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 real problem. The timeline to build authority hasn't changed (it still takes 2-5 years), but the gap keeps widening. A startup in 2015 competed against sites with 5-10 years of accumulated authority. A startup in 2025 competes against sites with 15-25 years. Authority signals that once filtered spam now create insurmountable barriers for newcomers because incumbents have had decades to compound their advantages.
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. When you need something tested and proven and you already know what you're looking for, SEO delivers authority and trust.
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.
What Actually Changed
What changed isn't SEO's rules; it's business expectations. In the 2010s, investors tolerated long growth curves. Venture capital funded multi-year SEO strategies. By 2020, interest rates rose, funding contracted, and investors demanded profitability over growth. Show traction in 6 months or you're dead. SEO's timeline didn't adjust. The business environment did.
So businesses fragmented discovery. When you need customers in 6 months and SEO takes 3 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.
- 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 without algorithmic intermediaries.
- 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.
The Broken Promise of Democratization
SEO never delivered on the promise of democratization. Tim Berners-Lee designed the web with an explicit rejection of gatekeeping, making it royalty-free and open so anyone could publish and be found. Google's PageRank promised the "democracy of the web", where community links would surface quality over editorial control.
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, but they compounded over time into insurmountable advantages for incumbents.
The promise decayed into algorithmic gatekeeping that serves Google's advertising revenue. Search advertising generated approximately $175 billion for Google in 2023, roughly 58% of Alphabet's total revenue (Alphabet 2023 Annual Report). Google's search engine exists primarily to serve ads. This explains why Google killed Google Reader (which competed with web traffic), why AMP attempted to keep content within Google's ecosystem, and why search results increasingly feature Google-owned properties.
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 is that SEO's barriers are algorithmic and opaque. You can't argue with an algorithm or pitch your case to a human gatekeeper.
What Comes Next
The solution isn't "fix SEO" or "abandon SEO." SEO became constrained, but it still provides real value for authority and trust. The solution is treating discovery as genuinely multi-channel and funding it accordingly.
Many organizations still treat alternative platforms as afterthoughts. They produce content for SEO, then repurpose scraps for social media and community engagement. This inverts the reality: if SEO 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, Discord, 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 alone. The alternatives exist. What's missing is the budget allocation to use them properly.
SEO's trajectory follows the natural lifecycle of human systems: innovation solves a real problem, adoption scales it, power consolidates, incentives shift toward self-preservation, and the system decays until disruption restarts the cycle. SEO now optimizes for protecting its own integrity more than for democratizing discovery. But it still delivers authority and trust for established sources, and that value doesn't disappear just because the system became constrained. Whatever eventually disrupts SEO will follow the same path. Engagement-based ranking will get gamed. New gatekeepers will emerge. The cycle continues.
What to Take From This
SEO has a real problem: it became more about protecting its own integrity than providing the discovery service it promised. Authority signals that once filtered spam now exclude newcomers. But SEO still excels at what it has become: a system for surfacing established, authoritative sources when you need something proven and trustworthy.
The "SEO is dead" narrative gets it wrong by framing this as a binary choice. Social channels and SEO serve different purposes: social platforms provide democratic reach and speed while SEO provides authority and trust.
There's another reason to pursue SEO excellence even if you won't rank soon: the standards themselves are a roadmap for good UX. Accessibility, mobile responsiveness, page speed, clear structure, 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; 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
- Recognize that newcomers need both: social to grow quickly, SEO to establish credibility over time
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