For newbies

SEO Is Dying – But Google Is the Murderer

|Author: Viacheslav Vasipenok|4 min read| 12
SEO Is Dying – But Google Is the Murderer

Not because people have stopped using Google. Not because everyone migrated to ChatGPT or Perplexity. Google’s own traffic is rock-solid. According to Similarweb data, visits to the search engine have been stable with roughly 10% cumulative growth from 2022 through 2026.

The killer is inside the house.

Google is systematically cannibalizing the very websites that made its search engine valuable in the first place — through aggressive, forced rollout of AI Overviews (and the newer, even more destructive AI Mode).

What used to work no longer does

For fifteen years, the SEO contract was simple: rank in the top 5 and you get traffic, leads, and revenue. Position #1 meant glory. Position #4 still meant serious money.

That contract has been torn up.

Look at the screenshot attached to this article.

SEO Is Dying – But Google Is the MurdererThe query is “how to integrate email sender to stripe”. A real, commercial, high-intent search. The page in question sits at a very respectable organic position #4 in Google’s results.

Sounds fantastic, right?

Now look where it actually appears on the screen.

It’s buried below:

  • A giant AI Overview that already answers the entire question;
  • Sponsored results;
  • Video carousel;
  • More ads and “people also ask”;
  • Various documentation links and community posts.

By the time a normal user scrolls past the first screen, they’ve already been fed a synthesized answer. The #4 result might as well be on page 3 of the old Google.

The classic SEO joke — “if you want to hide a dead body, put it on page 2 of Google” — has been updated for 2026:

Just push it below the first screen.

The numbers don’t lie

  • AI Overviews now appear on 48% of all search queries (up 58% in just three months earlier this year).
  • When an AI Overview shows up, organic click-through rates for traditional results collapse: 61% drop according to Seer Interactive, 34.5% drop for position #1 according to Ahrefs.
  • Zero-click searches now account for 80–85% of all Google searches — and jump to 83% on queries that trigger AI Overviews.
  • Some publishers have seen 26–55% traffic drops to their sites in the 12–18 months after AI Overviews expanded.

And that’s before we even talk about AI Mode — the full conversational replacement for traditional search results that pushes zero-click rates as high as 93%.

Google isn’t losing users. It’s just stopping them from ever leaving.

This is not a bug. It’s the business model.

SEO Is Dying – But Google Is the MurdererGoogle makes money when people stay inside its ecosystem. Every click that leaves Google for your website is a missed opportunity to show more ads, keep the user longer, and collect more data.

AI Overviews and AI Mode are the ultimate expression of that incentive: answer the question so perfectly that users never need to click anywhere else.

The old Google was a librarian that pointed you to the best books.  
The new Google is a librarian who reads the books for you, summarizes them, and then charges the authors for the privilege of being summarized.

Also read:

So what now?

Traditional SEO — the game of chasing blue links and fighting for positions 1–10 — is dead for most informational and even many commercial queries.

SEO Is Dying – But Google Is the MurdererThe new game has three rules:

  1. Get cited in the AI Overview (or become invisible).
  2. Own the sources Google’s AI trusts most (brand, authority, freshness, structured data, original research).
  3. Diversify aggressively — email lists, communities, YouTube, direct traffic, paid channels. Organic search is no longer a reliable primary channel.

The screenshot you’re looking at isn’t an outlier. It’s the new normal.

Your page can be #4 on Google and still be completely invisible.

Welcome to the post-SEO internet. The search engine isn’t dying.  
It’s just stopped sending traffic to anyone but itself.

Share:
0