The irony is that while AI slop is gaming Google, the AI models themselves (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) are surprisingly resistant to it. We tested ~150 B2B tools and the correlation between Google rank and LLM recommendation was 0.08. Basically zero.
So you end up with two diverging discovery layers: Google, increasingly polluted by cheap AI content, and LLMs, which seem to weight structured data, documentation quality, and mentions on high-trust platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow) way more than traditional SEO signals.
The real question is whether Google fixes this before users just default to asking ChatGPT instead of searching.
So you end up with two diverging discovery layers: Google, increasingly polluted by cheap AI content, and LLMs, which seem to weight structured data, documentation quality, and mentions on high-trust platforms (Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow) way more than traditional SEO signals.
The real question is whether Google fixes this before users just default to asking ChatGPT instead of searching.