SEO has had a hell of a run.

For years, it got sold like a semi-mystical growth shortcut.

Find the keywords. Build the pages. Wait a little while. Watch the traffic roll in. If you squint hard enough, you can still see the ghost of a 2017 webinar promising page-one rankings with a 90-day content calendar and the confidence of an entry-level content marketer who has never once had to explain attribution to a CFO.

“Just look at all of this traffic!!!” they’d declare wildly.

“Are we seeing more sales?” someone would ask.

“Wait, but did you see the new traffic?!” they’d reply, pointing to their slide again.

The reason that story stuck is that it contained a version of the truth: purposeful, SEO-driven content marketing works. But only when teams understood search intent, built useful pages, organized their sites well, and connected content to an actual business goal. Under those conditions, SEO could drive serious results. It still can.

Of course, the rise of AI has created a nonstop doom-and-gloom parade of “SEO is dead!” headlines. But you can’t let the clickbait distract you from the fact that you still need to help search engines (AI-powered or otherwise) understand your content, because those platforms are still trying to help people decide whether they should visit your site from the results page.

So, the foundation of SEO remains, but what’s wrapped around this foundation is what’s fundamentally changed.

In between the SEO doomsday preppers and the SEO purists who think everyone just needs to calm down are us performance marketers who just want to know:

Well, let’s talk about it.

Why the old silver-bullet version of SEO broke down

The old “grab a bunch of keywords and make the content” model worked best when it had strategy behind it. When teams understood the audience, knew which terms reflected real intent, and built pages with a clear purpose, that work could be enormously effective:

Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to have nice things. When marketers find something that works, we squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it until there’s nothing left. And when we get to that point… well, we’ll keep squeezing.

So, once word got out that this “SEO thing” seemed to actually work, the digital gold rush was on! We all tried to grab as much digital land as possible, before our competitors could, and we wanted to see results fast.

We were very busy, but we were also laying the foundation for a big mess:

Basically, we built a content factory designed to “win” the favor of Google, so we could land on page one.

Again, that worked for a while. But Google has spent the past few years, across multiple pieces of documentation, begging us to leave behind these aggressive keyword-grabbing approaches. Their goal is to prioritize helpful, reliable information created to benefit people, not content created mainly to manipulate search rankings.

This clarifies the reality we’re living today:

SEO didn’t fail because content targeted to search intent stopped working. Cheap, generic, scaled content got less effective because it deserved to.

Where does SEO fit inside a results-driven strategy now?

Specifically, how does SEO fit into performance marketing? Should SEO be measured against conversions and revenue? And how should organic search work alongside paid search, content strategy, and conversion optimization.

In real life, SEO inside the performance marketing context usually means one of two things:

That second point is the one we care about. (I’m a positive person, so I’m all for optimism… but I can’t generate a revenue report based on my feelings.)

Google still says that using Search Console and Google Analytics together supports exactly that kind of approach. Search Console shows how people find you in Google Search, while Analytics shows what those visitors do after they finally arrive at the front door of your website: buying something, signing up for your newsletter, smashing the submit button on a lead magnet offer, or raising their hand to start a conversation.

That doesn’t mean you should treat organic search like Groucho Marx, hiding behind a ridiculous mustache, pretending to be paid search.

Organic search still has a different rhythm. It takes longer. It compounds differently. It supports multiple stages of the journey. It depends on content quality, technical health, internal linking, authority, and usefulness in ways that are less immediate than paid media. Still, none of that exempts it from being measured against business value.

If a page ranks and brings in traffic, the next question is obvious: did that traffic do anything useful? That’s a performance marketing question, and SEO belongs in it.

Where AEO enters the performance marketing picture

AEO, or answer engine optimization, sits inside the broader shift toward answer-first search experiences:

(For the purposes of today’s discussion, we’re going to leave to the side the funny mistakes we’ve all seen Google’s AI preview make -- but please remember to always fact check.)

This shift changes the job for SEO in a few important ways.

A page now needs to do more than rank:

Now, before you think that means I’m telling you to be the world’s most boring Wikipedia page, packed with citations, footnotes, and headings, take a beat. That’s not what I’m saying at all. All this direction means is that a page should be clean enough, direct enough, and substantive enough that both humans and systems can understand what it contributes.

This is why I am furious at those who are throwing up their hands at the idea of SEO or creating content for search isn’t worth the effort anymore.

Your buyers are still searching for stuff online.

