It started like one of those “bold innovation” stories CEOs love to tell. A company decided to drop its entire SEO team after the boss became convinced that AI search would soon replace traditional SEO.
Two months later, the site’s traffic had collapsed by almost 70%, even though nearly all of its visits still came from Google.
The story first surfaced when a frustrated ex-employee shared their experience on social media, describing the chaos that followed after they were let go and the CEO took charge of the website strategy.
The post was later detailed in a PPC Land report that’s now making waves across marketing circles.
The new “AI-driven” approach turned out to be less intelligent than it sounded.
In the Reddit discussion that followed, users pointed out that the company’s management changed dozens of high-ranking URLs without adding 301 redirects, essentially erasing the site’s search history overnight.
Search engines treated them like brand-new pages, stripping away the years of authority they’d built.
Within weeks, impressions fell off a cliff, and Google’s Search Console became a graveyard of zeroes, according to the same PPC Land account.
The CEO, meanwhile, doubled down on the idea that AI would “replace the need for traditional SEO” and started experimenting with generative answers from tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.
It’s a gamble many brands are starting to take, believing that AI-generated summaries in search results will soon replace organic listings.
Yet most experts caution that even as search changes, the fundamentals—good structure, links, and relevance—still drive visibility.
A recent analysis from Search Engine Land found that nearly 90% of marketers believe ignoring core SEO signals while chasing AI hype could devastate long-term rankings.
This isn’t an isolated misstep either. Other agencies have seen clients experiment with “AI-first SEO” only to circle back when Google’s latest updates reminded them that AI search still relies on structured, optimised data.
Even Microsoft’s Bing Copilot draws from indexed content, not unranked chaos. So if you torch your technical SEO, you’re just removing your site from the map that these systems still depend on.
What’s tragic about this story isn’t just the lost traffic—it’s the misunderstanding of what AI can and can’t do.
Tools can enhance discovery, personalise results, even write content drafts. But they can’t rebuild the foundations of visibility that SEO has shaped for decades.
And as analysts at WebProNews recently argued, the future of SEO isn’t about abandoning it for AI—it’s about merging them, using AI for smarter insights while preserving the discipline that keeps content findable.
In my opinion, what happened here isn’t really a failure of AI—it’s a failure of patience. AI is a tool, not a replacement for understanding how people find things online.
If you treat it like a magic wand, it’ll burn you faster than bad backlinks ever did.
And maybe, somewhere in that 70% traffic drop, there’s a quiet lesson every marketer needs to relearn: innovation only works if you keep one hand on the fundamentals.