The only good thing about SEO (yuck) is it got some people to care about things that are good for humans too: fast pages, well-structured content, descriptive link text, etc.

I think the concept of SEO is fine. But the problem comes down to metric hacking.

Certainly you want to make your page easier to index by Google and others, but that's not the only thing that matters. You should improve your content and provide a good product to users. That's what Google intends to measure, but such a thing is actually impossible to do so accurately. So the problem comes down to this stupid cat and mouse game where sites happily shill out links that are immediate turnarounds for users.

I think this is larger than just search. We seem to just be optimizing towards whatever metric we've decided should be used. We then fool ourselves into thinking this proxy actually measures the real thing.

Unlike classic search, which got worse over time due to SEO gamings, AI search might actually improve with scale. If LLMs are trained on real internet discussions (Reddit, forums, reviews), and your product consistently gets called out as bad, the model will eventually reflect that. The pressure shifts from optimizing content to improving the product itself.