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Writing for humans is the only SEO trick left

Matthew Guay

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Bad news: AI is eating search. Good news: Writing for humans is the best content for AI.

The web as we knew it, yesterday, looked to the minds of Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a series of connections. Much like research papers are considered more authoritative the more they’re referenced, it dawned on the two young Stanford researchers that web pages, too, were more likely to be authoritative if more people linked to them.<br>Yahoo!, Dogpile, Webcrawler, and other early search engines were directories, with pages of links that other humans thought you’d like to see. But there was bound to be wisdom in the crowds, they guessed. If more people linked to one page when talking about frogs than another, well, that page must be the best frog page on the internet.<br>“The citation (link) graph of the Web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing Web search engines,” their 1996 thesis surmised, and so they set about building what’d become the GoogleBot to read through the web, log and follow every link on every page, and rank search results based, largely, on what was linked to the most.<br>Great content would automatically float to the top, once enough people discovered and linked to it. That was, in many ways, the promise of the web (and, to a degree, of research papers in general).<br>Feeding the beast<br>Thus Google. And what we knew as search engine optimization (or SEO for short) for the past decades has, largely, worked along those lines. There was more to it, of course: A backlink from an educational website accrued more reputation, as did links from older websites, authoritative authors, and more. But largely, if you wrote something and put it on the internet, and more people linked to it than another similar piece, your page would rank higher on Google search results.<br>A (predictable in retrospect) cat-and-mouse game ensued, with the worst actors on the internet buying backlinks or hiding them spuriously in comments or invisible text, in hopes that Google would smile as favorably on those links as it did ones earned through word-of-mouth. Then Google would tweak the algorithm, block some old tricks while adding some new structured data that folks would rush to add to their site to feed the GoogleBot. Sites would rise and fall in rankings on a whim, only after a few months to settle down into a new equilibrium. Again and again, until you develop PTSD from looking at your site’s traffic go up and down, largely outside of your control.<br>It wasn’t like Google would come right out and say ok, here’s how search will work starting next month, prepare your sites accordingly. They’d tweak the algorithm, your traffic would drop, and you’d be left guessing. “For many years, being found was basically figuring out the Google algorithm,” Duda’s CEO Itai Sadan told me in a recent call while talking about shifts in search. “People really focused on trying to get the exact keywords, backlinks, and having authoritative sources pointing to your domain.”<br>When Google said jump, the collective web said “How high?” We the writers of the internet needed Google far more than it needed any one of us individually. So if Google seemed to reward longer pages than shorter ones (were they counting bounce rates? time on page? actual number of words, or unique words? It never was exactly clear), we’d write the longest articles possible. Thus, among other reasons, why every recipe online seemingly has to start with the story of the author’s grandmother and a long-forgotten ingredient and more.<br>Yet it has always been a battle for increasingly scarce resources. What started as a competition to be one of the first ten blue links on a Google search results page turned into a losing battle as ads, answer previews, location details, questions, and more ate up increasingly larger swaths of the Google results page. Then when readers increasingly stop searching and turn to social media for answers instead, the entire value proposition of creating content in the hopes that Google would send you traffic increasingly wasn’t panning out.<br>Then Google itself upended the entire search paradigm it invented. “The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind,” Google’s VP of Search Elizabeth Reid wrote of what the search giant called the search box’s largest upgrade in over 25 years. AI mode, the new generative AI answers at the top of Google search, is now the default content at the top of Google searches; the blue links that we’ve been fighting over for decades are relegated to, often, under the fold.<br>People are “searching more than ever before,” said Reid. Only now, it’s likely they’re searching, getting their...