SEO is dead. Or so the narrative goes. ChatGPT is eating search traffic. Google's AI Overviews are burying organic results. Programmatic content farms are getting nuked by algorithm updates. And every founder who invested millions in SEO infrastructure is wondering if they just lit money on fire.
But here's the counterintuitive claim: the best growth leaders aren't abandoning SEO. They're doubling down—just not on the playbook from 2019. The shift isn't about keywords or backlinks or technical audits. It's about understanding that SEO in 2025 is a fundamentally different discipline, one that blends brand, AI-driven content infrastructure, and signals that Google's algorithm is only beginning to understand.
Three senior growth leaders—Kieran Flanagan at HubSpot, Luke Harries at ElevenLabs, and Omer Shai at Wix—are navigating this transition in real time. Their approaches differ wildly. Where they agree and where they clash reveals the real future of organic growth.
The Death of Growth Teams as We Know Them
Kieran Flanagan doesn't mince words: growth teams, as traditionally structured, are becoming obsolete. The issue isn't that growth is dead—it's that the clean separation between "touchless" product-led growth and human-driven sales motions no longer makes sense in an AI-first world.
What I see is AI is starting to collapse all of that into a single function, which is like an AI innovation pod. And the AI innovation pod is trying to figure out how do we deploy AI across that go-to-market to make it a much more efficient go-to-market.
— Kieran Flanagan, CMO (fmr VP Growth) at HubSpot
His reasoning is architectural. When your entire onboarding experience runs through a multimodal AI agent—one that can converse via text or audio, see the user's screen, and guide them through activation, upgrade, and retention—who owns that? Growth? Customer success? Sales? The handoffs don't make sense anymore.
We had growth forever trying to figure out onboarding, like tooltips and product tours and all of these different things. But what happens when your entire onboarding experience, your buying experience is done through an AI multimodal agent?
— Kieran Flanagan, CMO (fmr VP Growth) at HubSpot
For SEO, this shift is existential. The traditional growth team playbook—build programmatic landing pages, optimize conversion paths, A/B test CTAs—assumes static pages and linear funnels. But if users arrive from Google and immediately engage with an AI agent that answers their query, personalizes their experience, and guides them to activation, the page itself becomes less important than the orchestration layer beneath it.
Flanagan's prescription: early-stage founders should start with an AI ops team to ingest unstructured data (sales transcripts, chat logs, customer signals) and an AI innovation pod to build experiences on top of that data layer. SEO becomes one input into a larger system, not the system itself.
Programmatic SEO Is Alive, But Only If You Have Distribution
Luke Harries at ElevenLabs offers a different lens. ElevenLabs hit 1 million users in six months, raised $281 million, and reached a $3.3 billion valuation—all while building one of the fastest-growing AI products in the market. But Harries is clear: growth at that scale isn't about one channel. It's about compounding loops.
While the transcript provided doesn't include Harries' specific comments on SEO tactics, his broader philosophy around growth reveals a critical truth: SEO only works if you have distribution to amplify it. ElevenLabs succeeded because they sold to creators, developers, and enterprises simultaneously—each segment feeding the others. Programmatic content pages that target long-tail queries only scale if there's a viral or community-driven flywheel underneath.
This is the quiet split happening in 2025. Programmatic SEO still works for companies with network effects or platforms where users generate content (think Webflow templates, Canva designs, ElevenLabs voice libraries). It's collapsing for companies trying to rank for transactional queries without brand equity or user-generated signals.
Brand Marketing Is the New Backlink
Omer Shai has run marketing at Wix for 18 years. He's spent millions on Super Bowl ads—six for Wix, and one forBase44, a company Wix acquired just 12 days before Shai bought the spot. His rationale for Super Bowl isn't soft brand awareness. It's hard-edged acquisition logic.
The way that I'm thinking on brand activities is that it's not an empty, okay? It's not only brand. And when I'm doing acquisition, I'm not doing just acquisition marketing. So when I'm doing brand marketing, I'm thinking the balance between brand and acquisition.
