I started learning web development around the time the term search engine optimization, SEO, was becoming more common. You could still see the shift between pre-SEO content and post-SEO content. A popular article titled "Forgotten" (a great story) was suddenly republished as "Forgotten: My Adventures as an Employee the System Forgot to Erase."
Both titles and content were filled with keywords that signaled to search engines what the page was about. Articles basically catered to the search engines and only incidentally served people. On my own website, I remember editing page titles several times, then waiting a few days to see if Google noticed the changes and ranked me better. In fact, before Google introduced personalized results, I built a tool at my job to track how our website ranked for different combinations of keywords.
When personalized search results arrived, a lot of tools became obsolete. It was still useful, though, to track keywords for generalized metrics. But now AI Overviews are here. And it's not just Google's, plenty of people go straight to ChatGPT and ask the large language model their questions directly. While the information returned might be sourced from real websites, there's almost no incentive to click through to those sources.
While my inbox is still flooded with people promising to improve my SEO, I think it might not be helpful at all anymore. My traffic has shifted from mostly coming from Google to just a handful of visits. Most traffic now comes from AI bots scraping my content, and RSS readers (thank you!).
I take this as a relief. We can finally drop the act. We don't have to write keyword-stuffed titles and blog posts just to appear in search results. Large language models can understand our content just fine without it, and we won't be getting that traffic anyway. We can drop SEO.
You can finally write for yourself. Write for your audience. No need to cater to the robots.