Why do people say SEO is no longer relevant?

People say SEO is no longer relevant mainly because AI Overviews and chat tools now answer many questions directly on the search results page, without a click ever happening to the source site.

This is a real shift, but the content those AI answers draw from still comes from indexed, ranked web pages built using SEO fundamentals, meaning the discipline moved rather than disappeared.

The claim tends to come from businesses that saw a specific traffic drop and generalized it into SEO being over entirely, when the more accurate read is that the rules for winning attention shifted.

An SEO automation platform adjusts to that shift by writing content built to be cited, not just ranked.