SEO is dead again (once more)

I lost count of how many funerals we have thrown over the years for search engine optimisation. There was the “not provided” panic, the RankBrain vigil, the zero-click eulogy, the Core Web Vitals wake and, only a spring ago, the AI Overview requiem. Each time we voiced our sorrow, updated the checklist, and went back to polishing meta descriptions. Now the hearse has pulled up outside yet again, its driver a cheerful Sundar Pichai who insists that the coffin this time is real and roomy. AI Mode, fully live in the United States and India, and newly arrived in the United Kingdom, is the most complete attempt yet to saw through the plank on which SEO has balanced for two decades. Japan can still hear the hammering in the distance, but anyone depending on organic traffic for income knows the nails will soon bite here too.

For the uninitiated, AI Mode replaces the familiar stack of blue links on a Google search page with a single, conversational answer stitched from multiple sources. It listens, rephrases, sometimes translates, always compresses. To be clear, this is not Google AI Overview. This is Google AI Overview's very big, and very confident brother. Google is calling AI Mode a "shift from information to intelligence", which is a poetic way of saying, "All your clicks are belong to us". In internal presentations, the company boasts that the feature has increased the number of search queries by ten per cent, a growth figure that Wall Street applauds, as each extra query is another potential ad slot. Publishers, who rely on the part that happens after the query, are less enthusiastic.

The numbers are bleak. Ahrefs finds a 34.5 per cent decline in click-through for position one results when an AI Overview is present. Pew Research reports that users encountering an AI summary click on a link in only eight per cent of visits, barely half the rate observed when no summary appears. UK publishers already speak of traffic “apocalypses” and quote drops of up to eighty per cent. One independent news editor told Press Gazette that AI Mode feels like a lose-lose: journalists still do the labour of reporting, but the algorithm hoovers up the credit.

In my own experience at Ulpa, a niche consultancy I run on the side of my work for giftee, confirms the pattern. In January, our blog logged roughly one hundred and thirty daily clicks from around seven thousand five hundred impressions. A couple of weeks ago, daily impressions ballooned to twelve thousand two hundred, yet clicks declined to seventy-five. The impression line soars while the click line sags, creating a hungry gap that looks uncannily like the gaping mouth of a crocodile. It's called the "crocodile effect": jaws open, numbers diverge, brand recognition slips down the reptile’s throat.

That gap matters because humans do not remember impressions. We remember moments that carried a signature. AI Mode strips away those moments. It totally extracts the idea, not the name, so unless a brand is woven directly into the phrasing, the reader departs wiser but with no memory of who provided the wisdom. Reach without recall is the new fool’s gold.

Japanese executives are already debating how far the danger travels across the language barrier. Some reassure themselves that Yahoo! Japan still commands significant mind-share, that domestic users enjoy methodical research, and that kanji complexity will trip the model. Those comforts will last as long as the beta badge stays off Japanese queries. The instant it disappears, the crocodile's mouth will open just the same.

The first reflex will be tactical. Marketing teams will jam brand names into every second sentence, add schema for recipes and how-tos, and beg for that coveted “as explained by Suntory” mention. Some of this will help. Google’s generation engine often repeats entities that feel intrinsic to the fact pattern, so embedding the brand in the fact pattern can preserve attribution. But over-stuffing is spray paint on a tide wall. Waves do not respect adjectives.

The second reflex will be defensive. A handful of sites will block the AI crawler. They will cite cultural nuances, data-mining ethics and a proud history of protecting IP. Blocking may even win a bout of publicity. Yet the vacuum will be filled by rivals who feed the beast. The answer box will still appear; only the citations will change. Denial surrenders the conversation without preventing the plagiarism.

The third response is the only one that endures: shift the metric from traffic to memory. Brands must design content that carries mnemonic hooks strong enough to survive algorithmic compression. Think of Kirin’s fire engine red cans, or Muji’s disciplined whitespace, or the jingle that plays when Suica gates open. Online equivalents exist. A phrase that is unmistakably yours. A visual style that screen-scrapers cannot flatten. A tiny dash of humour that feels foreign if imitated.

