Search Engine Optimization Haters
The argument against SEO has barely changed over the past 15 years. Make something great, tell people, repeat. If the traffic doesn’t come, the work wasn’t good enough. Hiring someone to improve how you show up in search is treated as a con, or at least as a job for people without souls.
Search engine optimisation is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Derek Powazek
He was half right about the hucksters. He was wrong about the work. Placement is still one of the 4 Ps. The engine that does the placing no longer looks like a list of links.
What the Haters Got Right
Powazek’s useful line still holds:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again. That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail.
Derek Powazek
Thin pages stuffed with keywords deserved the contempt. So did anyone who sold a ranking they could not keep. If the product is weak, the support is weak, and the writing is a costume, no sitemap will save you. AI search is even less interested in that costume than Google’s old crawler was.
Where he lost me was the next step: if it is not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Maybe? Plenty of excellent work never ranks, never gets cited, and never gets retrieved, because the machines that allocate attention cannot find it, parse it, or trust it. That is a placement problem. Pretending it is only a quality problem is how good work stays invisible.
The Engine Stopped Being a List
Organic ranking used to mean a position on a SERP. You earned that position with onsite performance (can this page be crawled, understood, and used?) and offsite validation (do other people treat this source as real?). Links, mentions, reviews, and brand searches were votes. Titles, headings, internal links, speed, and UX were how you converted the click you won.
Answer engines and LLMs still need both of those jobs done. They just do not always send the visitor to your page to finish the job. An AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overview), a chatbot citation, or a synthesized brief is using your work as evidence. That is still placement. It is often more of the old SEO job, not less, because the model has to decide who is allowed to speak.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are new labels for that same split: be retrievable, be extractable, be cited. The haters’ slogan, just make it great, never described how a crawler or a model actually chooses a source.
Offsite Validation Moved Into the Model
Search engines treated the rest of the web as a reputation graph. AI systems still do, and they drink from a wider hose. Training corpora, retrieval indexes, and citation tools pull from the same kinds of proof SEO teams already chased: other sites linking with context, journalists naming you, practitioners quoting you, reviews, YouTube and forum threads where real users argue the details.
The difference is intensity. A blue-link ranking could survive on a handful of decent backlinks and a matching query. An answer that names three sources has to pick winners. Models overweight entities they have seen in many independent places, in consistent language, with a track record that looks like EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Unlinked mentions, co-citations, and people also ask this brand behavior matter more, not less, because the system is trying to avoid hallucinating a nobody.
That is offsite SEO with the volume turned up. PR, digital PR, community presence, original research, and customer proof are not a separate arts-and-crafts department. They are how you get into the set of pages a model is willing to lean on. If nobody reputable has ever corroborated you, you are asking a language model to take your word for it. Most of them will not.
Onsite Performance Is How You Get Quoted
The other half of ranking, onsite performance, is how a machine decides your page is usable evidence. Crawlers need sitemaps, a sane hierarchy, robots rules, and keywords where humans actually look. Models need that plus extractability. Clear headings. Direct answers near the top of a section. Tables and lists that survive summarization. Schema that matches the visible page. Author and organization markup that matches the offsite entity. CWV still matter because a page that will not load is a page that will not be fetched, rendered, or trusted as live.
None of that is common sense to a designer staring at a blank artboard. It is also not a trick. It is making the great thing legible to software that will either cite you or skip you. Hide the thesis in a hero animation, split the answer across twelve cards, or publish the useful bit as text-in-an-image, and you have made something a person might love and a model cannot use.
Onsite SEO used to be how you won the click. Now it is also how you win the quote inside the answer that replaced the click. That is a bigger assignment, not a smaller one.
Placement Was Always the Job
Arguing that SEO is not marketing ignores placement. If someone is searching, prompting, or asking an assistant, and you are absent from the result they trust, you didn’t fail at making something great. You failed at being findable where the question got answered.
A colleague of mine used to say SEO helps companies rank where they are supposed to rank. The 2026 version is uglier and more accurate: SEO helps companies show up in the answers they are supposed to be part of. Robots.txt, pings, sitemaps, information architecture, internal links, entity consistency, and citation-worthy sourcing are still the unglamorous workarounds for engine limitations. The engines got more opinionated. The limitations did not disappear.
You can do a lot of this yourself if you have the time. In a competitive result, or in a category where AI overviews already steal the CTR, someone who lives in retrieval, markup, and offsite proof will still change the outcome. The con is the person who sells a #1 packing the same way they did in 2010. The discipline is making sure the great thing is eligible for both the remaining blue links and the machines that now sit above them.
Make something great. Then do the unromantic work that lets Google, the overviews, and the chatbots treat it as a source. Skipping that second part is not integrity. It is leaving placement to chance in the most competitive attention market we have ever had.
