Is SEO Worth It in 2024? Looking Back With Two Years of Hindsight

2024 was a strange year to bet on SEO. Google rolled AI Overviews out wide that year. Search results started answering questions directly, no click required. A lot of business owners asked the obvious question. Why invest in rankings when the answer might just appear on the results page itself?

Two years later, the answer is clearer than it was then. Some businesses invested anyway. Others waited to see how it shook out. The gap between those two groups says more than any prediction could have made back then.

What Actually Changed That Year

AI Overviews expanded fast in 2024. Zero-click searches climbed alongside it. Fewer people clicked through for simple factual questions. That part was real, and it scared a lot of business owners into pausing their SEO spend.

What got lost in that fear was the split between two very different kinds of searches. Simple factual questions got swallowed by AI summaries. Commercial searches, the ones with buying intent behind them, mostly did not. Someone searching a plumber near them still wanted a real business result. Still wanted to click through and book.

The Businesses That Invested Anyway

Some businesses kept building through that year regardless of the AI Overview headlines. Content kept publishing. Technical fixes kept shipping. Backlink work kept moving forward, slower than either owner wanted, the way SEO always moves.

Those businesses hold visibility now that competitors gave up chasing. Rankings compound. A page built in early 2024 has had two full years to earn trust signals a brand-new page simply cannot match yet. That head start is not something a competitor buys back with a bigger budget today.

The Businesses That Waited

Other businesses held off. Understandable instinct at the time, given the noise around AI search. Wait and see felt safer than committing budget to a channel that seemed to be shrinking.

Two years is a long runway to lose, though. Competitors who kept building back then hold rankings today that took real time to earn. Rankings do not transfer on request. Whoever built authority during that window keeps most of it, and whoever waited is starting from behind, not from zero.

What the Cost Looked Like Then Versus Now

SEO in 2024 cost roughly what it costs today. Monthly retainers, content production, technical audits, link building. The line items barely moved. What moved was the competitive gap.

A business starting SEO from scratch in 2026 faces a real gap. Competitors hold a two-year head start on rankings. A two-year head start on backlinks too. Content depth compounds the same way. Catching up costs more time now than it would have back then. Not more money necessarily. More patience, more months before meaningful movement shows up in the reports.

Was It Worth It? A Plain Retrospective

For the businesses that invested through 2024, yes. Clearly yes. They hold rankings on commercial terms that still drive real traffic, AI Overviews or not. Their cost per lead has generally stayed steadier than paid channels, where bids only climb.

For the businesses that waited, the picture is mixed. Not a wasted two years exactly, since the underlying business likely still grew through other channels. But a missed window all the same. SEO rewards early movers more than most marketing channels do, and that year was one of those windows.

A Concrete Example of the Gap

Picture two similar local service businesses in early 2024. Same city. Roughly the same marketing budget available too. One kept a monthly SEO retainer running. Content kept publishing on a schedule. Technical issues kept getting fixed as they came up.

The other business paused SEO spend that year. AI Overviews were the headline everywhere, and pausing felt like the cautious move. Budget shifted toward short-term paid ads instead, which made sense in isolation. Traffic still arrived, just rented rather than owned.

By 2026, the gap between those two businesses is visible in Search Console data. One holds page-one rankings across a dozen commercial keywords, earned gradually across those two years. The other still ranks nowhere for most of them, starting from the same position it started from in 2024. Paid clicks kept the second business afloat. They never compounded into anything it still owns today.

What This Means Heading Into 2026 and Beyond

The same question keeps resurfacing every time Google ships a visible change. Is SEO still worth it, given whatever the newest search feature happens to be? The 2024 retrospective answers that clearly enough. Commercial searches still convert. Local searches still convert. AI summaries absorbed the informational layer of search. The buying layer stayed largely intact. This split has held for two years running now.

Calgary SEO clients who started building visibility back in 2024 are not rebuilding from zero today. That is the actual lesson from looking backward instead of guessing forward. SEO Company To-The-TOP! has watched this pattern hold across multiple algorithm shifts since 2007, not just this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was SEO actually worth it in 2024?

For businesses that kept investing, yes. Commercial and local searches kept converting through the AI Overview rollout. The rankings built that year still hold value two years later.

Did AI Overviews kill SEO in 2024?

No. AI Overviews mostly absorbed simple factual searches. Commercial searches with real buying intent, the ones that actually drive revenue, largely kept their click-through behaviour.

Is it too late to catch up if I waited?

Not too late, but it takes longer now. A two-year gap in rankings does not close overnight. Content depth and backlinks take even longer to catch up on. Expect a longer runway than a business starting fresh in 2024 would have needed.

How do I know if SEO is worth it for my business today?

Start with a website audit and real keyword research. Commercial intent keywords in your market are the clearest signal, more useful than any general debate about AI search.

Should I split budget between SEO and Google Ads instead of choosing one?

Many businesses do exactly that. Paid ads through Google Ads management cover the immediate gap. SEO builds the longer-term asset underneath it, the one that keeps paying after the ad budget stops.