SEO Still Works, Just Not How We Hoped

A few months ago, I read a post about how SEO is dead and that we need to let the past die and find greener pastures. I'm finally getting around to writing my thoughts on it. That contention was correct in many ways, but it also drew an undeserved binary between SEO and social media as two means to the same end. I think that framing misses the point.

SEO does have a structural problem. I'm using SEO for the whole system here, meaning Google's ranking and the work of earning a place in it. Top results have grown older and stickier, and the top spots keep getting harder to dislodge. Ahrefs' 2025 study of page age found that the average page ranking #1 on Google is 5 years old, up from 2 years in its 2017 version. It also found 72.9% of top-10 pages are more than 3 years old, up from 59%.

A new page can still break in, since Ahrefs also found 6.11% of new English-language pages reaching the top 10 within a year. But the spots a newcomer wants are increasingly held by pages that have stayed put for years. A startup in 2025 faces the same incumbents a 2015 startup did, with ten more years of advantage behind them.

And yet, SEO still works perfectly well for what it has become good at. Search for CNN, Mayo Clinic, or Amazon and established brands rank exactly as designed. These are navigational searches, so they show what authority is worth once you have it, not how a newcomer earns it. When you need something tested and proven and you already know what you're looking for, SEO delivers authority and trust.

Authority does the same work on queries that don't mention a brand. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines tell its human raters to hold "Your Money or Your Life" topics like health and finance to the highest standard of trust. Google then uses those ratings to evaluate changes to its ranking, so trusted sources are meant to win those searches.

The answer isn't choosing between SEO and social channels. It's recognizing what each does well: social channels for democratic reach and speed, SEO for authority and trust.

If you are just getting your start as a business or source of information, you should play all angles. Grow quickly through the more democratic and expedited nature of social platforms while positioning yourself to benefit from SEO's authority signals as they compound over time. The binary framing gets it wrong because it treats these as competing alternatives rather than complementary strategies serving different purposes.

Business Patience Shrank Faster Than SEO Changed

Google keeps adjusting its ranking, but the core bargain hasn't changed. Authority on contested queries still takes years to earn. What changed for many businesses is their patience. In the 2010s, investors tolerated long growth curves. By 2022, interest rates rose, funding contracted, and investors demanded profitability over growth. Crunchbase counted $285 billion in global venture funding in 2023, down 38% from 2022 and the lowest total since 2018. Show traction in 6 months or you're dead. SEO's timeline only got longer as incumbents kept compounding, while business patience got shorter.

Two other forces also pushed businesses away from search. Audiences were already spreading across other platforms, and Google kept more clicks on its own results page. With funding too tight to wait for search, businesses fragmented discovery. When you need customers in 6 months and SEO takes years, you adopt whatever works now:

• Parasitic SEO: Publish on Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, and dev.to to piggyback on domains that already rank. You sacrifice ownership, but gain immediate visibility, for as long as the host keeps its ranking power. Google's 2024 site reputation abuse policy, aimed at third-party content published on a host mainly to exploit its ranking signals, shows that Google can demote content that borrows a host's reputation.
• Social-first distribution: TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram function as discovery mechanisms independent of traditional search. Engagement elevates content immediately rather than waiting years for authority.
• Community platforms: Discord, Reddit, and Hacker News provide direct access to target audiences, where the audience, not accumulated domain authority, decides what gets seen.
• Direct advertising: When organic timelines don't align with business needs, companies pay for visibility through Google Ads and social media advertising.

The flood toward alternative platforms doesn't prove SEO is broken; it proves businesses can't wait for authority to compound.

PageRank's Democratic Votes Became Gatekeeping

SEO's promise of democratization didn't last. Tim Berners-Lee designed the web with an explicit rejection of gatekeeping, and CERN released it into the public domain in 1993, royalty-free, so anyone could publish and be found. Google described PageRank in the same terms. Its "Ten things we know to be true" declares that "democracy on the web works", with every link counted as a vote for the sites that offer content of value.

But those democratic "votes" became the gatekeeping mechanism they were supposed to replace. Links became currency to game. Authority signals made sense when the web was young and spam was rampant, and they still filter spam, because links from established sites still tend to mark reliable sources. But established sites' advantage also compounds over time. It entrenches whoever got there first, and newcomers struggle to overcome it on contested queries.

