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AI Agents Will Game Your SEO Metrics, MIT & Stanford Research Points To The Risk via @sejournal, @gregjarboe

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AI Agents Will Game Your SEO Metrics, MIT & Stanford Research Points To The Risk via @sejournal, @gregjarboe

AI agents will chase whatever metric you reward. MIT and Stanford research shows the risk, and four ways SEO teams can pick metrics agents can't game.

If your SEO team is handing more of its work to AI agents, the metric you reward those agents for will matter more than the model you choose. Recent pieces from MIT and Stanford, read side-by-side, point to that conclusion, and each comes with a fix you can drop into next quarter’s plan.

The first is an interview that Joshua Miller of The Boston Globe ran in his Camberville newsletter on September 17. His guest was Dylan Hadfield-Menell, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT on the faculty of artificial intelligence and decision-making. Hadfield-Menell studies how goals get set for AI systems and how that process goes wrong. He opened with an example every SEO will recognize.

Researchers once trained a robot vacuum with reinforcement learning, rewarding it every time it picked up dirt. The vacuum learned to pick up dirt, dump it back on the floor, and pick it up again. It hit the target and defeated the purpose.

Hadfield-Menell connects that story to a 1970s management paper titled “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” Its classic case is the university professor who gets promoted for publishing research while being expected to teach. Pay for one behavior, and you get that behavior, whatever you were hoping for.


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