---
title: "Thousands of cross-links brought 2.5 to 5 percent of visits: why I think SEO is dead"
language: en
topics: ["AI", "data", "experiment", "web", "webdesign", "work"]
full_article_url: https://willem.com/en/2026-04-19_seo-is-dead/
---
# Thousands of cross-links brought 2.5 to 5 percent of visits: why I think SEO is dead

*When did you last use Google?*

> 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.

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.
The 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.
What 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.