Hiring managers are watching something uncomfortable happen in interview rooms right now . Candidates arrive with the right credentials, the right vocabulary, the right tool stack on their résumés, and then someone asks them to reason through a problem out loud, and the room goes quiet in the wrong way. Not in the thoughtful kind of way, but the empty kind that tells you the person across the table has never actually had to think through a hard problem on their own. And research is converging on the same conclusion. Microsoft , the Swiss Business School , and TestGorilla have all documented the same pattern independently: Heavy AI reliance correlates directly with declining critical thinking , and the effect is strongest in younger, less experienced practitioners. This isn’t a technology story so much as a cognition story, and the SEO industry is living a version of it in slow motion.…