Is SEO still worth it in 2026?

Short answer

For businesses whose customers search with intent to hire, book or buy, yes, clearly. For businesses that relied on easy informational traffic, the return has fallen and will probably keep falling. SEO is not dead. The cheap version of it is. Whether it is worth it for you depends on which kind of search your customers do.

“Is SEO dead now with AI?” is one of the most common questions Google shows alongside almost every SEO search I looked at for this page. It is a fair thing to ask. The answer is more useful if you split SEO into the kinds of search it serves, because they are being affected very differently.

What has changed

Fewer searches end in a click. SparkToro’s analysis of US Google searches found 68.01% ended without a click between January and April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, with AI Overviews on more than a fifth of searches. For quick factual questions, the answer is now often on the results page.

What has not changed is how Google decides what to show. Its guidance on generative AI search says its AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that optimising for them is still SEO. The pages that get cited in AI answers are, broadly, the pages that rank.

Where SEO still clearly pays

Local services. Someone searching for a roofer, a dentist or a lawyer still has to call one. The map pack and the Business Profile are still where that choice happens.
Ecommerce. Product and category searches still lead to stores, because the buyer has to buy somewhere.
High-value services. Legal, medical, financial and B2B buyers research before committing, and they want to see who they are dealing with.
Brands with something first-hand to say. Original data, real experience, judgement that cannot be summarised from other sources.

For most of the businesses I work with, local services and stores, the changes in search have so far mattered less than the basics they were already getting wrong.

Where the return has fallen

Sites built on answering simple questions at scale: definitions, conversions, quick how-tos, generic listicles. Those are the searches AI answers absorb most easily. If that was your model, SEO is still worth something, but much less than it was, and the content needs to be harder to replace.

How to decide for your business

Look at your own search traffic in Search Console. Split it into queries where someone wants to buy, hire or book, and queries where they want to know something. If most of your valuable visitors come from the first group, SEO is likely as valuable as it was, and possibly more, because competitors are pulling back.

Then do the arithmetic. What is a new customer worth over time? How many would SEO need to bring in each month to cover its cost? For a clinic, a law firm or a roofer, that number is often one or two.

And compare the alternatives. Paid search in competitive industries is expensive: WordStream’s benchmarks across 13,474 US campaigns put the median legal cost per click at $9.87 and cost per lead at $131.63. SEO compounds; ads stop the moment the budget does.

What good SEO looks like now

Less volume, more substance. Fewer pages, each one genuinely useful and clearly written by someone who knows the subject. A Business Profile that is complete and current, if you are local. Internal links that point your existing strength at the pages that earn money. Links from places your customers actually read. And measurement based on enquiries and sales, not on rankings for their own sake.

What to stop doing

Publishing generic articles to target every keyword variation. Google’s own guidance treats that pattern as scaled content abuse. Buying link packages. Paying for “AI visibility” tricks such as llms.txt files, which Google says its search ignores. The work that still pays is the work that was always worth doing.

A realistic timeline

SEO has always been slow, and that has not changed. For a local business fixing its Business Profile and service pages, early movement can show in weeks and the full effect over several months. For a site building authority in a competitive market, think in quarters and years. If you need customers this month, use ads for this month and start SEO alongside them, so that the expensive clicks gradually matter less.

The businesses that did best from SEO over the last few years were rarely the ones that spent the most. They were the ones that started early, kept going through the slow months, and spent on the few things that mattered. That has not changed with AI either. If anything, the gap between that approach and the volume approach has widened, because the volume approach is exactly what AI answers replace.

So the honest answer for 2026: worth it for most businesses that sell to people actively looking for them, less worth it for anyone who relied on volume, and never worth it done badly.

If you are deciding whether to keep investing in SEO, my SEO consulting starts with your own data: which searches bring customers, what they are worth, and whether SEO is the right spend this year. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you.