SEO IS CHANGING THE WAY WE EXPERIENCE THE INTERNET, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

If there’s one thing we all know about the internet, it’s that it’s constantly evolving. If you’ve ever spent a few days off your phone and come back to realize you missed out on a new chronically online joke, you know the feeling. In addition to memes, one of the other forces quietly shaping that is the evolution of SEO. If you’re not knee-deep in the world of search engine optimization, it might feel like a buzzword—or worse, something only lame marketers and cash grabbers care about. But here’s the thing: SEO is changing a lot more than how businesses are ranking or which cookie recipe everyone’s trying. It’s influencing how we experience the internet itself.

THE INTERNET AS A CURATED EXPERIENCE

Once upon a time, the internet was a vast, uncharted wilderness. You’d type a URL or wander into forms or blogs to discover content organically. Today, search engines act as the gatekeepers to what we see and how we find it. Enter SEO.

At its core, SEO is (unsurprisingly) about optimization; using keywords, structure, and intent to align content with what people are looking for. But when everyone’s optimizing, the result is a curated, calculated experience with everyone vying for everyone’s attention, resulting in those who can afford it monopolizing it and those who can’t trying to keep up. Searches aren’t just for answers; they’re experiences carefully engineered to feel right for you and, more importantly, to act like a magnet for your views, dollars, and data.

This creates the convenience and ease of instant answers, but it also shapes how we perceive what’s out there. Page one is optimized to the max and sponsored beyond belief, and if it’s not on page one, does it even exist?

The push for quality & authenticity

The days of stuffing pages with meaningless keywords are gone. Today’s algorithms are smarter than that, prioritizing relevance, quality, and user experience. They reward content that’s well-written, engaging, and actually useful.

This shift has raised the bar for what we experience online. Businesses, creators, and platforms are now racing to craft meaningful, high-quality content because that’s what ranks and that’s what keeps you clicking.

But what happens when everyone’s playing by the same rules? Does authenticity suffer in the sea of optimized voices? Further, who can afford to be an ‘optimized voice’? If you think about it, most of the rewarded qualities I’ve mentioned (relevance, perceived quality, well-written, user experience) tend to come with increasingly steep money and/or time investments.

SEO and personalization: helpful or limiting?

The internet, in all its infinite vastness, is being served up in smaller, more predictable slices. That’s (maybe?) great for efficiency— but what about exploration?

If you and somebody else search “blue jeans”, you’re likely going to see different results. With the goal of delivering you the most relevant results, search engines use data like your location, search history, type of device you’re on, browsing history, perceived demographic qualities like age range or gender-identity etc. to predict what you want to see. This information sets the stage for companies to bid for your attention in the form of sponsored results, with the highest bidders usually being fast fashion and other huge companies.

If you’re anything like me and tried this and found that it was filled with jeans from places like boohoo, Uniqlo, Walmart, (fast-fashion places you’ve never shopped), this is because while relevant search results matter, their bottom line is always going to mater more. It’s not just based on your pervious search history and other data, in fact I just looked at jeans from Citizens of Humanity last week and while that brand was nowhere in sight, the style of the other blue jeans were suspiciously similar to the ones I was shopping for.

This is especially relevant for products and sponsored results, which outnumbered organic search results by 46:6 in a search for “blue jeans” at the time of writing this. It’s pretty misaligned & annoying with something carrying as heavy of implications as jeans, but looking at a water bottle or recycling bin these sponsored results are showing me more cost-effective products with similar styles to the ones I’ve been looking at. While this might feel convenient and let’s face it, kind of helpful— it raises questions. Is SEO creating an echo chamber where you only see things you’re into/what aligns with your past clicks? Are we losing the joy of stumbling on to something unexpected? Do ginormous (oftentimes less sustainable/ethical, especially when talking about something like clothing) businesses have the right to monopolize search results?

To look at this from another direction, when working with small businesses to help them with SEO, they usually come into the conversation thinking they’re top of results in core and all kinds of adjacent keywords. It’s not until they search in a private browser or I share my screen that they realize they’re ranking a lot lower than they think, but google is delivering their company first because of the connection. This happens more times than I can count and it sucks. It’s a tough conversation to have and especially devastating to realize that a ginormous company is driving ppc costs an astronomical amount that just doesn’t make sense for a small business. We get creative and make it work (that’s kind of our whole thing) but at the end of the day it’s a hard and frustrating situation for a local potter selling mugs trying to compete with Target, Walmart, Crate & Barrel, and VistaPrint for real estate on a “handmade mug” search.

What does this mean for businesses and creators?

For businesses, SEO has shifted from a technical practice to a full-on creative strategy. It’s not just about ranking or delivering information; it’s about creating experiences that align with what people want to see, feel, or know.

For creators, the challenge is staying authentic while having to optimize for visibility. How do you stand out in a sea of polished, SEO-friendly content? The answer is simple but not easy: by telling real, magnetic stories that resonate with your audience and play well with search algorithms.

Or, you go the other way. You say f it and abandon optimization completely. This is obviously going to make getting organic search traffic harder, so you’d have to focus on attracting traffic from other sources. For example if you’re a creator making blog content, you go fully authentic in your blog and rely on building a loyal audience on other channels, like social media or email list and leverage that to draw attention to your blog content. Investing your energy into getting a couple hundred super loyal readers is going to go a lot farther than working on a CTR rate of .5% (which is actually pretty good). The whole ‘more views equals more traffic and more traffic leads to more sales"‘ thing isn’t working anymore, but genuine connection is.

so, what’s next?

As SEO continues to evolve, so will our internet experience. Expect more integration with AI, hyper-personalized searches, and perhaps even greater emphasis on video and voice content. [I can easily] It’s not a far leap to imagine a future where information used to educate and inform that was previously rewarded with traffic and the opportunity to pull viewers into learning more about the website sharing it will be leveraged and morphed into Siri-style audio answers, similar to the AI results that now come up at the top of most questions searched on google. What does that mean for the businesses and creators behind the information?

No matter how algorithms change, one truth remains: the internet is a reflection of us. The better we get at asking meaningful questions, identifying impactful answers, sharing authentic stories, and being intentional about the value we create, the better our online experience will be.