SEO since 2012. Ask me anything.

No. It gets declared dead roughly once a year, usually by someone selling you the thing that's meant to replace it. Search behaviour changes, the tactics change, the channel does not die. People are still typing questions into things and clicking results, more than ever actually, they're just doing it across more places now. If anything the fundamentals matter more than they used to, because there are more ways to get it wrong.

Maybe. I'm a marketer, not a philosopher, so I'm probably the wrong bloke to bet your life on. What I can tell you is it's already changed how I work day to day, this whole site was built with it, and the people panicking and the people ignoring it both seem equally wrong to me. Somewhere in the sensible middle is where the useful stuff lives. Ask me again in a couple of years.

Maybe, if by "search" you mean the ten blue links we all grew up with. That format is genuinely changing, and fast. But "search" as in people looking for answers and businesses wanting to be found? That's not going anywhere, it's just moving into new surfaces like AI overviews and chatbots. The job stops being "rank number one on Google" and becomes "be the answer wherever people are asking". Different game, same reason to play it.

Yes. Here's the simple version: it's still one of the only marketing channels where you're reaching people at the exact moment they want what you sell, and you're not renting the audience by the click forever. The channel is broadening, not shrinking. What's changed is you can't coast on old tactics anymore, the bar for actually being useful has gone up. Do it properly and it still compounds like nothing else. Do it lazily and yeah, you'll waste your money, but that was always true.

Yes, and don't get too hung up on the acronym, half of them will be renamed by the time you read this. Strip away the jargon and it's the same job it's always been: make sure the things people use to find businesses actually understand yours and recommend it. That used to be Google. Now it's also ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the AI answers sitting on top of search. Getting mentioned there is absolutely worth it, because that's increasingly where the decision gets made. The good news is a lot of it rewards the same solid fundamentals as regular SEO, so it's not a whole new religion, it's an extension of the one you should already be practising.

Yes. It's a big part of what I look at now, whether that's auditing if the AI tools even know a business exists or working out why they're recommending a competitor instead. That said, remember I'm not chasing clients, my thing is audits and second opinions, not running your campaigns. So if you want to know whether you're actually visible in AI search, or whether the agency charging you for "AEO" is doing anything real, that's exactly my lane.