Insights
The Great Search Shakeup
I have no doubt you've seen the numerous posts about the volatility in Search, the 'listicle' debate, and sites being punished for using AI-generated content at scale.
Search ranking volatility is so prevalent that Barry Schwartz stated, "I mean, I can post about this every day but now I am at the point of just doing it weekly."
Google does push out smaller core updates or other updates to its search algorithms without announcing them, so perhaps this accounts for some of what we're seeing?
It appears there are more algorithmic actions (which are harder to diagnose and often get lumped together with core update volatility) and manual actions.
Google takes steps to protect itself
Google, Bing, and Microsoft have long had systems in place to demote sites abusing their content policies, but people persist in trying to manipulate search results with spammy tactics.
The use (abuse) of AI tools seems to have accelerated these practices, but AI also makes it easier for Google to detect them. (Plus, Google hates content at scale because it costs them money to crawl those pages).
Google’s entire business depends on trust. If users stop trusting results because they’re cluttered with low-value pages aimed at gaming search, then Google risks losing advertisers and their revenue suffers.
When Google's quality safeguards are triggered, they will take action to protect the search environment.
Whatever is going on, it's clear that Google is actively protecting its assets and I predict examples of SEO 'gone wrong' will keep showing up online.
Lily Ray went further, saying, "My money is on a major shakeup in the next few months that will do a lot of damage."
A positive note
How we measure 'success' in Search may have changed, but the core SEO fundamentals haven't.
Google still rewards the same things it did prior to AI engines: crawlability, high-quality content, E-E-A-T, and sound technical infrastructure, so stay focused on those when you perform any content or SEO experiments.
Related: The real risk of AI-generated content
Quoteworthy
Google's index is a quality filter
Indexing is now a quality signal, not a technical step. If your pages sit in "Discovered, currently not indexed" or "Crawled, currently not indexed," that's Google saying the content doesn't meet its threshold. Resubmitting won't fix it.
The irony is brutal. We spent 20 years optimizing for Google's ranking algorithm. Now we optimize just to get into the index. With AI search pulling from indexed, authoritative sources, the gap between indexed and not indexed has never been wider.
—Jan Willem-Bobbink
Jan's full Linkedin post is worth reading.
Related: 98% of the cited pages in Bing AI Answers are not indexed in Google because of page quality issues.
OpenAI banks on SEO
Search Engine Land published a piece last week about ChatGPT's dominance in SEO.
What I noticed were the jobs OpenAI advertise because they tell us plenty about their approach to SEO and content.
Their recent ads include:
- A content strategist with SEO experience: $310K to $393K
- An SEO lead: $255K to $320K
When a company valued in the hundreds of billions is paying between $255K and $393K for SEO and content hires, that tells you something about how they view (and value) these skills.
They're not doing this for fun. OpenAI is building organic acquisition infrastructure and that should matter to anyone who has been told SEO is on its way out.
Anthropic also advertised an SEO lead in the past month as well as a copy and content lead: $255K - $320K.
These huge corporations know that SEO and content are essential for growth, conversion rate optimization, and product discoverability.
The story here is that SEO investment at the highest levels of tech is accelerating, not decreasing. You could use this as a conversation topic with clients, because it's hard to argue with the world's most-watched AI company banking on SEO!
Google is watching you
"Google has literally PATENTED a system for psychologically manipulating SEOs into revealing their tactics, and most people in this industry have never even heard of it."
That's from a LinkedIn post by Charles Floate.
I'm sure there are plenty of Google patents we've never seen, but this one states Google will intentionally fake your ranking changes to see how you react.
The document says (more than once), "The spammer's behavior may be observed to detect signs that the document is being subjected to rank-modifying spamming."
The point here is not to overreact—or react too quickly—to ranking fluctuations. We know that 'good' SEO sometimes takes a little time to show results.
Related: Google might replace your poorly-designed e-commerce landing page with an AI-generated one. Credit to Brandon Lazovic for uncovering this.
SE Roundtable summarizes how it works.
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