James Laughlin, an SEO practitioner with 20 years in the field, argues SEO is now obsolete and authority matters more for AI-powered search. He warns that language models optimize for what users want, not what's true, which could fuel confirmation bias and radicalization at scale.
About 20 years ago.
A 10th grade education.
When a douchebag like me gets on a podcast like yours and start telling everybody how to game the system, they have to make an algorithm change. I started my career in SEO 20 years ago, and so I'm a, I'm a proponent. I'm not, I'm not here to just shit on an industry arbitrarily. I have a 10th grade education case. So I'm going to explain this like an idiot and then somebody who's smarter than me can come and explain it in a better way. SEO has already experienced a degree of forced obsolescence. SEO is so beyond irrelevant that it's lackable. What ends up happening is the most important thing that can, that you can do for yourself from an EO perspective is begin to establish yourself as an authority. The LLMs are trying to. And this is the thing that's horrifying. It's actually really scary. They're not trying to deliver you the quote, unquote, best information that's peer reviewed, double blind, scientifically backed. They want to give you whatever you want. It's horrible because the echo chamber we're about to build for humanity, it's inbuilt confirmation bias to a degree that will never allow for conflicting information like World War I. In terms of radicalization, this is probably a very dangerous thing. Instantly, dude, like the whole world is about to be instantly radicalized.
