Signal in the sound
Google only provides general SEO recommendations and lets the Internet's SEO experts cast bones and read tea leaves to gauge how the search algorithm works. This approach has paid off in the past, but not every SEO suggestion is a hit.
The tumultuous current state of the internet, characterized by inconsistent traffic and the rapidly increasing use of AI, may tempt struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil-like content chunking. When traffic is thin, people will pay attention to any upticks and attribute that to the changes they've made. If the opposite happens, it's just a bad day.
The new content superstition may seem to work at first glance, but at best that's an artifact of Google's current idiosyncrasies: the company isn't building LLMs to like disaggregated content. Sullivan admits there may be “edge cases” where sharing content seems to work.
“Great. That's what's happening now, but tomorrow the systems could change,” he said. “You created all these things that you did specifically for a ranking system, not for a human, because you were trying to be more successful in the ranking system, without staying focused on the human. And then the systems improve, probably the way the systems always try to improve, to reward content that is written for humans. All those things that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked may not continue in the long run.”
We probably won't see chunking disappear as long as publishers can point to a positive effect. However, Google seems to believe that chunking content for LLMs is not a viable future for SEO.
