need to make sure that you are pitching, you are trying to get sales. And I know

00:13:43

When people think about their websites, especially in the B2B world, you know, people are thinking more so, I need to get this lead in. I need to do whatever I need to say to get this lead in. So maybe it'll pitch at the bottom. That takes away from that that impacts the perception AI has when they're indexing because at the end of the day, AI isn't it wasn't made to be a sales tool. We're using it to be a sales tool to bring in new leads and such, but AI is meant to be educational. is meant to inform to to

00:14:13

Give data when people prompt it. So it's very important that you come from a very non-sales point of view talking about a topic in an expert sense to show that you are a thought leader and to tell AI listen these are the facts this is what's true this is what we've seen from our experience here are the numbers here are some charts here whatever we're the real deal that coupled in with the authority that I just talked about will get you index high when people are searching for topics and prompts that

00:14:42

You want one important aspect as well to make sure that is in the blogs, your prompts. Now, the concept of a prompt might be a little bit new, but simply anything that you've typed into an AI before, whether it's at GBT or Gemini, that's a prompt some way. Sometimes I like to communicate it as a really long longtail keyword. The concept of it is it is a human sentence versus where you're going on Google, best car US horsepower. Instead, you would search on any of the LLMs. What's the best

00:15:18

American muscle car with over a thousand horsepower? That's what a prompt is. And so when we're typing that in and we're considering what we want to show for where we want our information in our businesses to show up and how we want people to see us when they're typing in their prompts. We need to make sure we look at those prompts and we track those. So, for example, in the old days, you'd pick 20 keywords. You put those, you know, in your blog, spread those throughout your blogs, and then you

00:15:48

Track to see how your keywords are growing on those blogs. Here, it's a little bit similar, but it's going to be with prompts. You simply put in prompts into all the work that you're doing. You track the prompts by running against all the LLMs manually. And then once you do that, you get to see how you're growing in those prompts and how many times over let's say an average of five times, how many times and what position is AI recommending you. So, for example, if you type in that concept again, you

00:16:16

know, the best muscle car over 1,000 horsepower, you know, you'll start to see different things come through. So, you might see, you know, some souped-up Mustangs, you might see, you know, some Challengers. I'm a car guy if you haven't noticed already. Uh, but you'll start to see those that come in. And how much content is out there and how the prompt is written, how you show that prompt in your content, all of that determines what order you show up in. And again, just like Google search, the

00:16:45

The higher up in first position you are, the more likely they're going to spend time going there directly because people, especially in 2026, are much lazier. They have less time, much shorter attention spans. So, they see the first option, they're going to go with it. Something very important to keep in mind. Third aspect that we look at when it comes down to GEO is the indexing. Now, this is actually probably as similar as you can get when it comes down to GEO and SEO. The concept is if you're on

00:17:16

Better sites, stronger sites, like for example, BusySeed, we're on Forbes, Harvard Business School, a few other sites as well, that reflect really positively on us because we have these institutes of high trustworthiness that show our links that have our links there. So when we are being considered and trustworthiness this by the LLMs, we're more likely to show up than other agencies for digital marketing because of our connections and our placements on those sites. So when we think about

00:17:48

Indexing, it's very important to look at your backlinks, and backlinks are still important. while now AI is less concerned about you know a specific page and ranking on a specific page like SEO was and again AI focuses on the brand not necessarily the page anymore because of that change all of those links all of your back links are going to be associated with your brand which is actually a pretty positive thing so you don't have to worry about you know this one specific content just being stuck on this page

00:18:22

and being ranked number one you for that keyword. Now you have a lot of the data put together so that when you show up, you can show up in so many customized way because all of your website, your content has been vectorized by AI and their search crawlers. When it comes down to backlinks as well, it really depends on the type of backlinks.

00:18:51

AI is not super happy when it sees press wires because ultimately a press wire, you can go pay a few hundred bucks to get a press wire going and then it shoots out to a bunch of different sites. AI is intelligent to the point where it can understand what a press wire is. AI also doesn't like when you are on link farms because who likes being on a link farm? Actually, even in the SEO, if if you're on some link farms, those count are toxic domains. You should definitely disavow those.

