SEO Reality Check: 13 Hard Truths You Need to Know

SEO is far from dead – it’s simply evolved in ways that many may not have anticipated. The digital landscape has changed dramatically, and to remain competitive, SEO professionals must embrace these shifts, adapt their strategies, and continually expand their skill sets.

In this article, we’ll explore 13 hard-hitting truths about modern SEO. These truths will shed light on the new realities every SEO expert must understand to stay ahead of the curve.

The aim of these insights is to challenge your current methods, encouraging you to reassess and adapt strategies that may no longer be effective in today’s ever-changing digital environment.

1. Content-level SEO is no longer enough

Traditional SEO tactics like page speed, keyword optimisation, and link building are no longer sufficient on their own. SEO now operates on three distinct levels: content-level, content creator level, and website publisher level. While it’s still essential to focus on content-level SEO, neglecting the other two will lead to failure.

The identity of the content creator is now crucial. Optimising both the creator and publisher entities, alongside their E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) credibility and topical authority, plays a significant role in SEO success.

2. DA-based links are only a small part of the equation

Although links from websites with high domain authority (DA) continue to be beneficial, their direct impact on SEO performance is now secondary to other credibility signals. Google now evaluates a range of factors to judge credibility, including:

Mentions
Entity-to-URL relationships
Topic-to-URL relationships
Content creator credibility
Website publisher credibility
The relevance of your page in relation to others

If you place too much reliance on traditional DA link strategies and overlook these additional factors, your SEO results may be underwhelming.

3. Keyword quantity is no longer a priority

Relying on keyword frequency to improve rankings is outdated. Instead, focus on understanding:

User intent
Vocabulary
Context
Entities
Relationships
Query sequences

Keywords should still guide your strategy, but it’s essential to approach them thoughtfully. Shift your focus towards creating multimedia content that aligns with each stage of the buyer’s journey, and ensure your messaging remains consistent, clear, and on-brand across all content types.

4. Written content is on the decline

Written content is gradually losing its prominence as search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing place more emphasis on multimedia elements, such as videos, images, Knowledge Panels, and generative AI. As AI technology improves in its ability to analyse and present multimedia content, traditional text-based content is becoming less central in search engine results pages (SERPs).

5. Traditional blue link rankings are no longer sufficient

For years, ranking in the blue links of SERPs has been the cornerstone of SEO strategy, heavily relying on written content, keywords, and backlinks. However, these traditional tactics are steadily becoming less relevant. While they still form the foundation of the SERP, their impact on visibility and traffic has been weakened by the growing importance of other SERP features, such as Knowledge Panels and AI-generated content.

The rise of generative AI has further diminished the value of blue links. With the introduction of Bing’s Deep Search and Google’s AI Overviews, blue links now primarily serve through what can be described as “implicit ranking.” This method involves the search engine analysing various results and combining them into a single summarised outcome. This process is behind the scenes, making it difficult to measure or control.

6. On-SERP SEO is unavoidable

If you haven’t already embraced on-SERP SEO, now is the time. It’s no longer just a buzzword; it’s a vital strategy that’s here to stay. On-SERP SEO shifts the focus away from simply generating clicks, instead prioritising brand visibility and maintaining a consistent narrative throughout the customer acquisition funnel. Achieving this level of visibility requires mastering SEO for both on-site and off-site content.

7. Websites are becoming less central

Websites are no longer the primary gateway to online visibility. Brands are increasingly gaining prominence across various channels such as social media, review platforms, videos, and traditional PR mentions. While your website will remain a central hub for your digital marketing and SEO efforts, it’s important to recognise that its visibility in search results and on assistive AI platforms may decline over time. A broader, multi-channel approach will be crucial to maintaining brand visibility.

8. Brand is now the key player

Google’s understanding of your brand identity now outweighs traditional content strategies centred on keywords and links. The search engine evaluates entities, such as corporations, people, or products, and ranks results based on their relevance to these entities, rather than just counting words or links. A clear indicator of this shift is when Google recognises your brand name and displays it in the SERP. If Google doesn’t recognise your brand, it will only show the domain, signalling that your website is a weaker proxy for brand recognition.

9. Schema markup is becoming obsolete

Both Google and Bing have moved away from supporting schema markup due to its inconsistent and often manipulative use across websites. Similar to the outdated meta keywords tag, schema markup is often misused in attempts to manipulate search rankings. Neither search engine is expanding its schema support beyond the basic types and attributes they currently recognise. Instead, both search engines focus on extracting information directly from pages using advanced language analysis and HTML5 elements like tables, lists, and headings.

