@nxthompson Shopify saw this coming and built for it. Next wave of marketing is def gaming AI search, not human search, folks still optimizing for Google fall behind

@nxthompson When I recently asked 3 popular LLMs how I should improve my blog (more to see how they’d answer rather than getting useful info), they universally told me I should ditch the “clever post titles” in lieu of “10 ways to do xxx”, “5 top xxx for your xxx” formats—so, titles for bots

@nxthompson It’s insane how bad it’s gotten

We had the most trusted content in our space and Google rewarded w traffic.

Now, every vendor is firehosing AI slop articles. Our traffic’s fallen off and we won’t publish new content bc the LLMs don’t reward it.

Major quality problem incoming

This is wild—and likely a sign of things to come as we transition to a web that is optimized for bots more than humans. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/google-search-ai-optimization/687495/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=ntatl&utm_medium=social

@nxthompson This is typical search engine optimization stuff. It's been around far longer than LLMs and if anything used to be a lot worse

@nxthompson The book Weapons of Math Destruction was the warning shot. This is what happens when the algorithms start reading each other

@nxthompson I’m old enough to remember when companies had to coerce random third-party sites into playing this exact game. Now it doesn’t even matter because search results are just summaries and the source isn’t even considered.

@nxthompson this literally isn’t new though, shopify would have been on top regardless in search results because of SEO strategy.

@nxthompson @JasonKPargin I do like that as AI gets more intelligent and capable, a significant portion of that intelligence and capability goes towards tricking AIs into being less intelligent and capable.

@nxthompson @DanLamothe Particularly troubling for accounts like yours and mine, which objectively produce the best content on X, while others—who do not create content as excellent as ours—falsely claim to.

Wonder how long before we see political campaigns doing this

@nxthompson @inafried The web has been optimized for algorithms over people for quite a while now Billionaire funded CEO.

@nxthompson One would think the latest crop of AI bots are more sophisticated than yesteryears' SEO manipulations... I mean, the word counting was a UNIX 1.0 feature 😀

@nxthompson bots shaping the web now

@nxthompson Some interesting related research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415697122 cc @WillOremus

@theojaffee @nxthompson It’s not. The key difference is the user used to vote.

They would see 10 links and people with functional brains wouldn’t click on Shopifys opinion of Shopify.. and that slop would end up w no traffic

The human voting is gone. Major design flaw

@nxthompson I fail to see what’s to be gained by making a web optimized for bots instead of humans.

Maybe some sites can be optimized for bots, but do you really think sites like YouTube, etc, are going to be bot optimized?

YouTube is for people by people.

@nxthompson @thegrugq Glad I use a search engine that penalises SEO spam.

@nxthompson ttbh this is already happening with all the AI crawlers scraping everything. feels like we're building a web for machines not people

@nxthompson Ask it a medical question and it cites a bunch of venture capital backed telehealth companies, ask it why, it says because they have flooded the internet with SEO optimized articles