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The irony is specific: the person who deployed the most widely used LLM at consumer scale is now noticing that the internet is filling with LLM-generated content. The responses mocking him for this are accurate.
For SEO practitioners, dead internet theory has been operationally true at the content layer for a couple of years. The percentage of indexed content that is AI-generated and thin has grown fast enough that ‘create more content’ stopped being useful advice without quality filters attached.
The more interesting downstream effect for search: if the web increasingly contains AI-generated text trained on earlier AI-generated text, the knowledge layer that citation engines pull from degrades over time. The brands that document original research, first-person experience, and primary data become relatively more citable precisely because they’re increasingly rare. The extractable signal in a page that describes something the author actually did is fundamentally different from a page that summarizes what other pages said about the topic.
The SEO implication isn’t new but it gets sharper with every wave of synthetic content: the content that survives the next round of quality reassessment will be the content that could only have been written by someone who was actually there.
