SEO dead, but why exactly (at least for GTM)?
- Bohdan Lytvyn
- April 02, 2026
- 12:12 pm
“SEO is dead”, the long standing cliché and the source of LinkedIn buzz, deserves a close and attentive look. Let’s wear the glass of a Go-To-Market stage business and discuss it seriously. The claim is simple: SEO can’t bring leads any more (at the required economy level). This function has drifted somewhere and investing in SEO no longer pays off.
The “SEO investment” term is the weakest point here: the typical SEO-way flow may hardly sustain the notion of investment activity. In the sense of GTM, SEO is not scalable. Simply saying, if SEO is identifying keywords and producing content to rank in search engines to feed a conversion funnel, then, to be scalable SEO must become spam. This is to say, deploy content fast and so build authority with backlinks. With AI, it’s doable but it is spam. The latest updates (including the ongoing March 2026 Google Core Update) are targeted at fighting spam and reassessing the quality signals to prevent spammy sites from surfacing. And to some effect. Aligning to the scalability of SEO is aligning to spam, which is not something investors like.
But then again, how should SEO be “sold” to stakeholders (if you are an agency) or - more importantly - if you are the GTM team? Can it even be maintained as a channel or a strategy for the Go-To-Market? The simple answer is no. In some sense, Search Engine Optimization goes back to where it started: compliance to search engine requirements in order to get past the gatekeeper to where customers are. That’s all.
This emphasizes the Technical side of SEO (Tech SEO) and - at the end of the day - it’s the happy news. SEO or Organic Search ceases to be a channel and becomes an optimization function that increases the effectiveness of Content Marketing. In the cross-functional teams SEO specialists perform a service function of ensuring the compliance to content and brand visibility. Where it’s a tight Growth team or even a single Growth marketer, this compliance job might be “outsourced” to Claude AI, etc.
Some may argue, “how about keywords research”, meaning its role in demand discovery. In practice, keyword targeting has historically fueled SEO spam… Look at the search engine results page (SERP) and you may find that it’s saturated with “what is / how to / best of, etc” articles engineered around keywords. To make his / her way through the results a person - ironically - needs AI now. All right, but what about less obvious queries, i.e. long tail keywords (using the technical term)? An organization still needs SEO intelligence to spot that, doesn’t it? If SEO would lead the dance of content generation, these long tail keywords will follow the path of the high volume ones, i.e. the spam drill.
Keyword-driven SEO, whether head terms or long tail, tends to reproduce the same old noise.
SEO is dead for spammy, investment-like forms of scaling the content and links to cheat the traffic off Google. But it’s not dead as a content optimization function. Humble (if you want), technical and crawlability-focused - for large e-Commerce websites - or humble, and interests-focused - for content-driven businesses. And brand visibility focused (brand keywords and brand related conversation) - for all.
For innovative products in the Go-To-Market stage, Organic Search is still important as the way to capture existing demand. It works as a tool to take hold of the problem under the current “name” and re-frame it in line with their innovative proposition. For many it is important.
In this sense, search becomes part of an orchestrated GTM system: a territory to be “claimed,” where users are converted “new religion” or gradually re-educated into a new language, through “naming and framing problems” that may later become associated with the brand or generalized.
But is it even SEO?