Is SEO Dead? What Actually Works in AI Search and Google Rankings

Episode notes

Paid ads are renting. SEO is buying. Most business owners pour their marketing budget into Google Ads and Meta because the math feels obvious - drop in a dollar, pull out five. But the channel that actually compounds, the one that builds lead generation you don't have to keep paying for, usually gets pushed to the back of the budget. And that's how most businesses end up funding Mark Zuckerberg's next yacht instead of building real long-term traffic. In this episode of Humans of Growth, I sit down with Sophie Brannon, CEO of StudioHawk US, a global SEO agency that's been ranking businesses on Google for over a decade. We get into the SEO strategy that actually works in 2026 - what early traction really looks like, why paid CPCs are about to skyrocket, and how to think about SEO when AI search is rewriting the rules of discovery. Sophie breaks down the three core pillars of SEO (technical, content, and authority), why "chunkable" content is the new ranking advantage in ChatGPT and AI Overviews, and the outdated black hat tactics making a quiet comeback - and getting penalized hard.

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