In the battle for SEO, generating AI slop was always a losing strategy

Those already surfing the internet in the early noughties will remember the Wild West of early search engine optimisation (SEO).

 

When keyword density ruled supreme, marketers and webmasters devised ingenious, if slightly cheeky ideas of how to signal relevance to search engines, without rendering the origin text intended to attract customers into a nonsensical jumble of words.

 

Sending different messages to human readers and search engine crawlers proved to be the most rewarding tactic. One stone-age method involved hiding repetitive keywords from the human eye by displaying them in the same colour as the background.

 

Others crammed title tags and meta descriptions with phrases that barely reflected the actual content. Link farms – websites created solely to provide backlinks to boost a site’s ranking – became rife too.

 

These manipulative practices, which were later labelled as black hat SEO, were then gradually curtailed by Google’s algorithm updates from 2003 onwards.

 

Shrinking opportunities to secure SE visibility

 

Few areas remained intact from the disruptive power of ChatGPT – originally a chatbot that could be prompted to generate, improve or edit text, photos and videos. Web search was no exception either.

 

When ChatGPT first appeared, it was limited by its knowledge cut-off date. However, scepticism about its capabilities faded when browsing was added to its capabilities, as the tool became integrated with Microsoft’s Bing.

 

The move had two major benefits for ChatGPT. Not only did it address the issue of keeping the tool’s knowledge base topical, it also ensured that OpenAI became a key player in the AI-powered search engine space, where AI-native platforms such as Perplexity and Claude had already made a headstart combining real-time web search and transparent citation systems.

 

Whether it’s a simple Google or a generative search, brands must today aim for the top ten rankings to gain visibility.

 

Having broken with its previous functionality that allowed a maximum of 100 search results per page, Google now only displays ten, intensifying competition for the top ten positions where most search journeys begin and end.

While Google declined to comment, the most likely rationale behind this change was to make rank tracking – the scraping of search engine results pages – more cumbersome and costly for SEO tools and thus protect the value of organic traffic.

 

Another, highly plausible reason for the move lies in restricting the ease with which generative AI models – direct competitors to Google’s AI Mode – can scrape and index Google’s search data to train their own systems.

 

Generative search engines impose similar constraints as Google in source count. Although the number of sources varies by query, synthesised answers typically draw on between three to ten references. If a brand’s content is not among them, it remains unseen.

 

So to ensure visibility as a brand, it’s no longer a viable strategy to land in the first 100 results and work one’s way up once the brand has gained a foothold. Instead, new optimisation strategies must be built that can secure brand visibility in both Google and generative searches.

 

Brand mentions and topic authority: the new SEO buzzwords

 

The tips and tricks to pique gen AI-powered search engines’ interest are, however, significantly different from the tried and tested methods used in Google search optimisation. 

 

Generative search engines are largely indifferent to keyword density, backlink volume or sheer output. What they seek is quality, not the kind of slop churned out by content farms that started mushrooming after the release of ChatGPT.

 

Generative search’s increasing focus on authoritative, high-quality content and Google’s Helpful Content and Core updates in 2024 and February this year are now about to turn the tide on low-quality content mass-generated by gen AI with minimal or no human overview whatsoever.

 

Digital content optimised for generative search engines must demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EEAT) – the criteria for topic authority.

 

To be able to aggregate concise and highly relevant answers, generative search engines must rely on meticulously selected, clear sources – with no room for waffle or bombastic, overblown language.

 

They prioritise natural, conversational style answers free of jargon, which are, nevertheless, neatly organised into self-contained, comprehensive paragraphs.

 

The latest studies suggest that content following a clear bullet point structure is 40 per cent more likely to be cited, while direct opening paragraphs, clearly organised sections and verifiable data enhance credibility.

 

Repeated mentions in reputable media and expert commentary further strengthen a brand’s association with a given topic, increasing the likelihood of being surfaced in synthesised responses.

 

A case for a hybrid approach

 

Navigating this transition requires a hybrid mindset. While futureproofing search optimisation requires content that is visible by generative engines, with Google still dominating around 90 per cent of the market, the same text, picture or video should also meet prevailing SEO criteria.

 

Research suggests that overlap between Google’s top rankings and generative citations is limited: a 2025 study found that “only 12 per cent of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 results for the same prompt.”

 

This means that optimising for one channel does not guarantee visibility in the other. Therefore, brands must ideally create content that secure page-one rankings while being also structured and authoritative enough to be incorporated into AI-generated answers.

 

With the growing popularity of voice search, where an unedited snippet or, increasingly, a single synthesised answer replaces a results page, competition will intensify further.

 

In such a fast-paced, highly competitive environment, brands must fight tooth and nail to avoid the fate of news publishers, whose organic traffic started to decline or even collapsed after Google rolled out its AI Overview.

To remain visible and maintain their organic traffic, their mantra should be machine-readable clarity and EEAT.