little think: we get to solve puzzles for a living

So, I’ve had a little think…

Bruce Clay has died. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s one of the people credited with coining the term ‘search engine optimisation’ in the first place, and he spent the better part of three decades shaping the industry the rest of us wandered into.

Now, I never met the man. I can’t claim to have been an avid follower of his work either, and it’d feel a bit cheap to write a misty-eyed tribute pretending I was. But when the guy who named your industry passes away, I found myself curious about how he saw SEO and where he thought it was heading, and what I discovered landed a lot harder than I was expecting.

”I don’t think it can die”

“It doesn’t ever really die, it evolves and there will continue to be changes in SEO. I think SEO is not dead, I don’t think it can die, I think it’ll be around as long as there’s search.”

If you’ve worked in SEO for any length of time, you’ve heard that SEO is dead. You hear it after every core update, every SERP feature, every new acronym. Lately it’s been ai and ‘geo’ doing the killing, and I’ll be honest: the ‘seo is dead’ narrative has, more than once, left me quietly wondering whether I should still be in this industry at all.

Framing like Bruce’s is what pulls me back. SEO doesn’t die, it evolves. As long as people are searching for things, someone has to understand how that searching works and how to be found within it. The surface keeps changing. The job underneath it doesn’t.

And here’s the part I’ve slowly come round to: the people best positioned to make sense of ai search are SEOs. Especially the technically minded ones. We’ve spent our careers reverse-engineering opaque systems that never publish their rules, adapting when those rules shift overnight, and figuring out how to be visible inside someone else’s black box. That is exactly the skill set ai search demands. We’re not being made obsolete by it, we’re arguably the people most prepared for it.

”we get to solve puzzles for a living”

“It matters to me that people understand how it works, that it isn’t going to be something that is tedious, that it’s fun. We get to solve puzzles for a living.”

This one is the reason I wanted to write anything at all.

Two things in it map almost exactly onto how I’ve tried to work. The first is that it matters that people understand how it works. Throughout my career I’ve never wanted to just tell a colleague if something was good or bad for SEO without context. I’ve wanted to help them understand why, what’s actually happening under the hood - if only so they can sound really knowledgeable the next time a client asks them about it.

The second is the puzzle line, and it genuinely hits home. It’s the cleanest description I’ve seen of why I find technical SEO so interesting. The whole job, at its best, is finding a problem, working out why it’s happening, and fixing it. A crawl with far too many pages, a maze of redirects, a page refusing to index. It’s a puzzle every time. I really do get to solve puzzles for a living, and it’s the part I enjoy most.

I didn’t know Bruce Clay, and I won’t pretend to be grieving a friend. But the work he helped shape is the one I get to spend my days poking at, puzzles and all, and on the days I wonder whether it’s still worth doing, it turns out a couple of his lines are part of the reason I keep deciding that it is. That feels worth a quiet thank you.