Is SEO Dead in 2025? An SEO Agency Weighs in

By Bruce Klaic (MBA)   Thursday, March 6, 2025

Introduction – the annual obituary that never sticks

Every year, someone declares that “SEO is dead.” Yet Australian businesses will spend about A$1.5 billion on SEO services in 2025—12 per cent more than last year searchscope.com.au. For agencies like One Orange Cow, demand has never been higher. So why does the rumour persist? Because what stopped working in 2015 finally is dead, and too many agencies are still selling it. The question isn’t whether SEO works; it’s whether your agency has moved on from shortcuts to what drives visibility in 2025.

1. Why agencies keep hearing “SEO is dead” (and why it isn’t)

• Old tactics collapsed. Cheap directory links, spun articles, and random guest posts no longer move the needle.
• Search looks unrecognisable. Core updates now land quarterly, de-indexing thin sites overnight.
• Client expectations matured. Boards ask about revenue and share of voice, not “page-one vanity keywords.”

Put bluntly, “SEO is dead” really means, “lazy SEO is dead.” Alongside PPC and earned social, search is still Australia’s single most-requested digital channel according to agency benchmarking surveys and StatCounter market-share data searchscope.com.au. But the work looks different.

2. From Google-only to AI-everywhere

Five years ago you could live and die by Google rankings. Today:

Search behaviour has fragmented. Almost 60 per cent of all Google searches end without a click, because the answer is now on the search page itself. Meanwhile, Google’s AI Overviews are visible to 1.5 billion people every month and 38 million ChatGPT + Gemini searches originate from Australia alone. Younger audiences are splitting further: a 2024 SOCi study found 62 per cent of Gen Z use TikTok as a search engine—eclipsing Google. If your brand isn’t mentioned inside these answers, you simply don’t exist for that cohort.

3. The three layers of visibility in 2025

We now optimise for three stacked layers:

Most agencies stop at layer 1. One Orange Cow insists on all three. If you want ChatGPT or Perplexity to trust you, you must feed them machine-ready content and confirm your identity everywhere they look.

4. What the numbers say

• Zero-click reality: 59.7 % of EU and 58.5 % of US Google searches finish without a click.
• AI surfacing: Google’s AI Overview footprint is already 1.5 billion monthly impressions and climbing.
• Australian AI adoption: Australia logs 38 million ChatGPT / Gemini queries, equating to 1.42 AI searches per capita.
• Platform shift among youth: 62 % of 18-to-24-year-olds search on TikTok; Instagram sits at 67 %, with Google down to 61 % for that segment.
• Budget follows eyeballs: Australian businesses will pour A$1.5 billion into SEO in 2025, while total digital-marketing outlay hits A$13 billion

Old SEO aimed for blue‐link clicks; new SEO aims to be the answer wherever the question is asked.

5. Why we built Signal Herd

Signal Herd is One Orange Cow’s response to the fragmentation of search. It’s not a re-packaged “SEO retainer”; it’s an AI visibility system that:

1. Locks the entity. We eliminate NAP inconsistencies, duplicate-brand profiles, and rogue social handles, so AI tools map all signals back to one source of truth.
2. Speaks machine. Advanced product, organisation, review, and author schema are injected site-wide, giving LLMs the context they crave.
3. Seeds citations. We place factual snippets in industry forums, niche directories, and partner sites—assets AI models sample heavily.
4. Monitors mentions. A live dashboard tracks appearances in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, and TikTok search captions.
5. Closes feedback loops fast. When mention volume stalls, we deploy new answers, update snippets, or refine schema within 48 hours.

The result? Our self-storage client in Moss Vale now outranks a nationwide incumbent inside ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini—three separate AI engines agreeing who’s #1.

6. What it now takes to lead the SERP and the answer box

a) Entity optimisation over keywords

Google and OpenAI resolve entities first, phrases second. Audit your Knowledge Panel, ABN records, LinkedIn, Facebook and directory entries for perfect parity.

b) Structured content beats scattered content

Use How-To, FAQ, Product, and Author schema. Embed 60-word answer blocks with H-tags so LLMs can lift them cleanly.

c) Consensus signals over content volume

Stop dumping low-quality blogs. Instead, secure a handful of high-authority third-party references that repeat your wording—prompting AI models to treat it as consensus truth.

d) Answer velocity matters

Refresh evergreen pages every 90 days. The Gemini crawler indexes freshness; OpenAI’s GPTBot also re-crawls faster-changing pages first.

e) Measurement has to evolve

Track “mentions per 100 AI answers” and “snippet inclusion rate” alongside classic KPIs like organic sessions. Signal Herd reports these weekly.

7. Australia’s ROI case for modern SEO

• E-commerce leads the spend, claiming 35 % of total SEO budgets.
• Local intent still dominates: 46 % of all Google searches have local intent, and 78 % of mobile local searches convert offline within 24 hours.
• Voice and AI queries grow: 57 % of Australians already use voice search, and generative AI could contribute A$115 billion to the economy by 2030.

Businesses that double-down on entity-driven, answer-friendly content capture compound visibility: they appear in AI answers and receive the residual clicks still flowing through classic SERPs. That is a moat your competitors cannot easily copy.

8. Final verdict – SEO didn’t die, it graduated

Search optimisation in 2025 is no longer a one-dimension race for ten blue links. It’s a multi-surface discipline covering Google, AI chatbots, and social discovery. The mechanics have changed, but the objective is timeless: be the brand people find first and trust most.

One Orange Cow is engineering that future through Signal Herd. If your current agency can’t explain how they’ll secure your brand’s place inside AI answers, they’re playing yesterday’s game.

Ready to rank smarter?

Book your free AI Visibility Audit at SignalHerd.com.

We’ll show you how often AI already mentions your brand—and map the fastest path to multiplying that number in the next 30 days.