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.