I recently talked to a friend of mine who's in the leads business. He said that AI has things "feeling like its 2010 all over again" when it comes to organic SEO and paid ads/arbitrage.
I have a feeling that Google knows and they are OK with it....for now.
The irony is that while AI slop is gaming Google, the AI models themselves (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) are surprisingly resistant to it. We tested ~150 B2B tools and the correlation between Google rank and LLM recommendation was 0.08. Basically zero.
So you end up with two diverging discovery layers: Google, increasingly polluted by cheap AI content, and LLMs, which seem to weight structured data, documentation quality, and mentions on high-trust platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow) way more than traditional SEO signals.
The real question is whether Google fixes this before users just default to asking ChatGPT instead of searching.
I suspect almost everyone who is savvy is already using LLMs instead of Google, I have been for awhile. (If you only read the summary from google and don’t actually click on results links you are also using an LLM)
Content production cost went to near zero so the volume exploded. Google's incentive to actually fix this is weaker than people think, because ad revenue works the same whether you click through AI slop or a real article.