Is SEO dead now that AI answers questions?

No — but it has a new job description. AI assistants are built on top of search infrastructure: they crawl the same web, lean on the same authority signals, and cite the pages classic SEO makes strong. The work didn't die; the reader changed.

What is dying is the traffic-volume business model — publishing thin content to harvest informational clicks that AI now answers directly. What survives and compounds: being the trusted source on your topics, owning bottom-of-funnel queries, and being quotable.

The practical posture is both/and: keep the technical and authority fundamentals, add the GEO layer (direct answers, schema, llms.txt), and measure citations alongside rankings.