TechCrunch — a website that lives and dies by Google traffic — has taken its turn and also declared Google Search dead, in an article that will never be found via Google Search. Poetic, really. Almost like they’re beta testing the post-SEO world on themselves.
SEOs Ruined the internet; never the companies that profited from it
You know what actually ruined the “pure” internet?
- Google turning into an ad machine that rewards the highest bidder.
- Journalists writing 800-word listicles with zero research then crying when someone outranks them with actual useful content.
- Media companies pumping out AI slop while pointing fingers at the guys who’ve been doing this for 20 years.
PageRank – the algorithm that won’t die
PageRank was never the villain. PageRank was the democratizer. It said: “Hey, if real people link to your shit because it’s good, you get rewarded.” And journalists hated that. Still do. Because suddenly some random forum, blog, or helpful guide could outrank their precious branded “journalism” that reads like it was phoned in from a PR email. The horror! Merit-based visibility! How dare we!
Every time Google updates and some legacy publisher tanks, it’s the same script:
The Verge Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
The Verge’s “How SEO Ruined the Internet” piece (you’ve read it, we’ve all read it, it was extremely well optimized) made the case that SEO had reduced the web to a wasteland of keyword-stuffed garbage written by content farms to satisfy an algorithm rather than a human.
Which: fair point, partially. There is a lot of keyword-stuffed garbage on the internet.
But here’s what The Verge didn’t say, possibly because it would have been awkward: major media publications — including, let’s say hypothetically, ones that publish glossy tech criticism — spent years doing exactly the same thing. They hired SEO editors. They reverse-engineered Google’s ranking signals. They A/B tested headlines. They chased traffic with the same frantic energy as any content farm, they just had better brand guidelines and a more attractive 404 page.
The difference, apparently, is that when they do it, it’s “digital strategy.” When a smaller publisher does it, it’s “ruining the internet.”
What about Google’s role?
Meanwhile the actual problem is Google themselves:
- Flooding results with their own crap (AI Overviews eating clicks)
- Pushing ads above the fold like it’s 2009
- Then acting shocked when people game the system they created
But sure, blame the SEO guys. We’re the convenient scapegoat. The cult. The dark magicians who dared to read the algorithm and adapt.
The Actual Point, If You Need One
Journalists don’t hate SEO. They hate losing.
They hate that PageRank gave everyone a vote. They hate that the vote sometimes goes to people who understand ranking signals better than they understand prose. They hate that “quality” — a word they defined, for a very long time, in a very self-serving way — turns out to be more complicated to measure than they’d like.
SEO, done properly, is just the practice of making good content findable. The keyword research tells you what people actually want to know. The structure makes it readable. The links build the credibility that PageRank was always trying to measure in the first place.
That’s not ruining the internet. That’s how the internet is supposed to work.
The journalists can keep writing their “SEO is dead” pieces. We’ll keep making sure people can find them.
