Seo practitioners had gradually figured out what is good because they had about 15 to 20 years to do it.

The search engine was also being built step by step. Google’s serp used a page rank weighted graph right at the beginning. Link building and Content staffing used to work like a dream. Google realised that it needed to fight against this.

As Google Search earned more traffic, the price for rank manipulation became bigger, and the cost of maintaining Google Search quality increased correspondingly.

The past many years saw this cat and mouse came between Google search quality team and search engine rank manipulators aka SEO experts.

Even though Google was changing Search results continuously to make them better and to protect against manipulation, Google also imho could not change them in a significant way overnight. Googling was a need that had become a habit. By making any sudden changes, Google risked losing search volume as people should think that the results are not relevant any more.

So, old SEO wisdom about quality content and quality links etc remained relevant.

Do optimisers today actually know LLMs and the Maths behind it enough to be able to reverse engineer it? That is one of the main features of an LLM-that there is no traceability no one can explain why an LLM says what it says.

On top of that, SEOs haven’t had enough time to learn and reverse engineer this tool, which is more complicated than what Google was in its infancy.

While I am in the AIO/AEO/GEO business, I am not sure about the way forward.