Signal in noise
Google only provides general SEO recommendations, leaving the Internet’s SEO experts to engage in analytics and read tea leaves to evaluate how the search algorithm works. This approach has been successful in the past, but not every SEO suggestion is a success.
The current tumultuous state of the Internet, defined by inconsistent traffic and rapidly expanding use of AI, could prompt struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil, like content bundling. When traffic is sparse, people monitor any increases and attribute it to the changes they’ve made. When the opposite happens, well, it’s just a bad day.
The new content superstition may seem to work at first, but at best it’s an artifact of Google’s current quirks: The company doesn’t build LLMs to like split content. Sullivan admits that there may be “edge cases” in which content segmentation appears to work.
“Great. That’s what’s happening now, but tomorrow the systems could change,” he said. “You did all these things that you did specifically for a ranking system, not for a human being because you were trying to be more successful in the ranking system, without staying focused on the human being. And then the systems get better, probably in the same way that systems are always trying to get better, to reward content written for humans. All these things you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, might not last in the long run.”
We probably won’t see chunking disappear as long as publishers can point to a positive effect. However, Google seems to think that cutting up content for LLMs is not a viable future for SEO.
