Google: Don't make "bite-sized" content for LLMs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I don't think that it is a good strategy, but it makes sense, especially for content that you want to be scraped (like product pages).
The SEO solution is to be in the list of results that the search engines return to the LLM. That list is relatively small.
You don't even get into the "LLM evaluation" stage unless you're one of the top X number of results for the LLM search. Being that the LLM search uses the search engines and not the LLM, it's fatal if you don't score high enough for the search engines. Whatever makes your results top hits for the search engine is what it will take to get the LLMs to notice you in the future.
ie - for now, OpenAI is dependent on the search engines when doing research. So it's actually the search engines that represent the gatekeeper.
SEO practices are mainly guesses and superstition. The principles of making a well structured website were known in 2000 and haven't changed.
But your well structured site will be ignored both by search engines and by llms. And that is all there is to it, really.
Robots for thee but not for me.
- he has 1955 pages of content all created between october 2025 and jan 2026
Search results are noticeably poor and the top links are always obviously gamed.
Either Google have stopped combatting the gamed pages they claim they want to de-rank, or their execution does not match their intent at all.
Search has been getting worse from the SEO arms race for at least two decades. In the last few years this has accelerated due to machines producing more convincing slop.
Searches absolutely have not been surfacing the same quality of content as they did when Google first developed PageRank.
Moreover, beyond that, it used to be that I could find what I was looking for easily, the google search is now noticeably worst.
Reminds me of that instagram caption: “No problem! Here's the information about the Mercedes CLR GTR:[…]”. Wouldn’t be surprised if every other website returned that too nowadays.
I’m excitingly awaiting what the next SEO exploit of the exploit of the exploit will be
Of course when you start taking the browser apart you can heavily optimize such process.
At some point you could even get so frustrated with existing APIs..
> So you end up with short paragraphs, sometimes with just one or two sentences
The average number of sentences per paragraph in the article is... 2.4
I am not even kidding but there is a guy who viewed twitter, found that table salt Aka sodium chloride is "bad for health" and the medical study recommends that if thats the case then they should less the consumption
But he ends up asking chatgpt and it somehow recommends him the idea of sodium bromide instead of sodium chloride and it really ended up having him have so many hallucinations and so many other problems that the list goes on.
I found this from a video, definitely worth a watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell
Table salt is dangerous if yuo intake really too much of it and also if you intake too less of it. Water is the same way so Moderation's they key
Everything in moderation.
Basically this guy starts with this fringe conspiracy theory belief that chloride ions are bad for you and asks a question to Chatgpt about alternatives to chloride ions and gets bromide as the next halogen.
We don't know this for certain, but when that video came out I tried it in ChatGPT and it this is what I could replicate about chloride bromide recommendations. It doesn't suggest eating sodium bromide but it will tell you bromide can fit where chloride is. The paper that discusses the case also mentions this.
> However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do. [0]
Of course this kind of bad question asking makes you fall short of the no free lunch theorem / XY Problem. Like if I ask you: "what is the best metal? Name one only." and you suggest "steel" then I reveal that actually I needed to conduct electricity so that is a terrible option.
> We don't know this for certain, but when that video came out I tried it in ChatGPT and it this is what I could replicate about chloride bromide recommendations. It doesn't suggest eating sodium bromide but it will tell you bromide can fit where chloride is. The paper that discusses the case also mentions this.
From the video I watched, what I can gather is the fact that somehow the chatbot confused chloride and bromide for washing machine related tasks but that being said, AI's are still sycophantic and we all probably know this.
> Basically this guy starts with this fringe conspiracy theory belief that chloride ions are bad for you
I still feel like AI/LLM's definitely tried to give into that conspiracy rheotoric and the Guy got even more convinced as proof
Of course he had a disillusioned theory in the first place but I still believe that a partial blame can still be placed and this is the crux of the argument actually, dont read just AI sources and treat them as gospel
They are based on scraping public resources which could be wrong (we all saw the countless screenshots floating on internet where google search engine's AI feature gave unhinged answers, I don't use google so I don't know if they still do but for a time they definitely did)
This is actually what I think the grandparent of the comment is talking about regarding poisoning of data I think in their own manner or atleast bring the nuance of that discussion.
I used tiny amounts in the lab a lot of years ago, but it was disolved in carbon tetrachloride IIRC. It's a strong oxidant like Cl2, to Br2 may be good for bleaching, or destroy your cloths, or be very toxic in big amounts, or ...
I'm not sure you can dissolve Br2 in water. Cl2 is strange because in water it transform into ClH and ClOH so it dissolves nicely in a solution of NaOH to neutralize the acids. I'm not sure if Br2 has a similar reaction. So Br2 may be impractical (and perhaps to toxic) as a bleach alternative.
Disclaimer: Don't try this at home.
Reference to this? https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1cziil6/a_rock_a_da...
do not interpret their public statements as whole-truth confessions as that is most certainly never the case
You might have heard of it, it's called "SEO".
You could maybe argue they're trying to make it harder for LLMs to replace search, but they're trying so hard to replace search with LLMs themselves and also they're right that people shouldn't be formatting articles that way.
Sullivan admits there may be “edge cases” where content chunking appears to work.
“Great. That’s what’s happening now, but tomorrow the systems may change,” he said.