"I've been working in organic search since 2016. I remember the golden age when a well-optimized page with decent backlinks could print traffic. I remember watching our rankings and traffic drop after the Helpful Content Update (HCU), and scrambling to follow Google's guidance for recovery. And I still remember the process of coming to terms with the fact that search traffic wouldn't be returning to pre-HCU levels."
"LLM-generated answers need to be trustworthy and valuable. But there's a problem that every AI company faces and few SEOs acknowledge. Running deep content analysis on every webpage on the internet for every query isn't feasible. The computational cost and time required would be astronomical. So instead, LLMs use heuristics: educated shortcuts. Take ChatGPT's citations for instance. When it doesn't use training data alone, it searches the web using existing search engines. What ranks on page one is what it scans to determine citations."
LLM-generated answers must be trustworthy and valuable. Computational costs prevent deep content analysis of every webpage for every query, so LLMs rely on heuristics and shortcuts. When LLMs use web sources, they typically scan high-ranking search results, making search engine rankings a credibility signal for LLM citations. Traditional SEO practices remain important, but the focus must shift from chasing short-term hacks to building long-term authority, relevance, and trustworthiness. Sustainable visibility requires investment in authoritative content, reliable signals, and systemic strategies rather than following weekly optimization trends.
Read at Forbes
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