For the last few years, I have spent a lot of time talking and writing about a pretty simple idea: SEO is dead.
Not literally dead. People still search. Google still sends an enormous amount of traffic. What is dying is the world where Google Search is the unquestioned starting point for finding information on the Internet.
But after Alphabet’s latest earnings report, I think there is a much bigger question we need to start asking.
Is Google dying?
I don’t mean Google disappears tomorrow. History is filled with dominant companies that didn’t disappear. They simply stopped being dominant. And for the first time in a long time, I think that is a legitimate question to ask about Google.
The Quarter That Got Everyone’s Attention
Alphabet reported Q3 2026 revenue of $127.6 billion, against expectations of roughly $128.2 billion. The bigger problem was advertising: about $82 billion, missing expectations of roughly $83.4 billion.
Now, the nuance matters. Google Search is not collapsing. Search & Other revenue grew 12% year over year, and query growth was the highest in five years. But Search growth had been 17% just one quarter earlier. More importantly, Google itself attributed a larger-than-expected deceleration partly to increasing usage of AI Mode, where the company is still figuring out the advertising model.
That is the part everyone should be paying attention to. The machine isn’t broken. The machine is being disrupted by the thing Google knows it needs to become.
The LLMs Got Really Damn Good
LLM adoption is happening faster than most people anticipated, and the rate itself is accelerating. Why? Because the products got really damn good.
For most of the Internet era, Google’s proposition was:
Tell me what you want, and I’ll show you where to find it.
You typed into a box, got ten blue links, opened a few tabs, refined your search, and eventually found your answer. That was revolutionary.
LLMs changed the proposition:
Tell me what you want, and I’ll give you the answer.
That sounds subtle. It isn’t. I don’t want ten websites that might contain the answer. I want the answer. If I’m planning a family trip to Miami, I can ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or Grok and have the whole problem synthesized for me.
Google Isn’t Being Disrupted by Another Search Engine
For years, people wondered who would build the next Google. That was probably the wrong question. Technological monopolies rarely die because somebody builds a 10% better version of the incumbent product. They die because somebody changes the interface.
Search says:
Here are some places where your answer might exist.
AI says:
Here is your answer.
That is the problem.
Fewer Searches Mean Fewer Ad Clicks
Google built one of the greatest business models in history on a simple behavior. You have intent. You search. Google puts an ad next to that intent. You click. Google gets paid.
If I ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity instead, there is no Google Search ad click. And Google faces the same problem inside its own products. If someone moves from Search into AI Mode, Google has to monetize that interaction without destroying the experience that made the person use it.
That is why this quarter matters. Google isn’t just fighting OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and xAI. It is also fighting its own business model.
So What Does Google Do?
It spends an absolutely insane amount of money. Alphabet expects 2026 capital expenditures of roughly $195 billion to $205 billion, with spending set to increase significantly again in 2027. Its bet is straightforward: if people are going to move from Search toward AI, Google wants them moving to Gemini.
In other words: if Search is going to cannibalize Search, Google wants to be the cannibal.
The problem is that everyone else has money too.
Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI are some of the most heavily capitalized technology organizations on Earth. Google isn’t defending itself against three people in a garage. And I don’t believe six general-purpose AI platforms stay equally powerful forever. Massive technology markets tend to consolidate around a small number of leaders.
Does Google Become Coke, Pepsi...or IBM?
I think Google has a legitimate shot. It has great engineers, Gemini, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Workspace, its own TPUs and billions of users. And there is another side to the earnings report: Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.7 billion, and its backlog reached $561 billion. AI may be threatening one Google business while creating an enormous opportunity for another.
But so did a lot of dominant technology companies before the platform underneath them changed. When I worked at Microsoft, one of the great fears was becoming IBM. IBM remained a massive global technology company. But it stopped defining the future.
That is the real risk for Google. Not bankruptcy. Not disappearance. Irrelevance at the frontier.
SEO Is Dead. Is Google Next?
For years we have asked: What happens to SEO if Google Search becomes less important?
Maybe we should flip the question. What happens to Google if Google Search becomes less important?
This isn’t the death of Google. It isn’t even close. But it might be the beginning of the end of Google’s near-monopoly on how the world asks questions on the Internet.
If Google succeeds, Gemini becomes one of the dominant interfaces of the next generation of computing. If it doesn’t, Google probably doesn’t disappear. It becomes IBM: a huge, respected, profitable technology company that everyone remembers once controlled the future.
So yes, SEO may be dead. The much more interesting question now is whether the LLMs just turned Alphabet into Alphabet soup.