Sure, how and where they’re getting that information has changed. But if you’re not contributing to the online discourse about what it is you do or sell through expertise-driven content (in whatever form), you’re going to be left out of the conversation entirely.

And then your competitors will swoop in to take your place.

This is why the “SEO is dead” line misses the point.

What strong SEO in performance marketing actually looks like

A good strategy starts with search intent. You need to know what your buyers want, how close they are to action, what page type fits that query, and what business value sits behind the visit.

That sounds obvious. And yet, teams still mess it up all the time, because it’s so easy to get lazy at this stage by:

And then everyone clutches their pearls and acts surprised when they crush their traffic numbers, but there’s little to no reflection of that growth in terms of sales or revenue. Who knew turning your brain off, crossing your fingers, and hoping haphazard inputs would yield jaw-dropping results was a bad idea?

As a performance marketer, here are the search intent questions you should be asking today:

When you get specific and intentional in your answers to these questions, that’s the moment SEO comes back as a lever you can pull for growth.

Yes, page structure still matters… a lot

Pages built for modern search need to answer the question clearly, give enough detail to be useful, and guide the visitor toward a meaningful next step. That might be a purchase, a demo request, a lead form, a trial signup, another product page, or a deeper educational resource.

If you leave your visitors guessing about what they’re supposed to do next, they’re going to abandon your site. That looks like high traffic, zero conversions, and low pages-per-session data. Yes, your milkshake brought all the leads to the yard, but you didn’t give them a straw… or something.

(OK, I’ll admit that metaphor got away from me. Let’s move on.)

This is where some of the classics are still relevant today: clear page structure, good headings (that aren’t too clever), logical sequencing, specific messaging, active voice, etc. These are like the “little black dresses” of performance marketing SEO: they never go out of style.

The SEO metrics that matter now in performance marketing

You still need classic SEO metrics: rankings, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and organic sessions are useful. Search Console is built around those signals because they tell you whether your visibility is improving and whether people are choosing your result in search.

You also need the second half of the picture, and this is where Google Analytics and Search Console in tandem helps you understand what happens after the click:

A serious SEO performance marketing program usually cares about some combination of the following:

Of course, AEO adds another reporting layer. The reporting here is still less tidy than us fastidious performance marketers would prefer, which is annoying but not shocking.

You may need manual review, spot checks, and some common sense to understand whether your content is getting surfaced in AI Overviews or other answer-rich experiences. Still, your site can gain visibility and traffic through those experiences, which means they belong in the performance conversation too.

Skeptical performance marketers are right (and wrong)

Over the past five years (and the last 18 months in particular), many of us have watched our site traffic tank. And this has been happening at the same time as search engines (that swore up and down they were committed to bringing people to your sites) are keeping that traffic to themselves with on-SERP answers.

Of course, this is all happening against the historical backdrop of SEO having produced enough overpromising, magical thinking, and useless “hat on a hat” content to make any practical person a little twitchy.

So, the fact that you have real questions about whether or not SEO still works, how long it takes to see “results” (however you define them), what you should measure, and on and on and on, I get it.

You need to know if SEO, as the state of play stands today, can prove its value without hiding behind soft metrics and inflated attribution in reporting meetings.

Fair.

SEO has earned some of that skepticism over the years.

Where that skepticism goes wrong is when it assumes SEO is too fuzzy to evaluate seriously. SEO efforts and results are measurable, but they require a broader performance view than paid search alone:

For example, not all pages are designed to drive the same outcomes. In fact, pages can be built to support a lot of actions:

If you’re a performance marketer, evaluating the “role” of a channel isn’t new, right? The directive here is for you to now apply that to search.

So where does SEO fit inside performance marketing?

Right in the middle of it.

Performance marketers should think about search as one channel in your mix, rather than as a single holistic “strategy.” Because it’s a channel that can drive qualified traffic, influence demand, support conversions, reduce reliance on paid media in certain areas, and build long-term visibility around topics and queries that matter to your business.

Yes, the conversation around SEO has gotten weird, thanks to all of our algorithms rewarding clickbait and outrage over nuanced, realistic discourse.

But the fact remains that purposeful SEO content strategies worked, and they still work. What stopped working so well was the stripped-down, industrialized version that treated keywords like a commodity and content like packing peanuts.

Answer-driven experiences now shape visibility before the click, but that doesn’t make SEO irrelevant in our performance marketing strategies. Instead, it makes strategy, structure, measurement, and usefulness more important than they were when people thought the whole job was just “make the content and wait.”