This is a fun topic to discuss every 12 months or so.
There are many good points made by Gregg. Mostly related to how SEO has become a challenge. And even the article touches on some things that are concerning as it relates to SEO tactics in the automotive world.
Even though AI is eating up some of the queries with zero click experiences, they are mostly informational, leaving the high-intent, local, and transactional queries are being served. Now, that is where most of the VLAs come into play, so to your point, ads are in the way.
However, People Also Ask is not an ad placement and still a viable place to find organic traffic dependent on query/intent in some case above the fold.
Google, as a search engine, has no clue if your content is "helpful" or is provided by "experts".
In terms of ranking a page, this does nothing. In terms of content being consumed for AI Overviews, PPA, etc. that is another story.
But again is dependent on intent.
Google is a Page Level system and will rank your pages based on relevancy to the topic given intent of user search query.
AI content is flooding, but the last couple of Core Updates aim to push that down the SERPS forcing SEO as a whole to evolve.
Automotive SEO just gets a bit more bumpy, but in reality (since we all share the same shitty, slow websites), it comes down to Local SEO, like always.
In most cases, from what I can tell, when I see/hear/read about the death of SEO, again... it's mostly about SEO in "general". And two differing sides are talking past each other.
Niche down, slice it up by industry, geography, intent and you are looking at a completely different thing. Not to mention that SEO being dead is usually referring to specific "tactics".
Best practices are the same as it relates to a Page Level system that feeds PageRank.
SEO is dying, as Gregg said, a slow death, but at the end of the day it comes down to how your perception of SEO.
