AI Overviews Killed SEO. Again. For the Ninth Time.

Google put a paragraph of AI-generated text above the search results, and within hours the eulogies were live. "Zero-click search is here." "Organic traffic is finished." "SEO's obituary has finally been written, by an AI, which is somehow the funniest part."

None of this is new. What's new is the acronym. SEO didn't die, it got a sibling: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, which is, on inspection, the exact same job with a different slide deck. Write clear, well-structured, authoritative content that answers the question. Somehow this insight is billed as revolutionary every eighteen months.

Here's what actually happened after AI Overviews rolled out: some queries lost clicks, some sites gained visibility they never had, agencies added "AI Search Optimization" to their service pages without changing a single deliverable, and Google's overall search volume kept climbing.

The pattern holds. A new interface for search appears. People confuse "the interface changed" with "the underlying incentive to be found online disappeared." It hasn't. Businesses still want to be discovered. Search engines, AI or otherwise, still have to decide whose content to surface. That decision-making process is what SEO has always been. Renaming it doesn't kill it, it just resets the hype clock.

Come back in a year for Autopsy #10, tentatively titled "Whatever Google Ships Next Killed SEO, For Real This Time, We Mean It."