(2025-06-02) Precopio Seo Is Dead According To Google

Joe Precopio: SEO Is Dead, According to Google. It’s ironic that Google hammered the last nail into the coffin for SEO. But it’s not a mistake. Or a surprise.

But there are finally green shoots, like this article where “[Carly] Steven [SEO and editorial ecommerce director for the UK’s Daily Mail] urged publishers to lean into branded searches and unreplicable content, such as columnists and live blogs.”

What I will try to do is surface the trends I’m seeing in a way that will help people who really want to focus on meaning and purpose, for personal reasons or business, and not just hold a deathgrip on an obviously obsolete method of selling phone cases and shady mortgage loans.

When AI snuck up on SEO, content marketing had already gone full marketing, and content itself was also creeping scarily close to full marketing

#Bananamode

By December, I had discovered that tech had a role in the solution and hell, AI could play too. Just not in the content. Instead, I decided to use data to track and strengthen the connection between the reader and the writer, something I had built a business on 25 years ago, using the two axes that matter most — educating someone or getting an emotional response out of someone.
In my case, I do the latter with jokes and righteous indignation, and the former I save for my private newsletter.

just write shit people want to read.

Last April I almost quit writing. Writing is just something I do on the side, to try to help people, and it was becoming clear that the internets and the algorithms didn’t want me to help people any more.

I had spent my fair share of time trying to figure out how to digitally separate my needle of a message from the haystack of SEO fluff

instead of giving up the message, I decided to give up on the algorithms. I got tired of writing stuff that might get found — in fact, I got so angry at the system that I started writing stuff that… purposefully wouldn’t get found.

One of my readers dubbed this anti-SEO strategy #Bananamode, after I randomly stuck the word “Banana” in a post to confuse the AI scrapers.

Your link in the top of the search results is now buried firmly under an avalanche of AI slop. Or your words will be buried within it alongside ads that probably aren’t yours.

AI didn’t take out SEO like David taking out Goliath. SEO was already a creaky old man spewing word salad designed to surface links for… phone cases and shady mortgage loans. A lot of content was already automated and tailored, not to educate or emotionally lift, but to trigger a buy response.

Ten days ago, at Google I/O, the world’s largest — and let’s face it — only search engine, announced that it was mass launching updates built on its AI summarized search results.