AI in 2026: The SEO of 2000

I keep hearing the same question from founders: is the AI thing real, or is it hype? It's a fair question, and most people answering it are guessing. I'm not — because I've seen this movie before. I was optimizing search campaigns in 2001, back when “SEO” barely had a name and the rules seemed to change every few months. In 2005 I built OnDeck Sports from the ground up around search. Over the years I managed millions of keywords across dozens of accounts for Verizon's Superpages, built Best Buy's paid-search program to hit its targets, and ran campaigns for everyone from CVS to Bass Pro Shops. Twenty-five years and nearly 200 accounts later, I've watched a platform gold rush start, mature, commoditize, and shake out.

So when I say AI in 2026 feels exactly like SEO in 2001, I'm not reaching for a clever line. The energy is identical.

What 2001 actually felt like

In the early days of search, almost nobody understood the rules — including a lot of the people charging to explain them. There was real magic in it: do the right things and traffic, and revenue, appeared almost out of thin air. That drew a flood of self-proclaimed gurus, most of them improvising in public. The tactics that worked were genuinely powerful and also temporary — what felt like a secret weapon one year was table stakes the next. Plenty of smart people dismissed the whole thing as a fad. They were wrong. Search quietly reshaped how entire industries found customers, and the businesses that took it seriously early pulled ahead and stayed there.

Where the rhyme is loud

Line AI up against that and the parallels are almost uncomfortable:

• The edge goes to whoever understands it first. As with early SEO, the advantage isn't the tool — everyone has the tool. It's the judgment to use it well before everyone else does.
• There's a flood of “experts.” Most are a few weeks ahead of you and narrating it confidently. Some are excellent. Telling them apart is the hard part — same as it was in 2001.
• Today's clever trick is tomorrow's baseline. The prompt or workflow that feels like an unfair advantage right now will be a default feature before long. Commoditization is faster than ever.
• Gimmick users get left behind; integrators pull ahead. The companies bolting AI on for a press release aren't the ones who'll benefit. The ones quietly weaving it into how they actually operate are — exactly how the SEO winners behaved.

Where the analogy breaks

Here's the part most “X is like Y” takes skip: an analogy is only useful if you know where it stops. This one stops in a few important places.

First, SEO mostly changed how customers found you. AI changes the work itself — what your team produces, how fast, and at what cost. That's a deeper shift than a new marketing channel, and it touches operations, hiring, and process, not just traffic.

Second, the pace is different. SEO shifts played out over quarters and years; you had time to adjust. AI shifts arrive in weeks. The half-life of any single advantage is shorter, which rewards adaptability over any one playbook.

Third, and most importantly: in 2001 there was a real barrier to entry — you had to know things most people didn't. With AI, the barrier to access is basically zero. Anyone can open the same tools you can. That flips the game: the scarce resource isn't access anymore, it's judgment about what's worth doing, what to ignore, and how to fit it into a business that still has to run.

What I'd actually do about it

If I were a founder watching this unfold, I wouldn't chase every shiny tactic that crosses my feed — that's the 2001 mistake, and it burns time and money. I'd do three things instead: build a durable understanding of what the technology is genuinely good and bad at; pick one or two workflows that actually matter to the business and integrate AI into them deeply, rather than sprinkling it everywhere shallowly; and measure honestly, so you keep what works and drop what doesn't.

And — predictably, since it's a lot of what we now do at EverClick — I'd get help from people who've navigated a platform shift before, and who understand both the marketing side and the way a business has to operate day to day. The two are connected, and treating them separately is how good intentions turn into wasted effort.

The bet

The founders who win the AI era won't be the ones with the loudest opinions about it. They'll be the ones who, like the quiet SEO winners of the 2000s, simply made it part of how their business runs — and kept going while everyone else argued about whether it was real. I've seen which group comes out ahead. I'd bet on the quiet integrators every time.