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The same tricks that got you AI/SEO visibility will now get you penalized
Posted by on May 18, 2026 at 6:33 amThis pattern keeps repeating every time something new shows up in search
A new system rolls out, people try to understand it, and then a part of the SEO crowd immediately starts looking for shortcuts instead of actually improving content
Not better writing, not better insights, just figuring out what signals the system reacts to and pushing those at scale
We saw it with keyword stuffing, then backlinks, then mass-generated pages, and now with AI visibility
Instead of treating AI answers as a byproduct of good content, a lot of people treated them as the main goal
So we ended up with pages that are clearly engineered to influence the output
Listicles that pretend to be neutral but push one option
Content that repeats the same brand unnaturally
Structures designed for extraction, not for actual readingIt worked for a while because the system was new and easier to influence
Now Google has explicitly said that trying to manipulate AI-generated answers falls under spam, which means a lot of those patterns are going to get marked down
This is not new, it is the same old correction that has happened in every phase of search updates
If a page stops making sense the moment you stop thinking about how an AI will read it, that is usually a sign of the problem
A lot of “AI visibility strategies” were built on that gap
And now that gap is getting small…very small
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1 Reply
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I think there’s some truth to that. Hopefully they penalize spamming Reddit for mentions. I’m getting sick of every thread becoming promotional regardless of how slick they think they are.
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Just like a bunch of them that like shortcuts are attacking Reddit right now with their own little spam techniques.
The one I’m noticing the most is one person goes in and posts something like…
What is the best SEO agency to pick in Dubai? Or what does a good PPC agency do for their clients? And so on.
Then anywhere from one to three other people come into the same thread a little while later and do the brand mentions.
All from very new accounts or the same user with multiple accounts.
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Yeah, exactly.
You can usually tell when something is made to help real people vs when it’s just made to get picked up by AI.
Same thing happening on Reddit now too. Someone asks a fake ‘best agency/tool/service’ question, then a few fresh accounts show up dropping the same brand name.
It might work for a short time, but it leaves such an obvious pattern. Not really a long-term SEO strategy.
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Fast rankings are a massive draw for CMOs. I mean, they’re counting on those metrics to bag their next bonus or move up the ladder.
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I think the bigger issue is a lot of people stopped asking whether the page was actually useful to a human. You could almost feel when content was written for extraction instead of for someone trying to solve a problem.
The funny part is the boring advice keeps surviving every update cycle. Real experience, original data, clear opinions, and content that actually deserves links. It’s slower, but those sites usually don’t panic every time Google changes direction.
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> A lot of “AI visibility strategies” were built on that gap
or they were all always bullshit placebos.
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This is basically the history of SEO in one cycle: people treat every new ranking system like a loophole instead of a signal.
The ones chasing AI visibility with engineered content are making the same mistake people made with keyword stuffing and spam backlinks it works until Google understands the pattern, then the penalty comes.
If your content is only valuable to an AI parser and not to an actual human, it was never a sustainable strategy to begin with.
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