Is traditional SEO officially a waste of time for early-stage startups?

I’ve been analyzing top agency and SaaS websites over the last few months, and the data is pretty staggering. Traditional SEO (optimizing for Google's passive crawler, building backlinks, keyword stuffing) feels completely disconnected from how users are actually finding software now through generative engines.

We noticed that sites ranking #1 on traditional Google are often completely ignored by agents like OpenAI Operator or Claude because of "Agentic Friction" (heavy DOM bloat, lack of semantic tags, missing JSON-LD).

For founders launching today: Are you still investing in traditional SEO, or have you completely shifted your strategy to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

(P.S. We just launched GEO Stellar today to actually measure this friction—would love to know what frameworks you're all using to stay visible to AI!)