— Omer Shai, CMO at Wix
Shai's thesis: brand marketing creates the conditions for SEO to work. When Wix runs a Super Bowl ad, traffic spikes—but the real value is sustained. People who saw the ad weeks earlier are more likely to click on Wix's organic listing when they search for "website builder." Brand recall drives click-through rate. CTR drives rankings.
Eventually, I would like to see spike in the traffic to our site. That means that if we don't see people coming, relevant users, okay, I will add the word relevant, relevant audiences who are coming to our site. If we didn't do so, we don't need to invest at the marketing activity that we're doing. And marketing is investment.
— Omer Shai, CMO at Wix
This is the part most SEO practitioners miss. Google's algorithm increasingly prioritizes brand signals—direct traffic, branded search volume, repeat visits, social mentions. A backlink from a DR 70 site matters less than 10,000 people Googling your company name after seeing you on TV or TikTok. Shai is building SEO infrastructure by investing in channels that don't show up in Ahrefs.
Where They Disagree: Can You Still Win With Content Alone?
Here's where the three leaders diverge sharply.
Flanagan's worldview suggests that pure content plays are dying. If users interact with AI agents instead of reading blog posts, then the traditional "rank for a keyword, convert via CTA" model breaks. SEO becomes a data source for training agents, not a standalone channel.
Shai, on the other hand, is betting that brand-driven SEO—where content supports a broader marketing motion—still scales. Wix isn't relying on blog posts to drive conversions. They're using content to capture demand created by $100 million in annual marketing spend across TV, video, influencers, and events.
And Harries (based on ElevenLabs' trajectory) represents a third path: product-led SEO, where the product itself generates the pages. Every voice created, every language supported, every use case documented becomes a landing page. The content is a byproduct of product usage, not a standalone editorial effort.
The disagreement isn't about whether SEO works. It's about who SEO works for. Companies with strong product loops or massive brand budgets can still extract value. Mid-market B2B SaaS companies relying on blog content to drive MQLs are in trouble.
The New SEO Stack: AI, Unstructured Data, and Multimodal Interfaces
Flanagan's vision of the AI innovation pod reveals what the new SEO infrastructure looks like. It starts with an AI ops team ingesting unstructured data—everything from customer support transcripts to sales call recordings to user behavior logs. That data layer becomes the foundation for AI agents that can answer queries, personalize experiences, and guide users through the product.
For SEO, this means the traditional CMS-based content strategy is obsolete. Instead of publishing static blog posts optimized for keywords, teams need to build systems that can dynamically generate answers, personalize landing pages, and serve the right experience based on user intent.
The companies winning SEO in 2025 aren't the ones with the best content writers. They're the ones with the best data pipelines and the fastest AI deployment loops. Wix can personalize landing pages for millions of queries because they have years of user data. ElevenLabs can rank for voice-related searches because their product generates use cases faster than competitors can write about them. HubSpot can answer buyer questions through AI agents because they've been collecting sales transcripts and support tickets for a decade.
What This Means for Founders Building Today
So where does this leave early-stage founders trying to decide whether to invest in SEO?
First, if you're building a product without network effects, user-generated content, or a massive brand budget, SEO as a primary acquisition channel is a coin flip. The days of ranking a handful of blog posts and driving predictable MQL volume are over for most categories. Google's AI Overviews are eating that traffic, and LLMs are training on your content without sending you clicks.
Second, if you do invest in SEO, build it as part of a broader system. Flanagan's advice to start with an AI ops team and an AI innovation pod isn't just about onboarding—it's about creating the infrastructure to personalize, automate, and scale beyond static pages. SEO becomes one input into a larger demand capture engine, not a siloed channel with its own metrics.
Third, brand matters more than backlinks. Shai's willingness to spend millions on Super Bowl ads—and to measure that spend by traffic spikes and user acquisition—reflects a truth that most SEO tools obscure. If people don't know your brand, they won't click your organic listing, even if you rank #1. Brand-building creates the conditions for SEO to work.
And finally, the teams that win SEO in the next five years won't look like traditional SEO teams. They'll be cross-functional pods that combine data engineering, AI deployment, brand marketing, and product growth. The separation between "growth" and "marketing" and "product" is collapsing, just as Flanagan predicted. The question isn't whether SEO is dead. It's whether you're building the team that can do SEO in a world where the rules have completely changed.