Insights
Are You Partying Like It's 2010?
Ryan McMillan
I’m writing this reluctantly, because my LinkedIn feed has become a literal trough of AI slop, and someone has to say it.
Well, it might as well be me.
If you think your SEO/GEO strategy isn’t one model update away from tanking your website, international wars and oil prices might not be your biggest commercial risk.
Just a few months ago, many LI posts were of the “SEO is dead” variety. Now, based on my feed, posts are primarily by international SEO influencers, defibrillated back to life by the paddles of the ‘AI content generator’.
The prescription for SEO success is apparently simple: publish more, publish faster. Get 25 pieces of content on your website in a month instead of 5 targeted, high-quality ones.
Then watch your traffic roll in.
This might work — I’ve seen website analytics results that prove it does.
The problem is, we don’t know for how long.
And, based on the websites that I’ve seen tank after Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ update in 2023, their traffic hasn’t ever recovered.
If your fortunes change, there may not be an easy way back.
The 2010s were the glorious days of Black Hat SEO.
For the uninitiated, Black Hat SEO was the art of exploiting search engine algorithms to rank higher than you deserved.
It was hacky, cool, and with a sprinkle of being a total badass. Shady online communities were formed, sharing tactics to game the system.
For instance, you could write "life insurance" 50 times in white text on a white background at the bottom of a webpage to rank for the term. Or ‘spin up’ new websites in a day, pointing thousands of links at them to rocket to the top of Google overnight.
PBNs (private blog networks) were built — massive webs of interlinked sites engineered to manufacture website credibility out of nothing.
These tactics were effective but also completely illegitimate. Google’s guidelines (who really used other search engines?) were clear: create high-quality content experiences.
Black Hat was about finding the loopholes and essentially doing the opposite in order to profit.
I know people who operated in that space. Do you know what happened to them after Google's Panda Algorithm update (which fundamentally changed how websites were ranked) dropped on February 24, 2011? They didn't have a business anymore.
The Penguin update followed in April 2012 and killed most of what was left of the spam playbook.
Black Hatters made a lot of money. But they didn't build anything durable.
In 2026, you can influence how models cite and surface your brand in weeks.
You can publish 25 pieces of content instead of 5. You can run programmatic AI content plays at 10,000-URL scale. You can even buy "get cited by ChatGPT" consulting packages. And you can stuff Reddit and Quora threads because you know that’s where the models pull from.
Some of it works. But it only works right now. Anyone vying to rank in an LLM is at the whim of the LLM’s decisions to rank it. So all of it is just one model refresh, policy shift, retrieval update — whatever you want to call it — away from evaporating.
Over time, LLMs will get better at what search engines eventually got better at: rewarding content that adds something to the ecosystem rather than echoing it. That’s first-party data, original research, actual expertise from reputable authors. Basically, anything that’s difficult to produce and expensive to fake.
New opportunities shouldn’t be ignored. But the winners of 2012 weren’t the people who rode the black hat wave the longest. They were the people who moved first towards where content is headed, not where it is today.
Use AI for your plumbing — like building workflows, analysis, systemising deliverables. But if you want to build a durable, viable business, you have to add something original to the ecosystem.
In LinkedIn feeds created by AI, the only thing that can truly stand out is a human.
