Search Engine Land’s Top 15 SEO stories of 2024

SearchEngineLand.com published their 15 top stories for SEO in 2024.

The two I was most interested in were number 8 and number 10. Organic traffic dropping by 25% by 2026 is a big number, this is of course because of AI. It will be interesting to see how things play out there.

10. Organic traffic predicted to drop by 25%

Gartner made headlines with this prediction: “By 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.”

• Will traffic from search engines fall 25% by 2026?

8. Links still matter

We’ve heard a lot from Google about how links matter less and aren’t a top ranking signal. Well, it turns out that 96% of websites ranking in the top 10 of Google had more than 1,000 backlinks from unique domains – at least according to a study by Internet Marketing Ninjas.

• Study: 96% of sites in Google’s top 10 positions have 1,000+ links from unique domains