Are we creating a new problem for AI search by forgetting the lessons we’ve already learned from SEO?

Why would an AI search provider have a long-term incentive to trust information that a brand deliberately keeps separate from its public-facing website?

This is a question I’ve been coming back to as more conversations about optimizing for AI search seem to involve creating content specifically for agents, rather than people.

The logic is understandable: AI systems need information, sometimes in formats or structures that aren’t particularly useful to a human visitor. If we can make that information easier for agents to consume, surely that’s a good thing?

Yes, but there is a significant difference between making information more accessible to AI and creating an alternative version of your website, or even your brand, that exists primarily to influence what AI systems say about you.

We’ve spent decades dealing with versions of this problem in SEO, and I’m not convinced we’re taking those lessons seriously enough.

Anyone who has worked in SEO for long enough will have seen search engines evolve in response to the means used to manipulate them.

Early SEO was full of practices designed to influence search engines rather than help users: hidden text, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, cloaking, and eventually increasingly sophisticated content and link manipulation.

Search engines didn’t develop rules against these practices because they disliked SEOs (mostly). They did so because allowing websites to falsify relevance and authority undermined the quality of their results.

This is a very condensed version of things, and the reality was far more complicated, but the pattern is important.

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