Everyone that said "SEO is dead" owes you money

_{Day 238/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

Let's talk about the dumbest take of 2025.

"SEO is dead." "Google's over." "Just optimize for ChatGPT now."

I saw this from Semrush and honestly, I feel pretty justified in my various rants over the last couple months.

Here's the overlap between what ranks in Google and what LLMs cite:

Perplexity: 91.44% domain overlap with Google's top 10 Google AI Overviews: 85.79% ChatGPT: 44.65%

You know what that means?

The sites ranking in Perplexity and AI Overviews are the exact same sites ranking in Google.

It's not a different game. It's not a new playbook. It's the same players winning everywhere.

Even ChatGPT - the "lowest" at 44.65% - is pulling from nearly half of Google's top rankers.

Here's what nobody's saying:

LLMs don't have opinions.

They have training data.

And that training data? Scraped from the sites that already dominate Google.

So when you abandon "traditional SEO" to chase "AI optimization," you're actually just:

• Writing worse content

• For a smaller audience

• That doesn't exist yet

• While ignoring the 8 billion people who still type things into search bars

It's like burning your customer list to chase followers on a platform that's still in beta.

Except dumber.

Because the beta platform is literally trained on the content your competitors are already ranking for.

Let's do some math:

If you rank top 10 in Google, you have a:

• 91% chance of being cited by Perplexity

• 86% chance of showing up in AI Overviews

• 45% chance ChatGPT mentions you

If you don't rank in Google?

Your odds of showing up anywhere else are basically zero.

So all those "pivot to AI search" gurus?

They're not teaching you a new strategy.

They're teaching you how to lose in multiple places simultaneously.

What actually works:

The same stuff that's always worked.

Just do it better.

1. Answer the actual question Not the SEO version. Not the LinkedIn humble-brag version. The real human question.

2. Get links from sites that matter LLMs cite authoritative sources. Google ranks them. Your competitors fear them.

3. Keep your content alive Fresh signals matter to crawlers, training sets, and readers who aren't idiots.

4. Write like a human who respects humans Because you are one. And so is everyone reading this.

The fundamentals aren't dead.

The fundamentals are everywhere now.

Every piece of good SEO you do works in:

• Google (obviously)

• Perplexity (91% overlap)

• AI Overviews (86% overlap)

• ChatGPT (45% overlap)

• Whatever launches next quarter

• Whatever trains on the internet in 2027

Because they all reward the same thing: actually being useful.

Stop trying to "optimize for AI."

Start doing SEO so good that AI gets trained on your content.

There's no shortcut. There's no secret AI prompt. There's no "new algorithm to crack."

There's just:

• Rank in Google

• Show up everywhere else

• Win

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "The blog post is dead, long live the blog post" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. The actual funniest part of that Semrush data? ChatGPT has the lowest overlap at 44.65%, and people are still pivoting their entire content strategy around it. Meanwhile Perplexity is at 91% and nobody's talking about it. Why? Because Perplexity users actually know what they're looking for. They're not asking AI to write their grocery list. They're asking technical questions. And they want sources. From sites that rank. In Google. It's almost like... good content wins everywhere. Wild concept.

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