{
 "id": 76063,
 "slug": "thousands-of-cross-links-brought-2-5-to-5-percent-of-visits-why-i-think-seo-is-dead",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/thousands-of-cross-links-brought-2-5-to-5-percent-of-visits-why-i-think-seo-is-dead/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "Thousands of cross-links brought 2.5 to 5 percent of visits: why I think SEO is dead",
 "subtitle": "When did you last use Google?",
 "summary": "In April 2026 I generated new landing pages and thousands of cross-links on willem.com and two customer sites through my platform's API. Two weeks later I looked at the numbers and wrote: I think SEO is dead.",
 "topics": [
  "AI",
  "data",
  "experiment",
  "web",
  "webdesign",
  "work"
 ],
 "date": "2026-04-19",
 "published": "2026-04-19T00:00:00+02:00",
 "created": "2026-09-08T11:20:02.811000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-09-08T11:48:55.705000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2026-04-19_seo-is-dead/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "Is SEO still worth it now that people ask AI instead of searching Google?",
 "text": "On four thousand views a month, the new pages brought one hundred to two hundred, for thousands of extra links. Search Console showed 1.55K impressions in three months with a click rate of 2.9 percent. Google saw the pages, people did not come.\nThe honest question is how often you still search yourself, and click on a result. I had to think about it. The volume moves to the answer box and the chat window, where a page is at best a source in a footnote.\nWhat survives is what a model cannot do for you: forms and data processing, reserving, registering and buying, and data with a physical source such as a moving train or a marathon runner. Optimising for an agentic web is not a few extra tags, it is a second edition of your site for software that reads.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/thousands-of-cross-links-brought-2-5-to-5-percent-of-visits-why-i-think-seo-is-dead/snippet.md"
}