Previously on this blog, we discussed the growth of large language models, or so-called AI, and how it has likely been oversold in web marketing and the tech world at large. Separately, we talked about the use of black hat SEO tactics to trick search engines into ranking certain businesses highly.

Now we’d like to take a look at how those two phenomena could amplify each other, how it could make the internet worse overall, and how your web marketing could overcome that.

I hope there’s no question in readers’ minds as to whether this blog is written by actual human beings. It always has been and it always will be. But that isn’t true of all blogs these days – certainly not of blogs that are dedicated to web marketing and digital services.

We know this first hand, because this isn’t the only blog in that niche that we’ve ever written for. Unfortunately, some of our professional relationships have soured in recent months as there has been an alarming rush to embrace “AI” among certain people who either provide their own web marketing services or periodically seek out those services.

When LLMs were starting to really take off, one of those people expressed an interest in expanding their blogging operations, in service of web marketing. But instead of seeking out collaboration for more frequent and higher quality writing driven by expertise and a strategic human thought process, their idea of expansion involved using “AI” to generate and publish fake, keyword-dense web marketing materials at a pace of ten articles per hour.

We would like to ask you, dear reader, to imagine for a moment what that practice, if normalized across the industry, would do to web marketing on the whole. More than that, we’d like you to think about what it would do to the very landscape of the internet.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have to just imagine it. You can already see the effects beginning to accrue as other people with similarly unscrupulous approaches to web marketing and SEO latch onto new, environmentally devastating technologies to churn out massive amounts of low-quality content for no purpose other than to trick you into clicking onto their clients’ websites, or their own.

If you think that web searches have been frustratingly ineffective in recent years, rest assured that it is not your imagination. Although our previous blog post credited search engines with eventually weeding out content that uses trickery to boost a site’s ranking, it bears mentioning that those same search engines have encouraged this web marketing arms race. AI now threatens to function as a nuclear weapon, burying all good content with an explosion of garbage that is too massive for algorithms to weed out.

At this point you’re probably anxious for us to get to the part about how conscientious web marketing practices can still overcome this trend. Well, the likely reality is that if things keep going the way they have been you won’t be able to overcome it at the point of the web search. But that’s okay, because if things keep going the way they have been, many users will practically be abandoning web search anyway.

Until the collective push for AI-generated nonsense peters out, the best web marketing strategies will probably involve eschewing the question of search engine optimization altogether, and instead focusing on the development of organic connections among partner websites, along with ways of reaching out to customers directly, through social media, traditional banner ads, affiliate marketing, and so on.