AI in search is the medicine SEO needs
Finally, things are shifting with search quality, and it's about time.
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For years, SEO felt like trying to run a legitimate business in the Wild West. Honest brands with quality products and authentic stories were beaten by sites that played every SEO trick. Big brands with actual reputations to protect couldn't fight back with the same tactics their sketchy competitors used. I have worked with brands that couldn’t even obtain approval to use slang terms relevant to their industry or to create the most basic competitor comparison pages that their competitors were already using against them.
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In the early days of SEO, when ranking felt like a lawless free-for-all. You could stuff a page with "best xyz" without any quality signals, and it could still rank very highly with a thousand sketchy backlinks from a link buying marketplace
The system rewarded the wrong behavior because algorithms with defined sets of rules controlled the search results. SEO efforts could utilize those rule-based algorithms to manipulate their sites, while legitimate businesses were left hoping a new update would diminish their competitors who did not adhere to the same quality standards.
AI erases inefficiencies
Finally, things are shifting with search quality, and it's about time. AI algorithms that replicate human thought are becoming increasingly intelligent because they mimic human thought processes. In the same way a human can sniff out bad tactics, these algorithms can do it too.
Just like a human can incorporate subconscious brand signals when assessing a brand’s footprint, AI will do the same. It may one day be possible for Google’s Waymo to provide brand insights from the terrabytes of footage it collects as it autonomously drives down the street. A brand’s streetside billboard could have algorithmic impact.
Search engines aren't following rigid rules anymore; they're using AI to detect patterns, understand user intent, and spot manipulation, which means that even if the rules exist, they change dynamically.
No set of SEO rules guarantees results
When any human SEO can look at an output of backlinks and immediately know what is earned, bought, or pure spam, AI can and will do the same. Just like humans will have less trust for a website if it just doesn’t feel legitimate, AI can also identify those same subconscious patterns.
In both of those cases, traditional search algorithms were at a disadvantage because things like domain authority didn’t have an “it depends” factor applied to them. And, for spam, there were known patterns that were baked into the algorithm, but they couldn’t account for everything, hence the SEO complaints about being outranked by spam.
AI doesn't just count keywords or backlinks. For now, they pattern match, but eventually, with enough training data, they will analyze how users behave on your site. Google already includes clickstream data from the SERP; why would it ignore these additional signals that will be available to it from Chrome and beyond?
Google's new major algorithm updates are no longer one-time fixes; they're AI-driven systems that continually learn and evolve. They're getting better at distinguishing between sites that provide genuine value and those that manipulate ranking factors.
The result is that those gray-hat operators who built their success on hacks and loopholes are finding that their old playbook no longer works.
Modern algorithms track engagement metrics that are hard to fake. Metrics like: How long do people stay on your page? Do they find what they're looking for? Do they trust your site enough to make a purchase? These are signals that reveal whether your content actually helps people, not just whether you've optimized for the right keywords.
It’s great for users and the ecosystem
There's also a psychological shift happening. People have clicked on too many garbage search results to keep falling for the same tricks. When search engines allow spammy sites to dominate, it erodes trust in the entire system. Users became skeptical of everything they found, even legitimate brands.
As AI improves at filtering out irrelevant content, more users will begin to trust search results again. When people trust the search engine, they trust the brands it chooses to highlight. SEO transforms from feeling like snake oil to becoming a genuine requirement
New competitive advantage
This shift is creating a different kind of competitive advantage. The old tricks were shortcuts that anyone could buy or copy. Now those shortcuts are becoming dead ends. If you're already focused on creating genuinely helpful content, you're ahead of everyone else. If you are making product experiences with Product-Led SEO, you are way ahead.
Don't get me wrong, SEO isn't getting easier. If anything, the standards are higher now. AI doesn't tolerate lazy content, even from legitimate brands. You can't just publish something and expect it to rank because you're a big brand. You most definitely can’t get away with pumping out hundreds or even thousands of AI written pages that don’t help users.
Competition is where it should be
What makes this moment so exciting is that the competition is finally about what it should have always been about: who can best serve the user. You're no longer trying to outsmart link farms or compete with content farms. You're competing on user experience, and genuine value.
The lazy sites and agencies are still out there, and they'll continue to try new tricks. (Hello GEO) Fortunately, the technology is evolving faster than their tactics. Every model update makes it harder for them to hide behind manipulation and easier for quality content to surface.
We're witnessing a fundamental shift in how search engines work and what they reward. The gray area between legitimate optimization and manipulation is becoming increasingly blurred. The algorithms and models are improving at identifying and promoting content that genuinely serves users.
For brands that have been playing by the rules all along, this is the moment you've been waiting for. The noise is finally clearing, and your quality product is getting the recognition it deserves. The search engines are handling the cleanup, so you can focus on what you do best: serving your customers and building your business.
The user wins
This isn't just good news for SEO, it's excellent news for the internet as a whole. When quality content is rewarded and spam is filtered out, everyone benefits. Users find better information, the right tactics are rewarded and the web becomes a more trustworthy place.
For SEO operators who have been waiting to cut through the noise and win because they care about users, the future has never been brighter.
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There is a huge gap between the time that SEO was ruled by blackhat behavior and the dawn of AI being "medicine". And during this time, what helped was being a hardworking SEO and algorithm improvements by search engines. These are the medicines that SEO needed to combat blackhat techniques, not AI. The more people who consistently produce good quality content and implement proper SEO strategies are the ones to shove the bad guys down and off the radar of search algorithms. AI produces a lot of inaccurate content that is essentially scraped and stolen from sites that have worked hard to put it there. Because there is a lot of inaccurate information that is published on the internet. AI is actually quite damaging to SEO because of this fact.
I agree it’s good medicine for SEOs. But anyone with SEO in their job description is still trying to find every optimization edge they can right now. Just look at the growth of Profound, Athena, and other GEO optimization tools.