Signal in the noise

Google only provides general SEO recommendations, leaving the Internet’s SEO experts to cast bones and read tea leaves to gauge how the search algorithm works. This approach has borne fruit in the past, but not every SEO suggestion is a hit.

The tumultuous current state of the Internet, defined by inconsistent traffic and rapidly expanding use of AI, may entice struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil like content chunking. When traffic is scarce, people will watch for any uptick and attribute that to the changes they have made. When the opposite happens, well, it’s just a bad day.

The new content superstition may appear to work at first, but at best, that’s an artifact of Google’s current quirks—the company isn’t building LLMs to like split-up content. 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. “You’ve made 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, not staying focused on the human being. And then the systems improve, probably the way the systems always try to improve, to reward content written for humans. All that stuff that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, may not carry through for the long term.”

We probably won’t see chunking go away as long as publishers can point to a positive effect. However, Google seems to feel that chopping up content for LLMs is not a viable future for SEO.