The Dying Days of SEO?

Google's long campaign to wreck its search engine and basically destroy organic search results has, of course, culminated in its current attempt to impose 'AI overviews' on searchers rather than traditional results.  Which means, obviously, that individual websites are getting even less traffic from Google than before (and it has been in terminal decline for more than ten years).  This, in turn, has meant that the entire 'Search Engine Optimisation' (SEO) sector has been left high and dry as it is now patently obvious to everyone that their various tricks and 'strategies' can no longer 'game' search in order to promote traffic to client sites.  So they are desperately turning to other means to try and get us site owners to pay them.  Judging by the emails I've been getting of late, at least.  I've always had emails from SEO 'experts' telling me that, for a small fee, naturally, they can boost my traffic, but I've always known just enough about how the web works that it is largely snake oil that's being sold.  Of late, though, the emails have been coming from people who are promising the same boosts to traffic, but via various 'publicity' methods.  I've had two just this week from an outfit telling me how they can get my stuff onto Roku and various other platforms.  Now, bearing in mind that they do correctly identify The Sleaze as a satire site, it should be pretty obvious that a streaming TV platform is hardly the best fit for a site publishing text stories.  (Besides, if I wanted to set up a channel on Roku, I could do it myself - it isn't that difficult in principle).  

In their latest missive they even tell me how The Sleaze's traffic is up 60% so it would be great time to take up their offer.  Which seems counter-intuitive as it clearly indicates that I can grow traffic without anybody's help.  (How they know what my traffic is, I have no idea - the only reliable guide these days are server logs - to which only I have access - as I've found that the various services I use can't accurately discern bots from real visitors and one (a very well known web stats service) apparently can't process top-level VPNs - so it just ignores traffic using them).  But this particular outfit is just one of many claiming that they can get me across more platforms - none of it is anything I can't do for myself, but don't, because I've already tried and found out that it doesn't work.  I was also contacted, out of the blue, by a service concerning The Sleaze's associated podcast, 'After Hours'.  They were asking me to send a link to what I considered my best episode so that they could listen to it.  Which seemed an odd request as they had clearly scraped the email address I use for 'After Hours' from one of the services it is hosted on (most probably Spotify), in which case they know where it is and can listen to any and every episode!  Anyway, after some research, I found that they are a legit service - they apparently match up guests for podcasts.  Of course if they had listened to 'After Hours' or even read the show descriptions, they'd have known that it doesn't use guests, it isn't that kind of podcast.  In fact, I quite literally manufacture my own 'guests' for 'After Hours'.   That said, there are a lot of podcasters out there who have used their services and seem happy with them, so good luck to them.  But I still think that their method of approach was more than a little odd.