I used to know where I stood with SEO, but now?
A worryingly long time ago, I got a hobby website that listed options for days out to the front page of Google with minimum effort, mostly just by phrasing everything on it in ways that people searched for. I feel like I had a knack for getting ranked well, and it didn't involve lots of backlink tricks or handjobs for Google staff.
But in 2025 I just don't really understand how to even get my sites to appear on search results any more. I make fast websites with good fundamentals adhering to the search engine suggestions, I submit them to the Google Search Console and equivalents, and then I wait 4 weeks for them to...not really show up anywhere. They show as indexed, but good luck actually finding them.
Hell, I added Dark Visitors to my recently created professional photography site on the assumption all my photos would be getting pilferred by dastardly machine learning platforms, and yet they don't even visit the fucking thing.
Of course, the photography space is heavily saturated and it might be that I'm just not as interesting to the algorithms as the established players, but it seems to be an oddly challenging challenge in a time when everyone is touting the future of "agentic search", which as far as I can tell is when you ask an LLM to perform the search for you; like a zoomer Ask Jeeves.
I feel like a lot of the promotion of services, and by extension websites, is now heavily entwined in the walled gardens of the various social networks. And it's my own fault, I guess, for not wanting to engage in that - that is where the people are at, after all. But I think it's those same social networks that have poisoned the idea of search.
Google search is worse than it was 10-15 years ago, and I believe this is down to "algorithms". It's most obvious over on YouTube, where the search is completely fucking useless; it shows you the top 10 most popular videos for your search, then a line of semi-relevant shorts, then two more videos (why only two?), then more now-irrelevant shorts, and then "Explore more", which is completely irrelevant videos to your search query, and then "Previously watched", which for me is mostly a horrifying mix of cameras and vtubers. What happened to just getting a list of results sorted by relevance? Who thought this was better?
This has poisoned the results of Google too - it tries too hard to suggest what it thinks is most relevant to your query, even if that involves reinterpreting your request, and it massively overranks established players (i.e. the most popular results) over new results that might be more relevant. As on YouTube, those who get there first have an advantage that's very hard to claw back as a latecomer to the space. And if you're not on the first two pages of results you're practically invisible.
As an aside, I'd be curious to know if "agentic search" searches like a human and ignores anything past the first few results. How deep will it dive when trying to answer your query? Will it be like a teenager searching for boobs in the 90s and end up 40 pages deep in the search results?
Anyway, my struggles continue with my own websites. As for search, I've swapped back to Kagi, because it lets me block entire websites from my results. Remember search before Reddit infested it?
Turns out it's rather pleasant.