signal in noise
Google only provides general SEO recommendations, leaving the Internet’s SEO experts to figure out how the search algorithm works. This approach has been fruitful in the past, but not every SEO tip is successful.
The turbulent current state of the Internet, defined by inconsistent traffic and rapidly increasing use of AI, may tempt struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil like content chunking. When traffic is down, people will notice any increase and attribute it to the changes they made. When the opposite happens, well, it’s just a bad day.
The blind faith in new content may seem to be working at first, but at best it’s a sample of Google’s current quirks – the company isn’t building LLMs like split content. Sullivan admits that there may be “marginal cases” where altering the content appears to work.
“Very good. That’s what’s happening right now, but the system could change tomorrow,” he said. “You did all these things specifically for a ranking system, not for a human being because you were trying to be more successful in a ranking system, not focused on a human being. And then the system improves, perhaps the way systems always try to improve, to reward content written for humans. Whatever you did to please this LLM system, it may or may not work, that may not continue for a long time.”
As long as publishers can point to positive impacts, we probably won’t see the denialism go away. However, Google feels that cutting content for LLM is not a viable future for SEO.
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