Is SEO officially dead in 2025?

You've probably heard someone say this

Introduction

I've heard this way too many times but the truth is that SEO is well and alive.

The reason people say that "SEO is dead" is because their traffic has suddenly decreased after the introduction of LLM search engines like Perplexity.

They think that people will completely stop using Google and that their blog will get no traffic at all.

Traffic is a vanity metric

You have to realise that traffic is a vanity metric. You traffic going down literally doesn't matter, all we care about is revenue.

What do you think happens when someone searches through an LLM? They see your product being recommended by the LLM and they go and purchase. The only difference is that they're not coming through your blog or other content pages.

That is because people rarely click the sources inside Perplexity:

How to optimize for LLM search

Do you know where LLMs get their information from?

They search for it via Google or other search engines and their answer is fully based on the top results.

So how do you make sure that you're in the top results?

You do it through SEO.

Ranking in search engines = Ranking in search LLMs

But what if the LLMs don't use search? You probably know that ChatGPT doesn't use the search function everytime. The thing is that the data is still trained on the web. A great way to make sure you come out on top is to appear the most times inside the training data. You do this by making a lot of noise in the form of social media presence a lot of blog posts. You basically want to get yourself out there more than your competition.

Will SEO eventually die?

As long as people are searching for answers (which they are), SEO will be still be relevant.

The connection between LLM SEO and normal SEO is so strong that you'll still get people into your site even if you're not focusing on optimizing your content primarily for LLMs.

Thanks for reading.