The Top 5 Myths About SEO

Myth #1: SEO Is Dead Because AI Answers Everything Now

I get why people believe this one. You ask Google a question, an AI Overview shows up, and you never click anything. So why would anyone bother optimizing for search at all?

Here’s the honest answer. SEO didn’t die; it evolved. Sure, it’s true that AI Overviews eat up a ton of space on informational searches. There’s no denying that. 

But people still click through when they’re comparing products, booking something, or reading a full guide before they buy. The searches that actually make businesses money still send traffic.

Thin, generic content struggles now in a way it didn’t before AI. Sites with real expertise, clear writing, and something original to say are the ones that are showing up, getting cited, and continuing to rank well. 

So no, SEO’s not dead. It just stopped rewarding bad work.

What to do instead: Stop asking whether AI killed your traffic and start asking whether your content actually fulfills the intent of the terms you’re targeting, whether there are gaps in your topical coverage, and whether your content is up to date.

Myth #2: Keywords Don’t Matter Anymore

This one swings too far in the other direction. For years the advice was hit a certain keyword density, sprinkle your phrase into every third sentence, and you’ll rank. That was technically never actually true, and it’s definitely not true now.

Some marketers now think keywords are completely irrelevant, that you just write naturally and AI figures out the rest. But this is also not true. 

Google’s systems understand context, synonyms, and intent far better than they used to. Keyword stuffing doesn’t signal relevance anymore. It signals stuffing, and it can actually work against you. 

This doesn’t mean the words you choose don’t matter. It means you may need to change your approach to how you’re finding keywords, what type of terms you’re using, and how you’re building out your content strategy

Use the terms your actual audience uses. Target a variety of terms to improve your chances of being cited by AI. 

Answer the specific questions they’re asking. Provide full, complete answers that cover all angles of the topic’s intent. That’s still keyword research.

The bottom line here: Keywords aren’t dead. Keyword density as a ranking strategy is. Those are two very different things.

Myth #3: You Can’t Track ROI Anymore Because AI Hides Everything

Someone points at an AI Overview eating up the top of the results page and says something like, “How are we supposed to prove SEO is working if we can’t even see where the clicks went?” This is something I’ve thought a lot about while reviewing website performance this year.

Here’s the honest answer. Harder to measure is not the same as impossible to measure. Yes, an AI Overview showing up on a page cuts into clicks on the top result. That part is real and it’s worth acknowledging instead of pretending it isn’t happening. 

But you still have Search Console, GA4, and many other available tools to track performance. That’s enough to run real experiments. Change one variable at a time, a title tag here, an internal link there, a page speed fix somewhere else, and measure what actually shifts.

What changed is that clicks alone don’t tell the whole story anymore. Impressions, visibility inside AI answers, and brand mentions all matter now too. Even only looking at non-branded traffic doesn’t tell the full story anymore. 

If you’re showing up in AI overviews, have an increase in impressions, but your clicks are down YoY, chances are users are gaining awareness of your brand initially and circling back through a branded search after reviewing AI overviews and LLM responses. While this does make it trickier to pinpoint a customer’s full journey, it helps add context to the full picture. 

So the job isn’t “give up on ROI.” It’s “widen what you’re measuring.”

Is it more work than it used to be? Sure. 

Is it impossible? Not at all.

What to do instead: Stop treating a drop in top line clicks as proof that nothing’s working. Look at the fuller picture, and test on your own site instead of assuming what worked for someone else’s business applies to yours.

Myth #4: More Blog Posts Is Always the Answer

This might be the myth causing the most damage right now. A lot of businesses think the SEO plan is simple. Publish more blogs. Publish constantly. Eventually, something sticks.

It doesn’t work like that, and it never fully did. Publishing volume without a plan just adds noise to your website.

What’s actually working right now is a mix of page types working together. A blog post might catch someone early in their research. A service page or a clear FAQ section closes the gap when they’re ready to decide. Structured, answer-style content also happens to be exactly what search engines and AI tools use to figure out what your page is actually about.

If your entire SEO plan is “publish more,” you’re probably leaving results on the table. Fewer, better pages that fully answer real questions will beat a pile of thin ones every time.

What to do instead: Audit what you already have before you write one more post. Consolidate the thin stuff. Map out your topical coverage, identify gaps, and strategize accordingly. Make what’s left genuinely useful.

Myth #5: Technical SEO Runs Itself Now

This one’s newer, and it comes from a good place. Website platforms really have gotten smarter. A lot of basic technical hygiene happens automatically now that used to require a developer.

But “automatically handled” and “handled well” are not the same thing. AI crawlers and AI Overviews are more likely to cite pages that are technically clean. That means your titles, your meta descriptions, your heading structure, and your schema markup still need actual attention. Nobody’s software checks whether your content answers the question a real person is asking. That part still takes a human paying attention.

So, how do you know if you’re actually covered? Pull up your Search Console data. Look at your crawl reports. If nobody’s checked either in the last few months, you’re not covered, your site is just quietly assuming it’s fine.

Chances are there are a few (or many) pages that have fallen off, aren’t being indexed, or have some other sort of error that may need to be corrected.