So... let's talk about this.

The first thing to note is that SEO like this is useful if and only if you have absolutely no possible way to differentiate yourself otherwise. Press links? You're good. Physical location? You're good. Actual employees? You're good. Social media graph? You're good. Obviously doing your SEO after you have all that stuff is still a good idea but I fucking own my search terms within 20 miles of me which is enough. Search drives roughly 30% of our business (we measure it with our intake forms), another 30% being word-of-mouth, about 20% of it being "awareness" ("I drove by") and another 20% of it being "you're listed as covered on my insurance website." If your search engine optimization is, like, actual things of value the shit's fuckin' elementary.

Now obviously if you're hyping some random bullshit none of that works. But then - wasn't that the promise of the internet? Hyping random bullshit? Obviously we didn't call it that but "as an appendage to the real world" was never the promise of the Internet. It was always about "I rose to fame and acclaim by putting a live stream of the department's coffee maker where the whole world could watch it." It was always about "I can't even get the local alternative rag to publish my comic but now there's a whole documentary about it."

So how do you incentivize the discovery of random bullshit? Press links? you can fake those. Physical location? You can sort of do that but it doesn't help if you're national or international. Actual employees? You can make a million fake ones. Social media graph? Bot the shit out of it.

BUT WHY

Larry and Sergei fought ads for a heroically long time, then they caved, now they're billionaires. Along the way they created a billion dollar industry of people and companies trying to appear organic when they aren't. You have "advertisement" and "thing that does not need to be advertised" and the easiest way to cheat the beast is to turn yourself into an advertisement that a robot thinks isn't an advertisement. A cursory read of advertising laws would indicate that Google is in serious peril of eating total shit because their entire business model encourages false results to rise to the top of their search rankings which is one of many reasons you aren't truly a world government until you've sued Google.

You know why Google is so big into LLMs? Because you can cheat their algorithm without knowing what their algorithm is. So they need another algorithm that cheats their own algorithm so they can algorithm while they algorithm. They're building the tower of Babel out there where the Internet isn't supposed to be about the real world. It's gonna collapse and that right soon.

I run Pi Holes at home and at work. They're repositories of ad networks run by volunteers that act as DNS servers. They take up no room. They take up no power. They cut latency to the Internet by bypassing stacks and stacks and stacks of ads, increasing browser speed by a good 40%.

And there is absolutely no reason I couldn't theoretically run an nVidia Jetson that does the same thing for search.

Eighty. Eighty percent. Seventy percent just fuckin' search ads and ad network ads.

Take a good long look at that graph. It's showing you the financial incentives for a deeply fucked-up web. It's showing you how much money there is to be made between "what you want" and "how you get to it." It is the power of tollbooths. Information may want to be free, but every sociopath in Silicon Valley wants their fucking yacht, prole.

It cannot burn fast enough.

(^^^^nobody fucking read that and you're missing out)