iainharper

Author here. I have worked on SEO project for pretty much my whole career since the late 90’s.

It’s become increasingly obvious to me that the deal that sent organic traffic to websites for “free” has almost entirely collapsed. It is gone. It is not coming back. And the sooner we come to our senses and stop wasting time and effort on futile agentic search optimisation, the sooner we can focus on more productive things.

It pains me to say this, but there seems to be a collective delusion that this is like an algorithm change, a bump in the road we can figure out.

I argue that it’s much more severe than that, and that the organic referral traffic site owners have got used to seeing over 25 tears is gone for good.

Apologies for gratuitous Monty Python references.

I wrote this partly because nobody seems to know about Gödel who is arguably a more important figure than Turing.

The piece follows four threads where formal limits show up in AI practice today: learnable problems that mathematics cannot sort, neural networks that exist but cannot be trained, self-improving systems that dropped their safety proofs for benchmark scores, and the fact that “will this AI cause harm” is, mathematically, an unanswerable question.

The piece is long and the math is dense. I’m curious whether people see the connection as tight or as overextended—whether Gödel’s structural limits actually do constrain what we’re doing now, or whether I’m collapsing categories that should stay separate.

A detailed breakdown of why AI-generated prose feels so “uncanny”and flat. The argument is that because LLMs calculate probability distributions, they naturally gravitate toward the center of human expression, stripping away the “burstiness”and eccentricity of human writing. There’s a section on how RLHF essentially enforces a cautious, “middle-management” tone—and the unintended linguistic footprint of outsourced annotators popularising words like “delve”. Curious to hear what others think about the concept of “semantic ablation” mentioned here.