SEO Is Dead In 2026?

This isn’t a Think Big Minute… just a bonus for something thta has been rolling around in my head.

SEO IS DEAD IN 2026?

Major League Baseball and Google have committed the same kind of abuse.

It occurs to me that Major League Baseball in the late 90s and early 2000s is similar to Google in the 2020s.

In the early to mid 90s MLB was seeing their cultural importance decline.

NFL and NBA were red hot and you could argue that MLB was no longer America's pastime.

Then in 1994 they made it far worse.

MLB went on strike and canceled the rest of the regular season and had no postseason.

After 1994 they floundered for a while.

There were a couple of highlights like Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig's iron man record but for the most part MLB wasn't well liked.

Then came the 1998 season.

Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke Roger Maris's single season home run record and many other hitters (and pitchers) put on historic seasons and the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves were both very dominant.

This power output continued for several years… with Barry Bonds in particular putting up video game numbers.

The sport was as popular as ever and fans came back…

…but it was pretty clear that steroids and other substances were making players bigger and stronger than ever, leading to this output.

MLB was benefiting heavily from it, but eventually (and I'm not going to dig into the whole story for the sake of brevity) the heat got to be too much and there were trials and MLB decided to crack down on steroid use now that it was no longer a net positive for them.

They knew all along and were happy to benefit from players doing this to themselves… then let them twist in the wind and down them when it was no longer beneficial.

How does that relate to Google?

For years the value proposition of Google search was that you could search for anything and Google would surface the links to the best of what you were searching for… particularly for information.

So if you were deeply interested in, say, espresso machines you could create a blog and talk about your interests regularly and if you wrote well enough Google would show your information to its searchers.

Then what happened was people who understood SEO realized they could make websites that used the things Google used to figure out what sites were the best to their advantage and show up for search terms for things they might not actually have knowledge of and make affiliate and ad sales money.

This worked out well for almost everyone for a while.

Google got a lot more inventory to show to its searchers because SEOs were flooding the internet with content.

SEOs got to make fat stacks of money by taking advantage of the way Google chose winners.

People could still make money from SEO with genuine authority sites about things they were passionate about (though it got much harder).

And searchers had more options.

As for Google, they also got to collect a ton of data from these sites… this will be important later.

But like with anything, too much of a good thing eventually caused problems.

SEOs had flooded the internet with information that increasingly smart searchers didn't trust.

It got so bad that people would use Google search as just a way to search Reddit and SEARCH TERM + REDDIT became the most popular search term for a lot of different industries because searchers trusted user generated content, like that on Reddit, more than they did publishers because SEO sites dominated content marketing.

(As an aside… I never understood why Reddit didn't just make their own search better.)

It got to the point that Google decided to take action and released the Helpful Content Update… this was designed to remove all those content based sites that were thriving because the owners knew SEO and replace them with well branded and high authority sites (this is why you now see unrelated but high authority sites ranking for things in search…).

This did in fact crush most of the information based content that SEOs had flooded search results with, but unfortunately it also had the same effect on authority sites that were genuinely interested in the topics they wrote on.

(I don't feel too bad for that last group, though, because they tend to be insufferable about their approach to SEO.)

So on the surface, it looked like Google was trying to do the right thing, just like how on the surface MLB looked like it was trying to do the right thing by cracking down on steroids.

But what really happened in both cases was that publishers in the case of Google (and players in the case of MLB) had outlived their usefulness to them.

It was around this time that Google drastically changed its search results and started offering AI overviews that often answered the question so the searcher didn't have to even go to a website to get information anymore.

They also have AI Mode, Gemini, YouTube and so on to help searchers find information without ever sending them to a website.

The idea being that they keep them in their ecosystem all the time so they make more money.

So, MLB was happy to let players abuse the system by taking drugs as long as it benefited them.

When it no longer did, they basically disowned them.

Google was happy to take advantage of SEOs and publishers for as long as it benefited them, then cut off the traffic when they no longer needed them.

So does that mean SEO is dead in 2026?

No, of course not… in many ways it's better than it's ever been because now we have more targets than ever (different Google properties, ChatGPT, social media ranking and so on) to optimize for.

And it's not like Google is going away.

A lot of people don't trust AI and still want websites, especially for local things they need.

It's just not as easy as keyword research + on site optimization + a few links like it used to be… and that WILL filter out a lot of crap from search but it also gives us a lot more opportunity.

So we can complain that Google sucks and used and abused us like MLB did to players… or we can focus on what works, and go out and make some money.

I know what I am going to do.

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