SEO is Dead

By Lee Miller on 10 February 2026

I'm being completely honest in this statement, it's a bold claim, but is it true?

As a web developer, I build a lot of websites, and what I've noticed over the last year, is that Google doesn't add every web page to the index, they crawl them, but only index pages they consider as safe - safety is now a priority, over and above all else.

Googlebot uses AI to interpret content "chunks" rather than just keywords. The crawler is now capable of interpreting multi-modal content—analysing images, video, text, and audio simultaneously to understand the context of a page, not just the text.

Safety First

This is especially true for me, as a governance / legal technical writer, Google considers my sites as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), and so Google treats legal advice as high-risk, i.e. If a new site lacks a reputation or external validation (backlinks), it defaults to keeping it out of the index to prevent potential harm to users.

How do I know? I have 100s of pages that Google has crawled and just a handful added to the index, essentially from the standpoint of my business, my website is used to show people at trade exhibitions, and from word of mouth introductions.

AI Search

What do you do when using Google? Do you look down the page for answers, or do you go straight into AI Mode?

For informational queries—which make up about 88% of AI-triggered searches—people are increasingly choosing "AI Mode" over clicking individual links.

Recent studies from 2025 and 2026 reveal the extent of this shift:

The Click Gap: When an AI Overview appears, only 8% of users click on a traditional search result, compared to 15% when the AI is absent.
The Zero-Click Reality: Approximately 26% of searches with AI summaries now end without any clicks at all, as the AI directly satisfies the user's intent.
Ranking Devaluation: The #1 organic spot, once the ultimate goal, has seen its click-through rate (CTR) plummet by as much as 58% in the presence of AI.
The "First-Third" Rule:: Roughly 70% of users only read the first third of an AI summary before moving on, meaning even citations buried at the end of a response are often ignored.

This spells the "Death of Middle-Tier SEO" -if your goal is to rank for generic legal keywords and hope for a click — it is a losing battle.

The "Click-less" Reality (Ranks 4-10 are Dead)

Don't do SEO, Do GEO.

I no longer write for Google, I write for AI models like ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), and Perplexity, using "Generative Engine Optimization," an evolution of SEO, that's designed to influence AI, not Google.

Which brings me to the final point, and the reason for this post

New Ledger Auto SEO

Ledger now includes (from v1.4.0) a new feature, available via the admin section, that automates sitemap.xml creation and a agents.json file that's used by AI to discover what your site is about.