We are witnessing the end of the search era when it comes to web technology. The term, coined last year by The Verge’s Nilay Patel was provocatively called Google Zero.It refers to the moment when Google’s SEO is no longer sending the majority — or any — of its traffic offsite, thanks to the AI overviews that now take up the above-the-fold space on search results. As one analyst put it, “years of SEO strategy are now colliding with a system that for many publishers’ traffic is slowing — and in some cases is falling off entirely.”

Some of this is a good thing: the SEO snake oilers will have to reconstitute their potions and come up with new formulations. But it is also a bad thing, because while Google tweaks their search algorithms nearly continually, this is a big jump, and search ads are shifting quickly into AI-powered search. What this means for organic search traffic is doom, as it has already dropped significantly.

As someone who has seen web publishing from its earliest days, back before we even knew that it was a Thing, it is fascinating to watch. But it is also depressing to be working in this Brave New AI World. I was part of the early PC revolution when dead trees were turned into piles of trade magazines that reached dizzying heights. These piles were delivered the old-fashioned way of the US Postal Service to IT workers’ desks every Monday morning. Those were fun times, because contained in that stack of paper were the embodiment of millions of dollars of ads.

That era lasted about 15 years, until the web became a better delivery mechanism, and within a few moments, we went from a huge stack of paper to electrons that could target the digital cookies placed on your hard drive. The magazines went from each employing dozens or hundreds of people to having a single editor and perhaps another person to clean up the digital mess that was unintentionally published. We had companies such as TechTarget that literally had “search” in every one of their 57 (or was it 157?) of their domain names that built a lead-gen empire.

Now TechTarget is just another bauble in the Informa collection of washed-up mags that is quickly moving to an AI underpinning. Do I sound bitter? I guess.

“Nobody is bragging about their custom CMS with a name from Norse mythology. And now they will need a new investment cycle focused on understanding and applying audience data with fewer means,” says Brian Morrissey. I had to look up the Viking reference, and what I got was of course generated from AI. But I did click on the link just to show that I appreciated a little bit of SEO there. Call me old-fashioned.