Veteran SEO warns: unqualified 'thought leaders' selling AI silver bullets will burn exec buyers
5le · x · 2026-09-10
A practitioner warns of a growing wave of SEO tools and thought leadership from people who have never done SEO. They haven't watched a site tank from a botched migration or seen what happens when you buy links at scale — both of which the author witnessed firsthand last month.
The buyers are often executives and marketing leaders with minimal SEO experience who can't ask the right questions. Claims like ranking for competitive keywords with pure AI content, building LLM visibility via AI-generated Reddit comments, or declaring 'Google search is obsolete' sound like silver bullets.
His warning: executing these plans leads to disappointment and tears. SEO and AEO playbooks exist for a reason — if it sounds too good to be true, it is.
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