One of the most-read SEO voices of the past 20 years published something unexpected last week, and the community is still reacting.
Rand Fishkin published a LinkedIn post he described as one he almost never writes, opening with the statement that it felt necessary. His core argument: ignore traffic. Make inimitable products. Shift priorities away from great content on your own site and toward great marketing on the platforms where your audience pays attention.
Reddit a https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/ has a full thread dedicated to this post. The reactions range from full agreement to sharp disagreement, with the most nuanced responses pointing out that the advice applies differently depending on your business model.
If you monetize through affiliate links or display ads, traffic is your product. If you sell something else, traffic is just a means to an end.
The Underlying Argument
SEO news in June 2026 points to a truth that many founders resist: search is no longer a neat list of blue links, and teams who still treat SEO as a blog-only checklist are already late. Small teams can still win. Start with money pages, fix crawl and indexing issues, refresh pages already getting impressions, and build tight topic clusters instead of publishing random blog posts.
Fishkin’s argument is not that SEO is dead. It is that if you are optimizing for traffic rather than outcomes, you are playing the wrong game as the rules change.
Su X a https://x.com/search?q=Rand+Fishkin+content+traffic+2026 the discussion is ongoing. Several SEO professionals are pushing back with data showing that well-executed content strategies are still generating strong organic revenue. Others are agreeing that the marginal return on generic informational content is falling fast.
The Quora thread at https://www.quora.com/Is-blogging-still-worth-it-in-2026 captures both sides of this argument with concrete examples. Worth reading before you decide whether to shift your content budget toward platform-native content or double down on your own site.
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