The promise decayed into algorithmic gatekeeping. Google's advertising revenue gives it little reason to reopen the gate, since a newcomer who can't rank organically can still buy the top of the page. Google Search & other advertising generated about $175 billion in 2023, roughly 57% of Alphabet's total revenue of $307 billion (Alphabet 2023 Annual Report). Search is, first of all, an ad business. Google still needs organic results good enough that people keep searching, so this is a misaligned incentive rather than a plan to shut newcomers out.

That incentive fits three of Google's choices. Google killed Google Reader, which let people follow sites without going through search (Google cited declining use). AMP attempted to keep content within Google's ecosystem. Google's motives for those two are inference. The third choice is on the record. Search results increasingly feature Google-owned properties, and the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion in 2017 for ranking its own shopping comparison service above rivals'.

This mirrors pre-internet gatekeeping, when only established publishers could reach mass audiences. The internet promised to democratize that access. SEO re-centralized it through algorithmic authority. The difference from those human publishers is that SEO's barriers are algorithmic and opaque. You can't argue with an algorithm or pitch your case to a human gatekeeper.

SEO's trajectory follows the natural lifecycle of human systems: innovation solves a problem, adoption scales it, power consolidates, incentives shift toward self-preservation, and the system decays until disruption restarts the cycle. Tim Wu traced the same pattern through the telephone, radio, film, and cable in The Master Switch and called it the Cycle, where open information systems consolidate and close until a disruptive technology reopens them. SEO now works out in favor of Google's market position and the incumbents it ranks more than it democratizes discovery. Whatever eventually disrupts SEO will likely follow the same path. Engagement-based ranking will get gamed. New gatekeepers will emerge. The cycle continues.

Fund Fast Channels as Primary, Not Leftover

The solution isn't "fix SEO" or "abandon SEO." SEO became constrained, but it still delivers genuine value for authority and trust. The solution is treating discovery as genuinely multi-channel and funding it accordingly.

An organization that still lacks authority and needs reach within months, yet produces content for SEO and then repurposes scraps for social media and community engagement, has it backwards. If ranking for contested queries takes years and businesses need reach now, alternative channels deserve primary investment, not leftover budget.

The web has already started routing around authority-based discovery. TikTok and Reddit elevate content through engagement rather than accumulated authority. YouTube prioritizes watch time over channel age. Hacker News can surface a blog post from an unknown developer based on upvotes rather than domain history. Those rankers are as opaque as Google's, and followers and paid boosts give incumbents an edge there too. But these platforms weigh how people respond to each post now more heavily than a site's years of history, and that is the difference a newcomer needs.

Treating SEO as the primary channel looks weaker still once AI answers enter the picture. They are the strongest form of the "SEO is dead" case, and they cut into SEO's trust advantage too. Pew Research Center found in 2025 that Google users clicked a result link on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when none did. People clicked a link inside the summary itself on only 1% of visits.

Ranking well now earns fewer clicks, even for established sources. Whether being cited without a click builds credibility is unproven. The case for SEO narrows to the readers who still click through, plus technical standards that improve a site whether or not it ranks.

Use Each Channel for What It Does Well

The "SEO is dead" narrative gets it wrong by framing this as a binary choice. Authority signals now hold newcomers back, but SEO still excels at surfacing established sources when you need something proven. That value now reaches only the readers who still click through, since AI summaries answer many queries outright. That makes SEO a smaller bet than it used to be, sized as background work rather than primary investment. Social platforms provide reach and speed.

There's another reason to pursue SEO excellence even if you won't rank soon. The technical standards are a roadmap for good UX, covering accessibility, mobile responsiveness, page speed, clear structure, and quality content. These practices make your product better regardless of whether search engines reward you for them.

Stop treating these as competing alternatives. Instead:

• Use social channels for democratic reach and speed, and treat them as primary investment, not leftover scraps
• Build platform-native content for TikTok, YouTube, Discord, and Reddit
• Let SEO compound in the background as a long-term asset for authority and trust: publish on a domain you own, start with specific queries incumbents don't serve, meet the technical standards, and let whatever links you earn accrue there
• Recognize that newcomers need both: social to grow quickly, SEO to establish credibility over time with the readers who still search and click through
• Move the audience you win on social onto channels you own, like an email list or your own site, before those platforms close up the way search did

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SEO still works, but the approach has changed. Success now depends on helpful content, search intent, user experience, and building trust rather than just keywords and backlinks. With strategies that focus on visibility and credibility, erasenegativelinks helps businesses strengthen their online presence and reputation.