00:19:19

So making sure you have a really good understanding of what is going on with your back links and making sure that you're getting back links that are maybe listicles you know on a site if you're a SAAS company and you you know you're rated very highly you know on G2 for example this could also be in the sense of having you know people write guest posts whether you go into somebody's page and write that guest post or they write a post about you showing up on other websites and having people talk about you having them view you and content of that matter, even though it's on somebody else's site, reflects really positively with AI.

00:19:53

The final pillar of GEO that we have is social. Now, this throws some people off because they look at social media and there wasn't necessarily a massive correlation between SEO and social media back in the days. Of course, you know, there are aspects where posts and all of that get indexed, but again, SEO was very much based on the page and the rankings were all based on the page. This is based on the brand. All your content on social media, everything you post out there, that gets included in with your brand. AI is very intelligent. It can put all of those dots together.

00:20:22

The most important thing though about social is that it is a massive trust signal for AI because it's taking true genuine user sentiment about you, about your brand and taking that to account. And one big example I give to people that also throws them off is that Reddit, for example, is a powerful powerful platform for you to consider when you're thinking about showing up in these AI models. Reddit is a massive database of people across the web. It's historically known to be very unbiased.

00:20:53

People will speak their mind there. So, there's true sentiment that you can gain from that. If you have anything that's consumerf facing and people are talking about it on Reddit and you're not there, you lose control of the narrative and you lose control of how AI indexes and speaks about you. One big thing that I always like recommending, especially on the consumer end, if people are talking about you on Reddit, you have to be there.

00:21:21

It's very important to make sure you're responding to people and you are setting the narrative straight. If somebody, you know, looks at your product, says, "Oh, no, this product isn't, you know, wellade." Well, product isn't wellmade, AI will index that and that will start showing up to your clients. The more people start saying that, that will start showing up to your clients. What you get the chance to do on Reddit is respond back and mention actually this is how our product is made. I'm sorry that you have that perception. 

00:21:48

We're sorry for that bad experience, but this is how our product is made. We use this type of quality A, B, C, etc., etc. All of that is key to writing the narrative. biggest takeaways that I hope you get out of this is that you, especially in 2026, early 2026, the opportunity to write the narrative of how you get indexed in these LLMs is now you have to seize this moment and you have to really make sure that you're controlling how people perceive you and how they talk about you all across the web.

00:22:20

Obviously, this is pretty straightforward when it goes to review sites as well. You know, you think of the G2, Google reviews, you think Yelp, all of those, all of those are same concept there. It's true user sentiment and AI will absolutely index it. If it's public, AI can index it. So, anytime you're seeing those reviews, you got to make sure you're responding to them. Reputation management is a very important aspect of how you treat your AI search gameplay. 

00:22:50

So to summarize, long gone are the days of keyword stuffing and focusing on certain landing pages, and with SEO, the focus is on short content. And today we look at GEO AI search as the next generation of being discovered organically. It's important to keep in mind all the pillars of GEO such as authority, content, indexing, and social. those areas there with all the the pieces that I've described earlier are going to help you stay in line and show up more.

00:23:29

The other important thing that I can't emphasize enough is that now is the time to act because right now it's a rush to come up with content. Everybody is trying to fill their pages, their sites all with content so that they can get indexed. If you play or if you come to the game too late, you're going to have a lot more work compared to your competitors. So, it's important to to jump on this right now. Obviously, what I explained is a lot. There's definitely a lot going on in the GEO world. And this is something that we do at BusySeed and we love helping our clients with.

00:24:01

So whether you need more advice on this from just a friendly conversation or you'd actually like to have us take care of some of these services for you, please feel free to reach out. We're more than happy to help. We do some free assessments. We understand where you are with your competitors so that we can show you, all right, these are the next steps to take and we do it all from A to Z, so you don't have to worry about it completely white glove. But my name is Omar Jenblat. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time and I hope I taught you something great today.