The “SEO is dead” headlines have been doing the rounds since Google started rolling out AI Overviews, and they will probably keep doing the rounds for a while yet. Some of what is being written is worth paying attention to. A lot of it is noise, either from people who have always been sceptical of SEO finding a new reason to say so, or from agencies selling the next thing. The reality is more nuanced and, for most small businesses, more reassuring than the panic suggests.
What has genuinely changed is that AI tools are increasingly answering questions directly rather than pointing people to a list of results to click through. Google’s AI Overviews sit above the organic listings and summarise information from sources it considers authoritative and reliable. That does shift the game slightly. Being on page one matters less if the person asking the question never scrolls past the AI summary. If you want to understand that shift in more detail, I have written about it separately in the context of Generative Engine Optimisation.
But here is the part the headlines tend to skip over. The signals that determine whether a site gets referenced in an AI summary are not wildly different from the signals that have always mattered for search. Clear, well-structured content from a source that has demonstrated genuine expertise over time. Fast loading pages. Accurate metadata. Proper schema markup. A site that is maintained and up to date. These are not new requirements. They are the same things good SEO practice has always pointed to, and most small business websites are still not doing them consistently.
The mistake I see regularly is businesses chasing the latest development before they have sorted the foundations. Worried about AI Overviews when their service pages are vague. Thinking about GEO when their site takes eight seconds to load on a phone. Wondering why they are not ranking for anything when they have not updated their content in three years. The fundamentals are not glamorous, but they are where most of the work needs to happen, and they happen to be the same things that improve performance across traditional search and AI-driven results alike.
Local SEO is worth addressing specifically, because the “SEO is dead” narrative can be particularly misleading for businesses operating in a defined area. Local search, the kind that shows a plumber in Kidderminster or a café in Bewdley when someone searches nearby, still works broadly the same way it always has. Google still values businesses rooted in real places, with accurate information, local signals, and content that reflects where they operate and who they serve. That has not gone away.
The practical upshot is this: if your website is well built, clearly written, properly maintained, and honest about what you do and where you do it, you are in a better position than most, and you are also in a good position for whatever search looks like in two years’ time. If it is not those things, that is where the attention should go before anything else. If you want an honest view of where your site stands, get in touch and I will take a look.
