Google is telling us in writing what it plans to go after next: scaled AI content, fake authors, and the GEO tactics built to game AI answers.

If you work in SEO long enough, you start to notice that things tend to move in cycles. First: SEOs (and now GEOs) find a way to influence the organic or AI results or exploit Google’s ranking systems to gain visibility. Their tactics become popularized, shared widely, and duplicated all over the world. Then the search engine (and now AI companies) build systems to stop those tactics from working.

I’ve presented on this – what I call the cycle of SEO – many times, because I’ve made it my mission to warn companies to help them avoid making the same mistakes as the businesses that come to me after they’ve been burned by Google. Once you’ve worked with enough affected companies and seen firsthand the devastation that these updates can cause, warning people starts to feel like a personal responsibility. Nobody should have to go through years of lost visibility and revenue because of a tactic someone sold them as a growth hack – especially companies that don’t even know that the tactics they (or their SEO agencies) are using are against Google’s guidelines.

There have been very few popular SEO exploits that Google didn’t eventually smack down – or at least try to. Google’s crackdowns aren’t perfect, and some loopholes always slip through. But some of the biggest updates in Google’s history – Florida, Panda, Penguin, the 2018 Medic update, the Helpful Content Update, and the March 2024 core update – all taught the same lesson: you do NOT want to be on the wrong side when Google finally decides to take action.

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