The future of SEO lies not in explicit semantics like schema markup, but in implicit semantics. This involves creating clear, on-page content that is consistently validated by multiple trusted sources.

10. Entity optimisation is foundational but complex

Entity optimisation goes far beyond simply adding schema markup to webpages or securing a Knowledge Panel for a person or corporation – it’s just the starting point. True entity optimisation requires building a confident and accurate understanding of the entity, which is crucial for search algorithms. This confidence is often overlooked but plays a vital role in helping search engines accurately identify every attribute of the entity and its relationships with other entities, such as people, corporations, products, services, webpages, books, topics, and cohorts.

To achieve this, you must create a detailed and accurate network of relationships and attributes for your entity. Maintaining this confidence involves ensuring that this network remains stable as your digital footprint evolves. Moreover, it’s essential to ensure that the representation of related entities aligns with their actual attributes and relationships, reinforcing the interconnectedness across the web.

11. Credibility is about N-E-E-A-T-T, not links

Google has become increasingly adept at identifying the creators of content and the companies that publish it. Consequently, it evaluates and applies credibility signals related to notability, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and transparency (N-E-E-A-T-T) across three distinct levels:

The content itself
The content creator
The content publisher

These factors now play a significant role in how content is ranked and presented in search results, moving beyond traditional link-building strategies.

12. You cannot ignore conversational assistive search

Users now depend on both traditional search engines and conversational assistive platforms. This shift means that SEO strategies must evolve to meet the conversational and multimodal nature of platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and new SERP features, such as AI Overviews and Bing’s generative search.

The future of search is conversational and multimodal. Bing’s Fabrice Canel highlights the “bridges” between platforms, allowing users to move seamlessly from one interface to another depending on the task. For example:

ChatGPT now integrates with Bing search.
Bing uses generative AI to answer follow-up questions.
AI Overviews dominate the top of Google’s search results.
Google’s new Learn About experiment pushes the boundaries of multimodal search.

This transition is happening right now, and it’s crucial to optimise for these platforms today, before it becomes more competitive.

13. Think beyond Google: Diversify your SEO strategy

Supply creates its own demand. Assistive chatbots have not replaced search engines; rather, they have expanded the ways in which information from the web is leveraged to solve user problems. As AI continues to reshape the landscape of search and assistive technologies, Google’s dominance is on the decline.

AI-powered features like Google’s AI Overviews and Bing’s generative search, as well as off-SERP platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta, Alexa, and Siri, are becoming essential for reaching your target audience. With billions of users across these platforms, ignoring them would be a missed opportunity.

This shift towards a conversational, multimodal, and multichannel experience requires that your content, corporate brand entities, and key subject matter experts be optimised for all major tech algorithms. Moreover, AI tools are being integrated more deeply into everyday applications, such as CoPilot+ PCs, Zapier, Canva, Gmail, and Excel, providing new opportunities for those with a diversified, beyond-Google SEO approach.

Critical SEO shifts you can’t ignore in 2025

Search has expanded far beyond the traditional Google SERPs, and this shift is now irreversible. While content-level SEO remains vital, it’s no longer enough on its own. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into everyday platforms and tools, Google’s once dominant position is gradually diminishing. Search is no longer confined to a single format or platform; it now spans multiple modalities and channels.

People are now engaging with search, research, and assistance across various mediums, including text, voice, images, and video, using a wide range of platforms. While the avenues for reaching potential customers have multiplied, it’s important to note that Google and Bing continue to control the web’s indexing, maintaining a certain level of simplicity in the process.

To effectively influence how search engines engage with your brand, it is crucial to maintain consistent and robust content online. However, relying solely on Google is a mistake. Bing, which powers ChatGPT and many of Microsoft’s platforms, also plays a pivotal role in the search ecosystem.

In order to thrive in this evolving landscape, it is essential to adopt a universal strategy that optimises your content, brand entities, and subject matter experts for all major search algorithms. This will not only ensure your survival but also position you for success, as these emerging technologies offer immense opportunities for visibility and customer acquisition across the entire marketing funnel.

In my next article, I will provide a practical 13-point roadmap for navigating the future of AI-driven search and assistive engines, offering actionable steps to help you adapt to SEO’s new reality and capitalise on the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.