Right there with you because SEO has evolved to a place that incentivizes a lot of bad behavior, and the end result made search worse for everyone. I’m personally less interested in “gaming” LLMs than understanding what they already do. From my side, this feels closer to observability than optimization when trying to see whether AI systems are even reading or understanding a site, not how to trick them into ranking something low quality.

The Raymond Chen analogy brings up something interesting. If everyone forces themselves on top, the signal collapses. My hope is that AI systems end up rewarding genuinely useful, well explained things rather than creating another arms race...but I’m not naive about how incentives tend to play out.

A huge concern of mine has been the introduction of ads. Once ads enter LLM responses, it’s hard not to ask whether we’re just rebuilding the same incentive structure that broke search in the first place.