The Verge published an incredible takedown of the SEO industry and I'm here for it.
Work in agency so can't share the specifics of client analytics, but I'd point to the explosion in search "hacks" in keyword traffic. The big one for years was appending "reddit" to product recommendation-based searches, less reliable now that SEOs have caught on and that doesn't consistently return reddit discussions, or those discussions are filled with SEO spam.
For clients that rely on affiliate marketing via reviews, actual monthly searches have dried up in conjunction with AI-spam sites rising to the top positions with 10,000 word nonsense reviews for any product you can think of.
This article plays like a comedy central roast of SEO in the best way possible. I'm not even mad about it: The people who ruined the internet
It gets even better: Danny Sullivan got very mad about this article and wrote a response where he comes off exactly as the reporter described: Thoughts on The Verge article about SEO
"As a person who militantly unsubscribes to any and all marketing emails, I suddenly felt claustrophobic, surrounded by people who annoy the rest of us for a living"
I really love how she brings it home at the end by calling out Danny Sullivan as a corporate shill.
The DISCOURSE is revealing. Danny Sullivan makes the biggest comms mistake you can make - responding defensively to criticism that's largely accurate.
How Google changed its relationship to SEO to make mainstream SEO (1) almost meaningless, and (2) to get SEOs to defend Google? How the fuck did that happen?