oh absolutely, and I'm honestly relieved someone else is saying this out loud. Traditional SEO and this whole "AI visibility" thing feel like they're already playing two completely different sports.
Google's still clinging to the old playbook: backlinks, technical nonsense, keyword density, matching "search intent" like it's a Tinder date. Meanwhile, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and even Google's own AI Overviews are just scraping the entire internet's gossip column - Reddit threads, Quora rambles, LinkedIn humblebrags, YouTube comments, niche communities where three people actually talk about your product. they don't care about your meticulously optimised meta description. They care about who's talking about you, and whether it sounds like a real person or a marketing bot throwing up buzzwords.
so yeah, a smaller site that's genuinely discussed in forums can suddenly pop up higher than some perfectly polished corporate page that nobody has ever mentioned outside of its own press release. the AI rewards the most cited, most human-sounding, most contextually trusted mess of chatter. it's not about ranking pages anymore - it's about building a web-wide reputation layer.
and can we talk about LinkedIn? Underrated as hell for this. AI models seem to scoop up recurring expert opinions from there faster than anyone predicted. so we're all now supposed to be SEO experts, PR people, community managers, and LinkedIn influencers? Great. Another hat to wear while the algorithm changes the rules again.
basically, we've moved from "optimise your page" to "be everywhere and hope the internet's AI overlords decide you're worth mentioning." Fun times.
