Is SEO dead? No.

Every few years, someone declares that SEO is dead. Social media was supposed to kill it, then voice search, and now it is AI’s turn. My answer is short: no.

Most of my clients still get their calls from prospects who found them on Google. Some prospects now also find them through AI assistants such as ChatGPT. Those assistants do not invent the businesses they recommend: they read the web, often through the kind of search index that Google and Bing build. If search engines cannot find your site, there is a good chance the assistants cannot either. So you had better be out there.

What has changed is the effort. Making a website search-friendly is far easier and more automated than it used to be, so you may need a specialist less often than a few years ago. But SEO still works. Below is why, then the checklist I give beginners who want their website to become a very eligible bachelor for page one.

Is SEO dead? Why the answer is still no

Google is still where people look. In the UK, Google handled about 91% of searches in June 2026 and Bing about 6%, according to Statcounter. Someone who needs an electrician tonight or an accountant this month still types it into a search bar.

AI answers are built on search. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode only show pages that Google can crawl and index, and Google’s guide to its generative AI features, published in May 2026, says in substance that optimising for them is still SEO. Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing. To be quoted, your pages first have to be found and understood.

There are fewer clicks, but the right ones still come. Pew Research found that in the United States, people clicked a result in 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, against 15% when it did not (Pew, July 2025). That hurts sites that live on traffic for its own sake. A small business lives on calls and quote requests, and the people who want to hire someone still click, compare and pick up the phone.

That is what I see with my clients: the calls keep coming, most of them from people who found the business on Google, and some from people an AI assistant pointed to it. If you want to know what changes for the assistants, my comparison of GEO and SEO goes through it.

What has changed: SEO got easier

Ten years ago, a small business website needed someone to fix the technical side by hand. Today most of it comes built in:

• Website builders such as Squarespace or Wix give you HTTPS, a mobile layout, a sitemap, clean addresses and a field for each page’s title and description.
• Google says its AI features need no special tricks: no special file, no special markup. Good pages, well organised, are the job.
• AI tools can draft a meta description or list the questions your clients ask, as long as you check and correct what they write.

So yes, many owners can now do the basics without an agency, and that is good news. What still needs a human is the part no tool decides for you: which searches you want to win, what each page says, why a stranger should trust you, and the patience to let it work.

The beginner’s checklist: make your site page-one material

Take these steps in order. Most of them take an afternoon, and none needs a paid tool.

1. Make sure search engines can see your site

Check that the site is public: on Squarespace, the Site availability setting must be on Public; on WordPress, the box that discourages search engines must be unticked. Then add your site to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap, as shown in my Search Console tutorial. Add it to Bing Webmaster Tools too: Bing feeds Microsoft Copilot, and its AI Performance report shows when Copilot cites your pages.

2. Find the words your customers type

Your clients do not search for “bespoke climate solutions”. They search for “air conditioning installer Leeds” or “emergency plumber near me”. Type your service into Google and note the suggestions and the “People also ask” questions. My guide to keyword research for a small business shows how to check them with free tools.

3. Give each service its own page

One page, one service, one main search. A page that tries to rank for everything ranks for nothing. I saw it with one client: of the sites I built for them, one did not work at all because it offered too many different services, while the one that ranked sells something very specific. If you serve several towns, a page per town only makes sense when each one says something genuinely useful about that area.

4. Write the two lines people see in Google

Each page needs a title tag of around 50 to 60 characters, with the main search near the start, and a meta description that makes people want to click. Add one clear heading at the top of the page and a short, readable address such as /emergency-plumber-leeds. My on-page SEO checklist covers each element.

5. Answer the questions your clients ask

On a first call, people ask me the same things: do you have experience, what will SEO bring me, how long does it take to rank. Your clients have their own list. Put the answers on your pages, starting with the answer itself: your prices or price ranges, the areas you cover, how long a job takes, how it works. Short, direct answers are what Google shows in its snippets and what AI assistants quote.

6. Complete your Google Business Profile

If you serve customers in a local area, your Business Profile is where many calls start. Choose the right main category, add your service area, your hours and real photos, then ask happy clients for reviews. My Google Business Profile tutorial walks you through it.

7. Make it fast and easy on a phone

Many of your visitors will arrive on a phone. Test your main pages with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights, compress your photos before you upload them, and skip the heavy sliders and pop-ups. A page that loads slowly loses people before they read a word.

8. Show that you are real

Real photos of your work, client projects, reviews, a phone number, an address and your company details all tell Google, the assistants and your visitors that a real business stands behind the site. A stranger hires the business that looks the most serious.

9. Get mentioned elsewhere

Links and mentions on other trusted sites still count: the directories of your trade, your suppliers and partners, a local paper. You do not need followers to get press coverage, just something interesting to bring to the table. These mentions are also how assistants learn that your business exists.

10. Let the AI assistants in

Check that your site does not block the crawlers that feed AI search. Blocking OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot, for example, keeps your pages out of ChatGPT search answers. Cloudflare blocks known AI crawlers by default on domains added to it since 1 July 2025 (it asks at set-up), so check that setting if your site uses Cloudflare. You can refuse the bots that train AI models and still allow the ones that search: my robots.txt guide shows how.

11. Measure what matters

In Search Console, watch which searches show your pages and which pages get clicks. Then do the simplest thing of all: ask every new client how they found you. “On Google” and “ChatGPT suggested you” are the answers that tell you it works.

12. Give it time

Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO talks of four months to a year to put improvements in place and see the benefit (Do you need an SEO?). A page can rank much faster: one of my clients’ sites reached a top ranking for one of its searches within a day or two of going live, which is rare. Plan for months anyway, as I explain in how long SEO takes.

Or hand it over

You can still hire someone to do it for you, though. It makes sense when you do not have the afternoons, when your competitors already rank well, or when the site itself needs rebuilding. When I take on a client’s SEO, I work on it for one to three months, then we look at the results together and decide what comes next. If that is a better use of your time, my SEO service is there for it. And if you want the full method first, start with my complete guide to small business SEO.