"Generative Engine Optimization" a phrase as dumb as the idea.

For 30 years marketers have been doing everything they can to avoid making sites useful for people, despite that being what Google rewarded from the start (e.g. relevant link text, page titles, and headings).

to be clear, marketers are not the only ones to blame for useless sites.

It’s infuriating when I do a search and get an entire page of AI slop articles, “helpfully” prefixed with the search engines’ own AI summary of the AI slop articles

I searched for a specific niche product the other day. Second result down was AI blogspam “what to buy now that product X has been discontinued. We reviewed these 9 alternatives now that the company shut down.”

The company didn’t shut down. The 9 alternatives were the same product by the same company in different sizes and quantity counts. How kind of them to hallucinate so many glowing reviews for me after they hallucinated a problem into existence first.

At least the search engine can summarize all the slop for me. It even cites sources! The sources directly contradict the summary almost every time, but why would you click through?