Does SEO Really Work, or Is It a Scam? What Google Itself Says

The email shows up without anyone asking for it. “I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…” Below that, an offer to fix the problem.

At Sunday dinner, your brother-in-law has his opinion ready. SEO is a scam. He paid, he waited, and nothing changed.

Maybe you are somewhere between those two voices, with a simpler question. Does SEO actually work?

Start with a curious detail. Google gets that same email. It published the text on an official page, written for people thinking about hiring an SEO. ¹

On that same page, Google writes: “Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.” Then it lists, one by one, the promises none of them can keep. ¹

A disclosure before going any further. I sell SEO consulting, and I have a stake in the answer. That is why every claim here rests on a Google document or on dated research. My own opinion comes in only where I say so.

A sentence too big to check

“SEO is a scam” works fine over Sunday dinner. Checked against documents, it falls apart. It packs too many things into a single sentence.

In my book, I run an exercise on sentences like this one. I reduce the slogan to a claim you can check against a document. ⁶ Here, it splits in two:

1. No work on a site changes what Google shows.
2. People who sell SEO promise what they cannot deliver.

The first claim is false, and Google itself explains why. The second holds for part of the market. Google also says which part.

How Google chooses, and where SEO comes in

Picture a standardized exam scored by a machine. Nobody has a friend on the exam board. Nobody knows the whole answer key. Studying still works. Whoever studies the right way improves their odds, with no passing grade guaranteed.

Google Search is built along similar lines. Google calls it “a fully-automated search engine.” Programs called crawlers explore the web and find, on their own, the vast majority of pages listed in the results. ³

The order of the results comes out of a calculation. Google writes that ranking is done programmatically. Relevancy, the same page says, is determined by hundreds of factors. ³

Two rules follow from that design, and Google wrote both. The first: it does not accept payment to crawl a site more frequently or rank it higher. Then it adds, “If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re wrong.” ³

The second rule cuts the other way. Google does not guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve a page. That holds even when the page follows the Google Search Essentials, its basic rules. ³

What is left is the part that depends on the site owner. A page can be easy or hard for the machine to read. It can answer well or badly what the person searched for. Google’s official Starter Guide sums up the work as two kinds of help. Helping search engines understand your content. And helping users find your site and decide whether to visit it. ² This is called SEO, short for search engine optimization.

The path from a page to the screen, from crawling to serving, is laid out in how to get your site on Google. Here, the consequence is enough. There is a mechanism, and you can work on it.

What Google says SEO can do

Google’s page on hiring an SEO opens with a list of what a good professional delivers. ¹

• Review of your site content or structure.
• Technical advice on website development, such as hosting, redirects, error pages, and use of JavaScript.
• Content development.
• Keyword research.
• SEO training.
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
• Optimizing for generative AI.

The effect the page describes is modest. Hiring can improve your site’s visibility and save you time. It can also damage your site and your reputation. ¹

The Starter Guide adds the rule of likelihood. Sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google’s search results. ²

Notice the word. Google talks about likelihood, never about a guarantee. That is the real size of “it works.”

The same Google says a small local business owner can probably do much of the work themselves. ¹ The mechanism is there with a contract or without one.

The promises Google calls impossible

Now the second claim. On the same page, Google describes what part of the market sells and Google refutes. The table lines up those promises with Google’s own words.

Put the last row next to the Starter Guide. There, Google writes a line with an apology built in: “There are no secrets here that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!).” ²

For the email that arrives uninvited, Google chose a comparison. It says to give that email the same skepticism as “burn fat at night” diet pills. ¹

The scam costs more than the contract fee. Some techniques violate Google’s spam policies. The result can be a negative adjustment of the site’s presence in Google, or even its removal from the index. ¹ The page also says who answers for that: “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” ¹

With both claims checked, the verdict fits in two sentences. The mechanism exists, and working on it raises the chance of showing up. The certainty sold along with it is the scam, and the one refuting that certainty is Google.

What works takes time, and nobody knows how long

Back to the exam. A serious test-prep course does not promise the day you will pass. It shows you the exam outline, the study plan, and what you already get right.

Google’s Starter Guide treats time the same way. In its words, “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.” Its advice is to wait a few weeks before assessing the effect. Then comes the warning: not all changes result in a noticeable impact on search results. ²

The page on hiring an SEO says what a serious audit delivers. It should give “realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.” ¹ The word is estimate, with the uncertainty built into it.

I work the same way, and I state the limit. I cannot promise a position or a date. Nobody can, and Google put that in writing. What you can agree on before starting is the diagnosis, the plan, and how to measure. The first step of that diagnosis is in the SEO audit. The conversation about timelines has a piece of its own, how long SEO takes.

Do people still search on Google?

There is a newer version of the distrust. It admits that SEO worked once. Now, it says, everybody asks ChatGPT.

Behavior data tells a different story. SparkToro analyzed the clickstream panel from Datos, with millions of devices in the United States. Between 2023 and 2025, AI tool use jumped from 8% to 38%. Over the same period, more than 95% kept using search engines regularly. ⁴

Heavy Google use went up too. In the first quarter of 2023, 84% of the desktop devices in the panel visited Google 10 or more times a month. In the first quarter of 2025, the figure was 87%. ⁴ Rand Fishkin, who wrote the study, reads it this way: “traditional search isn’t going anywhere, even for the heavy adopters of AI.” ⁴

Two limits, because the number has an owner. The panel covers only the United States. And Datos belongs to Semrush, a company that sells SEO tools. ⁴

Brazil is one of the world’s largest internet markets. There, the Super Panorama survey by Mobile Time with Opinion Box interviewed 4,100 smartphone users in March 2026. Almost 40% use only search engines. One in four uses search engines and AI in equal measure. Only 2.2% rely on chatbots alone to search. ⁵

People keep searching. What changed is the screen. Many searches end right there, without a click, and the piece on the first page of Google shows the numbers. For the question in this piece, one consequence is enough. Showing up and getting the visit have become two separate events. By my yardstick, whoever measures SEO tracks both, each on its own line.

How to spot the scam in the next proposal

Take the last SEO proposal you received. That uninvited email works too. Grab a sheet of paper and make three passes.

1. Copy only the promises, one per line. No introduction, no price.
2. Compare each line with the table of impossible promises. A line that matches the table gets an X. By Google’s own yardstick, that is where the problem is.
3. On the lines that are left, rewrite each promise as work. What will be done, on which page, and how the effect will be measured. If a line cannot be rewritten, write “slogan” next to it.

A sheet with no X and little slogan describes the SEO that Google calls useful. It still does not guarantee results, because nobody does. It shows that the proposal talks about work.

If you hired someone before and got burned, the question becomes what went wrong last time. Checking the previous work in Search Console is covered in hiring SEO again.

The same sheet applies to SEO Genome. The order we follow, diagnosis before execution, is published on our methodology page. Run our proposal through the three passes, just as you would any other.

From today on, when someone says SEO is a scam, you have a question to hand back. Which promise? If it is a guaranteed first place, Google agrees with your brother-in-law. If it is described work, with an estimate and a way to measure it, Google calls that a useful service.

Open your inbox now and find the last message that mentioned SEO. Copy its promises onto the sheet and mark the X’s before you reply.