Is SEO a waste of money? Short answer, absolutely not. SEO only becomes a waste of money when the people doing it are the wrong fit. That can mean an agency, freelancer, or internal hire who does not understand what drives rankings, does not know where to look when performance stalls, or leans on popular tactics that get repeated across the industry but do not produce measurable results. Paying for activity without outcomes is what wastes money, not SEO itself.
SEO remains the foundation for being found in traditional search engines like Google and Bing, and it increasingly influences visibility inside AI answers from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. These systems, in their current form, still depend heavily on search results and web sources rather than maintaining a complete independent index of the internet. That makes strong SEO a direct advantage across both classic search and AI discovery.
SEO is not dying. It is becoming more important than ever. The only real waste is investing in SEOs who cannot prove results.