Eighteen months ago I was a big fish in a small pond. AI search was a curiosity, the pond held a handful of practitioners, and a man who published daily, in his own name, on his own site, could be the answer the machines gave. Then everybody invested. The pond is an ocean now, the fish are innumerable, and I am small in it. I tell you this because the tactics changed when the water did, and most of the advice still circulating was written for the small pond. Here is the avoid list I work by now, in three tiers of worsening trouble.
Tier one: the played out
These cost time and return nothing. Writing to a word count. Tuning keyword density like a radio dial. Publishing the same listicle ten thousand other sites published the same week, on the same topic, from the same outline the models hand everyone. Commodity content trades like pork bellies and frozen orange juice: interchangeable, priced by the ton, forgotten by Friday. The machines ingest it and cite none of it, because a claim stated identically in ten thousand places belongs to no one and differentiates nothing. If your page could be swapped with a competitor's page and no reader would notice, you have written feedstock.
Tier two: the folklore
These circulate at conferences and in group chats, repeated with confidence, supported by anecdotes. An llms.txt file as a ranking charm. FAQ schema as a resurrection spell for traffic the Helpful Content era took. Quoting yourself, stuffing statistics into every third sentence, and calling the result GEO. Buying citations in roundups assembled for that purpose. Each of these seems like it should work; each has the shape of a mechanism. The test is simpler than the folklore: the answer engines cite sources they already trust, and trust accrues to sites with a record. A charm file is not a record.
Tier three: what will kill you
Modern black hat wears better clothes than the old version and dies the same death. Content farms at machine scale, a thousand pages a day of fluent nothing, attached to a domain with a reputation the farm did not earn. Parasite hosting: your authority rented to a coupon page, a casino page, a pill page. Expired domains bought for their backlink profiles and refilled with a new business wearing the old one's skin. Reviews written by the reviewed. Pages that show the AI crawlers one text and human visitors another, with instructions to the machines hidden in the markup like a note passed in class. Every one of these works for a season. Then the update arrives, the site is gone from the index and the answers both, and the season's revenue is revealed as a loan.
The one asymmetry worth money
The chatbots answer from memory, and their memory runs months behind the world. Google's AI answers from the live index; it read this morning's pages this morning. A site that publishes current, accurate, first-hand material competes in the one arena where freshness is a ranking input rather than a courtesy. That is the whole business model of this weblog: show up daily, say something true that was not true yesterday, and let the up-to-the-minute machine find it. Stale authority defends itself in the chatbots. It starves in AI Mode.
So the positive program fits in one breath, and it is the close of every tier above. Earn the E-E-A-T signals the slow way: named expertise, first-hand experience, work other people cite because it helped them. Publish content that is useful, current, and different enough to belong to you. Avoid the played out, ignore the folklore, and never touch the third tier. The pond is big now. The fish who last are the ones the water trusts.
Two companion guides carry the same list in other uniforms: the owner version, written for the business deciding what to refuse, and the practitioner taxonomy, which names the modern schemes after the antiques they descend from.
Update, October 27, 2026, 9:35 AM: The prompt box now carries Chris’ dictation verbatim, per house rule, and E-E-A-T in the close now links to the glossary, which carries the term.