The question hides two different questions, and they have opposite answers.
If you mean writing articles that explain things, and hoping people find them and eventually buy something, then largely no, not any more. AI Overviews now appear on around 92% of informational queries. On hybrid ones, the sort that mix a question with a place or a price, it reaches 97%. Your explainer is being summarised above the results and the click is going nowhere.
If you mean ranking for the queries where somebody is trying to buy, the answer is yes, and the case is stronger than it was two years ago. AI Overviews turn up on roughly 8% of commercial queries and 5% of transactional ones.
Read those four numbers together, because they are the whole strategy.
Google’s AI answers have taken almost all of the traffic that was never going to convert, and almost none of the traffic that was.
The part of SEO that actually died
The blog post titled “what is GST registration” or “how does term insurance work” was the backbone of small business content marketing for a decade. Write enough of them, rank, capture people early, nurture them down to a sale.
That model is finished, and it is finished for a straightforward mechanical reason rather than a mysterious algorithmic one. Somebody asking what a thing is wants a paragraph, not a website. Google now gives them the paragraph. There is no reason for them to click, and no amount of better writing changes the fact that their question was fully answered before your link appeared.
I would not spend a rupee chasing that traffic in 2026.
The thing worth noticing is that this traffic was never very good anyway. People at the “what is” stage of a question are months from buying, if they ever buy. The industry spent years congratulating itself on traffic that converted at a fraction of a percent, and the loss of it is being mourned more than it deserves.
The part that is barely touched
Now the other side.
For local intent, the picture is remarkably stable. Local-intent searches show a local pack around 93% of the time while an AI Overview appears on only about 15%. Somebody searching for a service in their area still gets a map with businesses on it, and getting into that map is the same work it always was.
I should be honest that the research disagrees on the exact figures here. One widely quoted study puts AI Overviews on 68% of local searches against local packs on 39%, which is close to the reverse. The difference almost certainly comes from what each study counts as a local search, since a question like “how long does an eye exam take near me” is informational wearing a local costume, and behaves like an informational query.
The pattern underneath the disagreement holds up though. Question-shaped searches get AI answers. Buying-shaped searches get results you can rank in.
So what should you actually write
The rule that follows is simple enough to apply this afternoon.
Write the pages nearest the money. Service pages that name what you do, where you do it and what it costs. Comparison pages for the decision somebody makes right before buying. Location pages if you genuinely serve those areas. Pages that answer “who should I hire for this” rather than “what is this”.
Stop writing the encyclopaedia. If a page could be fully answered in a paragraph by a machine, it will be.
This is a smaller SEO programme than the one agencies were selling in 2022, and a better one. Fewer pages, closer to revenue, each worth considerably more.
The honest numbers for India
An SEO retainer in India runs roughly Rs 10,000 to Rs 40,000 a month depending on competition and scope.
Google Ads for the same business typically runs Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000 a month, with cost per click somewhere between Rs 5 and Rs 20 on informational terms and Rs 50 to Rs 300 on the high-intent commercial ones you actually want. Legal, finance and real estate need considerably more, often Rs 50,000 and up, before anything happens at all.
Timing is where the real difference sits. SEO needs three to six months before meaningful movement, and eight to twelve months to reach page one for competitive terms in a metro market. Ads work in a fortnight.
The reported pattern across Indian small businesses is that ads win the first one to three months comfortably, and SEO wins over twelve to twenty-four months by a wide margin.
Who should not do SEO
I would rather be useful than encouraging, so here are the cases where the answer is genuinely no.
If you need customers this quarter to keep the lights on. SEO is the wrong instrument for a cash flow emergency. Run ads, take the worse unit economics, survive, and start SEO when you can afford to wait.
If you cannot sustain six months of spend. This is the real reason most small business SEO fails and it has nothing to do with the algorithm. The work gets abandoned in month four, right before the payback window, and the money spent buys nothing at all. Six months of committed budget or do not start.
If your category has no search volume. If you are selling something genuinely new, nobody is searching for it yet, and SEO cannot capture demand that does not exist. That is an outbound and content distribution problem instead.
The framing that gets people into trouble
Treating this as a choice between SEO and ads.
They operate on different clocks. Ads buy you customers now at a price. SEO buys you customers later at a declining price, and the asset keeps working after you stop paying, which is the thing ads never do.
The sequencing that actually works for an Indian small business with a real budget: run ads immediately on your highest-intent commercial keywords, build SEO on those same keywords in parallel, and as organic rankings arrive over months three to six, move ad budget off the terms you now rank for and onto new ones.
That is not a compromise between two camps. It is using each for the window where it is genuinely better.
If you are working out what any of this should cost you, I went through the real pricing ranges in India separately, including why the quotes vary so wildly.
If you’d like to think through whether your category justifies it, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch. My notes on SEO cover the detail.