Repeating the Search Meta Pattern

AI Search (GEO/AEO) does have a spam problem. This WAS inevitable.SEOs knew it - we’ve seen it before. The sense of staring at the future of search whilst also looking back 10+ years is uncanny as it is frustrating.

There is a Meta-Pattern forming in our world

• New surface(s) appears - seemingly un-policed opportunities are there for the enterprising/exploitative. Often thought of as “gold rushes”, but invocations of lawless wild west are helpful if a little overplayed.

• Exploitation scales - Effective tactics uncovered, shared and commodified.

• Monetisation - commercial pressures build, avenues of ad-selling are explored. A new balance of ads vs user experience is a tightrope that needs to be trodden

• Action (algorithm updates) needed to recalibrate trust - Spam/adversarial tactics risk chasing away users/advertisers, which cannot be left to fester.

• Metrics and data - Provided to advertisers, website owners, researchers and the like, data has to be shared to help understand the value of this. 

There are possibly as many differences as there are similarities - in case I get called out for overfitting. But the key difference here are that there’s already an industry ready to scale, commodify and exploit. Not even Google was totally ready, but where are AI Companies/LLM researchers? Everyone is being forced to learn in public.

Whilst Google (Gemini), are still learning how to make effective AI search like the rest of us, but they do have A LOT of real spam-fighting experience. This makes them the foremost in curating/cultivating less spam filled results. But we in the SEO industry know this isn’t “one and done”, but a constant escalation.

As Dan notes even Google/Gemini https://dejan.ai/blog/ai-spam/ are riddled with spam and they have the head start.

• This pattern is not that AI search is broken.

• This pattern is that every new distribution surface becomes contested territory.

The only constant is that trust must be defended faster than exploitation scales.