Is SEO Dead? The Truth About AI Search, AEO, and Google in 2026 | Jono Alderson

90% of e-commerce websites are beautifully designed, incredibly expensive, and completely invisible to Google and AI search bots.

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For the last two decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was about stuffing keywords and building links to rank on Google. Today, artificial intelligence has completely rewritten the rules.

In this episode of Marketing Misfits, hosts Norm Farrar and Kevin King sit down with technical SEO mastermind Jono Alderson (former head of SEO for Yoast). Jono breaks down the brutal reality of what Google and AI engines (like ChatGPT and Claude) actually look for in a website today.

Discover why 90% of business websites are technically broken, why your "483 cookie-cutter blog posts" are destroying your rankings, and why Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means AI is no longer just crawling your site, it's judging your brand's entire reputation across the web.

📌 Main Topics Covered In This Episode

The Evolution of Search: From the keyword-stuffing days of the 90s (Lycos, AltaVista) to the modern era of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

Why 90% of Websites Are Broken: Why building websites using heavy JavaScript applications and 30MB images is destroying your PageSpeed and costing you sales.

The Death of the SEO "Tactic": Why cookie-cutter blog posts and guest-blogging link schemes no longer work, and why true SEO now looks exactly like good marketing strategy.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): How ChatGPT, Google, and LLMs synthesize the internet, and why what people say about you on TikTok or Reddit now dictates your AI ranking.

Schema Markup & Structured Data: Do you need two versions of your website (one for humans, one for AI)? Jono breaks down how schema text communicates with AI bots.

The Future of Publishers: Why recipe blogs and informational sites are losing all their traffic to AI overviews, and how businesses must pivot to hyper-niching and owned email lists to survive.

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