I've done SEO in some capacity since 2005, and I mean FULL-TIME. Not part-time, but full-time... This online biz thing has let me live a life that I could have only dreamt of as a kid and OpenAI has literally KILLED SEO for me.
I started working on natural language generation back in 2014 and my peers honestly LAUGHED at me. I was using python and third-party tools like Wordsmith:
https://automatedinsights.com/ and I was doing things that people here are just figuring out now. Creating articles for sports betting just using spreadsheets and stat lines, custom scripts to pitch different betting lines, etc etc...
And when GPT first came out I was pretty impressed and got to use it as a dev with beta access, but what I didn't expect was it going mainstream as ChatGPT and looking at it, I SERIOUSLY think it's killed SEO. To the point that I held a meeting w/ my partners where we literally decided to forgo all organic SEO on Google... and you want to know why?
Because we've been years ahead of everybody for a while now. I don't ask myself about what's working now, but what's going to be working in two years. And we don't see Google being able to handle every webmaster on the planet just pumping out tons of content. They simply don't have the computing power to index it.
Couple that with how consumer search trends have been changing and people are using Google less and relying on other methods more and more each day.
We've literally quit all SEO.
When you're on BHW and people are coming on and can barely do more than copy and paste and they're already talking about generating content that's supposed to actually require expertise to generate you'd have to assume that for every one person asking there are 100 more reading the answer and doing the same thing. And there are countless more out there doing the same using plugins like this.
When the barrier to entry has been lowered to $30 it's time to pick up a new shtick, take your bat and ball, then just go home. Because your favorite fishing spot has been overrun by people who just bought "Fishing for Dummies" and are all trying to do what you did for years.
I can't say what we're doing now, but we've literally had to craft a plan around where we don't see NLG being impactful in the near future, but this?
This is trash... and might seriously destroy organic search as we know it.
Not because something like Bing or You.com is better, but because Google will have to fight even harder to deliver relevant results and consumers aren't going to scroll through pages of ridiculously tedious AI content.
They're just going to look in different ways.
