Listen instead
“Is SEO dead?” gets asked every year, and the honest answer is no. People still search. They still click through to websites. Businesses still get found.
But a specific set of tactics is dead, and that’s the part nobody announces. Google removes a feature with a one-line note in developer documentation. The tactic keeps getting sold for another two years, because the blog posts recommending it never got updated and the agencies quoting those blog posts never re-checked.
Here are six, each with a date and a source. Where we got one wrong ourselves, we say so.
A tactic works. Everyone adopts it. Enough people abuse it that the signal turns to noise. The platform removes the payoff quietly. The advice circulates for years afterward. Recognizing this shape is more useful than memorizing any single item below.
1. FAQ Schema for Rich Results — Dead May 7, 2026
What people still say: “Add FAQ schema and you’ll get that expandable question-and-answer dropdown under your search listing, taking up more space and pushing competitors down.”
What actually happened: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026 — for every site, not just small ones. In June the FAQ report disappeared from Search Console; the API data followed in August. The dropdown is gone.
What’s still true: FAQPage is still valid Schema.org markup and still helps machines parse your questions and answers cleanly, which matters for AI systems. Keeping existing markup costs nothing. Just don’t pay anyone who pitches it as a way to own more of the results page.
2. HowTo Schema — Dead Since 2023 (And Seven More in 2025)
What people still say: “Mark up your instructions with HowTo schema for step-by-step rich results.”
What actually happened: Google removed HowTo rich results from mobile in August 2023 and desktop in September 2023. Then in June 2025 it retired seven more structured data types at once — Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing — on the reasoning that they weren’t widely used and no longer added user value.
What’s still true: Entity schema was never deprecated and still does real work. LocalBusiness, Organization, Service, Product, Review, Event — these tell search engines and AI systems what your business actually is instead of making them infer it. That’s where schema effort belongs now. Our schema markup guide covers the types that still earn their keep.
3. “Raise Your Domain Authority” — Never Was a Google Thing
What people still say: “Your Domain Authority is 22, we’ll get it to 40 and your rankings will follow.”
What’s actually true: Domain Authority is a Moz metric. Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric. Both are third-party estimates invented by SEO tool companies to approximate link strength. Google has said plainly that it does not use Domain Authority in crawling, indexing, or ranking — it isn’t a number Google computes or grades you against.
This one is subtler than a deprecation, because DA and DR are genuinely useful — as rough comparison tools between sites, and for spotting whether a link is worth pursuing. The problem is selling a number a client can watch go up as though it were the goal. It’s a proxy, and a proxy sold as an outcome is how retainers get renewed without anything real happening.
What to ask for instead: rankings for terms your actual customers search, calls and form fills, and the pages driving them.
4. “Hit 1–2% Keyword Density” — Never Google Guidance
What people still say: “Use your target keyword 1–2% of the time. Any less and Google won’t know what the page is about; any more and you’ll be penalized.”
What’s actually true: Google has never published a recommended keyword density. The 1–2% figure is practitioner convention that hardened into folklore through repetition. Modern search systems evaluate relevance, context, and whether the page answers the question — not how many times a phrase appears.
Writing to hit a percentage actively hurts you, because it produces the stilted phrasing everyone recognizes: “Looking for a Richmond VA chiropractor? Our Richmond VA chiropractor team provides Richmond VA chiropractor services.” A human bounces. An AI system, which is assessing whether your content reads like something worth citing, skips you.
What to do instead: answer the question the page exists to answer, in the words a customer would use. See What Is SEO, Really? for the longer version.
5. llms.txt for AI Visibility — We Recommended This. The Data Says We Were Wrong.
What we said, in April 2026: on our own post about being invisible to ChatGPT, we suggested adding an llms.txt file — a plain text roadmap at your site root telling AI crawlers what your site contains. We noted it wasn’t yet a universal standard but said adoption was growing fast and it took about 30 minutes.
What the data showed after that: in May 2026, Ahrefs analyzed 137,210 domains and found that 97% of valid llms.txt files received zero requests over a month. Nothing was reading them. When they tested whether having the file predicted how often a site got cited by AI, it didn’t — and removing it from their model made the model more accurate, meaning the file was contributing noise rather than signal.
On top of that, no major AI company — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, or Mistral — has committed to reading it in production. Google’s John Mueller said it’s “not done for search” and compared it to the long-discredited meta keywords tag.
What’s still true: llms.txt genuinely helps coding agents and agentic browsers parse developer documentation — that’s a real job, just a different one than getting a local business cited by ChatGPT. If you already have the file, leave it; it’s harmless and costs nothing to keep. We haven’t removed ours or our clients’. But we no longer count it as AI-visibility work, and we won’t put it in an audit as though it moves the needle.
Our April advice was hedged and defensible when we wrote it. The disconfirming study landed a month later. That’s the whole point of this post: the tactic didn’t change, the evidence did — and if we won’t correct our own published advice, there’s no reason to trust the rest of it.
6. “Rank #1 and the Traffic Follows” — True for Twenty Years, Not Anymore
What people still say: “Get to position one and you capture the clicks.”
What changed: Google now frequently answers the question before anyone reaches a link. Estimates of how often AI Overviews appear vary widely by measurement method — anywhere from roughly 20% to over 50% of searches depending on the query set — but every independent tracker shows the same direction. Similarweb’s 2026 report put it at 43% of tracked searches, up from about 15% a year earlier. Where an AI Overview appears, organic click-through drops sharply.
Position one still matters. It just no longer guarantees the visit, because the answer may be delivered above you, assembled partly from your own page.
What replaced it: being the source that gets cited inside the answer, not just the link beneath it. That’s the whole discipline of answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, and it’s a different job than classic ranking work.
How to Spot Stale SEO Advice Before You Pay for It
You don’t need to track deprecations yourself. Three questions catch most of it:
1. Does it cite a primary source? Google’s own documentation or announcement — not another agency’s blog post citing another agency’s blog post. Most stale advice traces back to a chain of blogs with no original source at the bottom.
2. Is there a date on it? Undated advice about a search feature is a warning sign by itself. Features get removed; the pages recommending them rarely get revisited.
3. Does it promise a specific search feature? This is the most perishable category of all. “You’ll get the dropdown / the carousel / the badge” is exactly the kind of promise that quietly stops being true.
And a fair question to ask anyone selling you SEO: what advice have you changed your mind about in the last year? Someone doing this work honestly will have an answer. Someone reciting a 2019 checklist won’t.
SEO isn’t dead. Specific tactics are. The reliable move is to stop chasing features and start being genuinely, structurally useful — that’s what has survived every one of these changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SEO dead in 2026?
Does FAQ schema still work?
Is Domain Authority a Google ranking factor?
What is the ideal keyword density for SEO?
Does an llms.txt file help you show up in AI search?
How can I tell if SEO advice is out of date?
// FURTHER READING
- Google Drops FAQ Rich Results From Search — Search Engine Journal — The reporting on the May 2026 deprecation, including the phased rollout dates.
- We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read — Ahrefs — The study that changed our own recommendation. Worth reading in full for the methodology.
- Google Confirms llms.txt Has No Current Implementation — Search Engine Journal — John Mueller’s comments, including the meta-keywords comparison.
Every claim on this page was verified against a primary or reported source on August 3, 2026. Search platforms change quietly — if you’re reading this well after that date, re-check anything you plan to act on.
Not sure whether the SEO advice you’re currently paying for still holds? Our SEO & AI-search service in Richmond, VA starts with an honest look at where you actually stand — including telling you when something you’ve been sold no longer does anything.