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Organic SEO no longer valuable
Posted by on May 16, 2026 at 10:00 amWe run a service-based business and did about $8m revenue last year.
For the last 10 years we’ve grown on organic SEO. Our services are very high intent keywords, so customers would search SERVICE in CITY and we would be at the top. We have a modest spend (about $100k p.a) on AdWords and Meta, but really it is the organic SEO that has allowed us to grow.
In the last 12 months we’ve seen this change. Our users on site are down +20% month YOY and this carries through to bookings.
I personally believe it is because Google is now prioritising AI results, then paid ads, then maps, then some more paid ads, then finally organic results – so by the time a customer gets down to you, they’ve already crossed many other options.
I guess I’d just like some insight in what you recommend. I get ads for ‘ranking in AI results’ but not sure if they actually work or if our customers use AI in that way. We can increase spend on AdWords and Meta, and our CAC is good, but I just want some opinions on this.
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1 Reply
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If it wasn’t still valuable, you’d be down a lot more. I get it’, it sucks. But you won’t see the same kind of ROI on other channels.
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Organic isn’t dead imo, but the old “rank page = get lead” math is kinda broken. For service + city searches I’d look at the whole SERP now: maps, ads, reviews, AI box, all of it. You can technically rank and still be buried under half the page.
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It’s the strategy to keep the user in their own ecosystem as much as possible. I think AI overviews is for many websites the main reason traffic dropped, primarily for more informational keywords.
I would analyse the SERP for your top pages and keywords.
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You show up for “service city” let’s say you rank top for main keywords.
some SEO strategies are done only to rank certain keywords using articles and backlinks.
In those cases, the business ranks for main keywords but misses all the variations people actually search.
This can be confirmed by checking GSC data.
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Just don’t stop doing it! It’s worth more then ever now.
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Maybe you need more backlinks from your local portals and blogs?
Some videos on youtube maybe?
Check broken links. -
At what position do these pages rank please?
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I wish Google had an option to have really good search results only on the page as a user. The results from ai are nice, but I agree it’s like ai, maps, sponsored, then eventually you get to real results
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This feels like a million dollar question that we’re all asking right now. Personally I’m trying to explore video content but it’s new to us so it feels like I’m a toddler learning to walk and I’m not able to create nearly as much content or quality that I’d like yet.
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And how do you rank in maps and AI? Classic SEO. Maps uses content to help (though proximity is huge).
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The preferred content mediums for crawlers to understand and shares to consume highly technical content has changed from copy to video. Pages need to be optimized with both, but I’m seeing technical content indexed from the video hit conversational search engines within 12 hours
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You lost 20% of your customers? So you still have 80% through SEO?
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Only losing 20% is quite impressive. Google SERPS is now absolute trash for most searches. The first page is all ads, AI, reloated searches and 1-3 actual search results. Search is more dominated by corporations, even if they have very poor content and product offerings.
Google has decided to canibalise content creators and small businesses. They have decided to eat our content and dominate our businesses. The quality of search results is trash. Very bleak out there right now.
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Ai results mean 60% less clicks 🙁
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