SeO what?
A new algo dropped from Google and it appears to have the world of SEO in a tizzy.
So what?
If you’re like me, you’ve learned to recoil at the thought of playing by the rules of someone else’s game instead of serving your readers.
And besides, isn’t AI taking over from search?
Well, kinda…
There are a few notable new challenges that have arisen with this update, in combination with industry deals, that should have bloggers and newsletter publishers more concerned than usual.
- Google will be the foundational AI tool for iOS starting this year. Search and AI will be dominated by two companies that do not rely solely on AI for revenue. The majority of readers will consume according to their rules.
- The new updates do a lot of good, clearing out AI slop from search results. However, that slop was trained on your original work. The lines are starting to blur. If you look in Google Search Console, you may be surprised to find how many of your pages have been de-indexed.
- FAQs are out as a landing page tactic that worked for customers and Google alike. Google’s models have learned all they need from these, I guess.
- Posting a newsletter that links to your own posts is more likely to be flagged as duplicate content and de-indexed as well. This is alarming if it means Google has adapted to Substack-style gated content as the standard.
- Link posts (the original form of blogging from the mid-90s that’s still popular with many writers in tech) are now de-indexed to the point that it has become, in my experience, a near ban.
My biggest concern is not that these individual pages are de-indexed. That’s a minor problem for SEO troubleshooters and there’s a lot of nuance around why a page is de-indexed.
My biggest concern for publishers is the overall outcome of these changes when taken together. The value of your site is being diminished in the eyes of the dominant search and AI companies, making it difficult to reach new readers.
When models crave a very specific kind of training, it can be tempting for Google to take the easiest path and exclude content that isn’t an exact match for its AI needs — regardless of what it means for the reader.
They can no longer claim trust is a meaningful signal.
That can’t end well.
What can we do?
I don’t know your individual situation or audience, but I think we can turn all of this into a positive.
Link posts are out? Fine, put them in your newsletter. The world needs more editors in the era of AI blandness and link-posting bloggers are those editors. Don’t give up on this format, but make sure it isn’t used against you.
Publicly posting all your newsletters (that link to pages on your site) is out? Fine, make your newsletter archives a more meaningful destination for subscribers only, with deeper archives than what’s publicly available, easy search, downloadable ebooks based on topic round-ups, forums for Q&A, and AI chatbots trained on all the content you’ve created.
Keep making your site more valuable for your subscribers, and let Google de-value what it wants in the name of AI.
We’ll see which strategy survives in the long run.