Author here. I have worked on SEO project for pretty much my whole career since the late 90’s.

It’s become increasingly obvious to me that the deal that sent organic traffic to websites for “free” has almost entirely collapsed. It is gone. It is not coming back. And the sooner we come to our senses and stop wasting time and effort on futile agentic search optimisation, the sooner we can focus on more productive things.

It pains me to say this, but there seems to be a collective delusion that this is like an algorithm change, a bump in the road we can figure out.

I argue that it’s much more severe than that, and that the organic referral traffic site owners have got used to seeing over 25 tears is gone for good.

Apologies for gratuitous Monty Python references.