Memory begins with owning a topic rather than renting a keyword. The Blue Ocean Strategy authors became obligatory citations because they coined the phrase. Japanese firms can do the same. Coin a term for your proprietary logistics model or sustainability pledge and the AI overview must cite it whole. If you publish yet another “Ultimate Guide to Matcha”, the AI will shred it and serve the powder to searchers without ever mentioning your name.

Memory continues with assets that resist paraphrase. Infographics watermarked with logos remain intact when pasted into presentations. Interactive calculators survive as embedded iframes that link back to the mothership. Short-form video, still privileged in Japanese search results, carries subtitles where you can speak your identity out loud. AI Mode cannot embed a YouTube clip in the answer card without attribution, so the clip becomes a trojan horse transporting the brand into the user’s second click.

Then comes the hardest test: agentic commerce. Google says its long-term aim is to let AI Mode complete tasks, so the searcher can ask for “a mid-century oak coffee table under thirty-thousand yen, deliver next Tuesday, apply my Visa points.” The agent will compare options, pick a retailer, execute the checkout and email the receipt. Suppliers who run thin integration layers will lose to those whose feeds, stock APIs and loyalty hooks are ready for real-time negotiation. Japanese retailers have an advantage here. The market pioneered QR payments, point economies and same-day kombini pickup. Turning those primitives into agent friendly endpoints is mostly a question of will.

If this sounds like brand marketing rather than SEO, that is precisely the point. Google has chosen to intermediate informational intent. Fighting that decision on its own turf is self-defeating. Companies should instead cultivate the kind of identity the intermediary cannot erase. Measure branded search impressions, direct site visits, newsletter opt-ins, Discord memberships, and even LINE friend counts. Ask focus groups what brand comes to mind when they recall a concept 72 hours later. Memory is a ranking factor for humans, which is the only ranking that ultimately pays salaries.

The new rule set does not mean ignoring technical hygiene. Pages must still be crawlable, fast, and structured. AI Mode’s generation engine begins with a query fan-out that relies on canonical signals. Starve it of clean data, and your angles never make the cut. But hygiene is table stakes. The scoreboard has moved.

Sceptics insist the death-of-SEO narrative invariably overshoots. They have history on their side. Every earlier death ended in resuscitation. Yet there is a difference between a traffic dip and a memory hole. One hurts revenue, the other corrodes future demand. A travel agency that loses half its clicks today can buy ads tomorrow. A travel agency nobody remembers will discover that its cost per acquisition has doubled because the brand name no longer pulls users directly to its form.

We should also remember that Japanese consumers are connoisseurs of brand stories. They line up for limited edition Nike sneakers, mourn the retirement of a mascot, and dissect the umami notes of a seasonal crisp. They will recognise and reward distinctive editorial voice online as readily as they applaud it on packaging. The task is not to trick a language model but to impress a culturally tuned reader despite the model’s summary.

My own checklist looks like this: replace generic headlines with ones that whisper our name; insert first-person anecdotes because personal narrative often survives truncation; publish research with an invented framework, however modest; design screenshots that double as postcards; integrate inventory and loyalty APIs ahead of the agentic pilot; run surveys on whether readers recall Ulpa without prompting. We treat impressions as potential sparks, clicks as nice-to-haves and memory as the real currency.

Will it work? Who knows, but what we do know is that SEO is indeed dead again (once more). The ritual gets easier each time. Say a kind word, lower the casket, plan the resurrection. This time, however, we are being asked to resurrect something older than title tags. We're being challenged to resurrect personality, taste, and idiosyncrasy. Algorithms change fast, culture endures. So why not put in the effort to teach culture to remember your brand, and then the crocodile jaws can snap all they like; you will still be standing on the riverbank, counting the echoes and dollar bills y'all.

I write a monthly magazine called UZU that provides commentary, interviews, and articles on branding, marketing, and life in Japan. Subscribe here. 📬 https://lnkd.in/gH-drv6B

#seo, #aimode, #googleai, #futureofsearch, #digitalmarketing, #contentstrategy, #brandmemory, #japanmarketing, #organictraffic, #searchengine