Did AI kill SEO for small publishers?

For a small publisher whose traffic came from ranking, yes — and the operator it happened to can name the page. Neville Medhora ranked number one for "what is copywriting," built a course business on that kind of traffic, and watched it decline. His words: "SEO was just murdered for the small person by AI."

What changed

"We had all these courses about SEO and how to rank your small blog posts… Now people just look at the top AI result on Gemini, or they go to ChatGPT and ask the same thing. And you get it exactly customized to your preferences rather than looking up some blog post with a ton of ads on it. And so that whole industry just went out the door almost for small people."

His own page: "We had a blog post called What is Copywriting? And I showed up as number one. And now when you type in what is copywriting, there's a nice little summary right at the top."

The part that compounds

The answer does not just replace the article. It replaces the reason to learn the thing the article taught.

"It knows that you're trying to start an accounting business. Copywriting can be applied like this. And then it could actually make all the writing for your website. It could actually make you the website. So the need to learn the skill of copywriting was reduced for a lot of people."

The business consequence, stated plainly: "Copywriting Course started to drop in sales. It was just very hard to get people to sign up for the same value proposition." Though not to zero — "It still makes money and we still get people coming in for strategy and things like that. But it's not as easy as it once was."

The reader behaviour behind it

Artificial Reality's host described doing exactly this: still searching on Google, reading only the summary, not clicking through to the cited pages. Medhora's response is the honest version of what every publisher is up against:

"I'm not against the blue links, but I got what I needed from the AI result. So what are we doing? Why do I need to go further? I don't need to."

What still works

1. Content the summary cannot reproduce. An answer engine can summarise what copywriting is. It cannot summarise what a named operator paid, what broke, and what it cost — because nobody else has it.
2. Being the source that gets cited rather than the page that gets clicked. Different metric, different game, and the traffic is smaller but far better qualified.
3. Selling the judgment, not the information. Medhora's course sales fell; his strategy work did not. Same with Swipe File, where customers buy his taste in ads, not the archive.
4. Owning a category nobody can generate. His answer was to grow the business built on his own judgment while the one built on rankings shrank.

AI tools named in this report

Tools named by the operator on the record. Inclusion is reporting, not endorsement.

Where this comes from

S2E1: AI should have killed his career. He's making $1M a year instead — the full interview with Neville Medhora. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.