You can tell clients "LLMs are probabilistic" until you're blue in the face, but I don't think most people fully appreciate how much of a mind bender it is for GTM teams who want to win AEO but don't live and breathe this stuff. We all started our careers working with systems where the relationship between inputs and outputs was predictable, but LLMs are not. With LLMs, a brand might show up consistently one week and disappear the next, even if nothing meaningful has changed about the brand or its marketing. And trying to figure out why less drastic, more subtle changes happen is typically a mix of guesses and bias. All this makes it difficult to distinguish between what's working, what's just noise — and when you are successful, what to double down on. We've all been trained to look for patterns, establish benchmarks, build repeatable processes. so naturally, we're trying to force AEO into the same box, but it isn't going to work. We need to get comfortable with the idea that we can't engineer certainty or predictability into AEO programs. That doesn't mean we stop measuring, testing, or trying to improve outcomes. However, I think we, as an industry, need to rethink what success looks like, the expectations we're trying to set, and how much confidence we should have in the conclusions we're drawing.

Earlier in the year I saw another Ramp AI marketing promotion. So at the time I asked Claude if there offering a $3100 promotion. Don’t know if this counts as working or not BUT it is something a human can bring up with their sales team to try and secure a discount anyway.

Today, we're expanding SynthID Detector in partnership with @OpenAI, @NVIDIA, Kakao & soon @Apple as part of an industry-wide effort to make AI-generated content more transparent. Available globally in English, our verification portal lets you check if media was made with AI 🧵

Google Manual Actions are appearing in so many places - the last few months I've been seeing more and more popping up. And it's no surprise, so much of the SEO industry has turned to short-cuts and scaled content abuse for the short term gains without considering the longer-term pains. Do you remember the old adage, pay cheap pay twice? That's what's happening now. Businesses cheaped out on SEO or cut spend because AI could do it SEOs at the lower end or spammy end turned to it for scale and now people like me are part of the clean up and recovery solution. Manual actions can be devastating - often bringing entire sites down with some losing 90%+ of their traffic overnight. Here are some of the common manual actions businesses maybe facing now or could be expected to face as Google ramps up on scaled content abuse and spam / link spam. ❌ Back button hijacking The site interferes with browser history so visitors can’t use the Back button to return as expected. ❌ Site abused with third-party spam A significant part of the site is being used to publish spam, often through forums, uploads, free hosting or other interactive areas. ❌ User-generated spam Visitors have posted spam, commonly in forums, comments or user profiles. ❌ Spammy free host A significant share of the sites or pages on a free hosting service are spammy. ❌ Structured data issue Markup violates Google’s structured data guidelines, for example by describing hidden, irrelevant or misleading content. ❌ Unnatural links to your site Google has found a pattern of artificial or manipulative links pointing to the site. ❌ Unnatural links from your site Google has found a pattern of artificial or manipulative outbound links on the site. ❌ Thin content with little or no added value Pages provide little unique value, such as thin affiliate pages, scraped content or doorway pages. ❌ Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects Google is shown different content from visitors, or visitors are redirected somewhere unexpected. ❌ Major spam problems The site uses aggressive spam tactics or has repeated or egregious spam-policy violations. ❌ Cloaked images Images shown to Google differ from, or are obscured compared with, what visitors see. ❌ Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing Pages hide text from visitors or repeat keywords excessively. ❌ AMP content mismatch AMP content differs materially from its canonical page. ❌ Sneaky mobile redirects Mobile visitors are secretly redirected to content that Google’s crawlers don’t see. ❌ Site reputation policy Some third-party content on the site is inconsistent with Google’s site reputation policy. These are just SOME of the manual actions you can see in Google Search Console when a quality rater has visited the site and made a determination. Googles automated spam algorithms flag suspicious patterns, or the site is highlighted through user-submitted spam reports and routine quality sweeps. #seo# #seotips#

New way to make slide decks, go to @lilyraynyc timeline and start copying and pasting. :) Credit is always given but MY GAWD homeskillet is out here discrediting tactics with data at a scale I need to get to / contribute to. Thank you Lily!

Just found another b2b SaaS company that got destroyed in the January update... this one wasn't on my original list (~100+) Unsurprising: the blog is full of listicles (including 38 self-promoting ones), "ultimate guides," alternatives pages, how to, etc. Full site pattern:

1) Glad to see GP in the fan outs for B2B SEO agency prompts 2) 95% of the agencies in fan outs are over 10 years old. We have done zero AEO work (and that's going to change shortly) but we are baked in to the system. TL;DR this is not a channel for brand new companies