SEO and AI search advice your business should refuse now
Every week a business owner forwards me a pitch that promises search visibility in the age of AI answers. Some of those pitches waste money. A few waste something harder to replace: the trust Google and the answer engines place in a domain. I sort the pitches into three tiers, and I advise my clients to refuse all three, at three different speeds.
On this page
Tier one: decline politely
These offers burn budget and return reports. Content sold by volume, priced per post and aimed at a word count, produces pages no customer would quote and no engine will cite. Keyword ranking reports sold as the deliverable measure positions on results pages your customers no longer read. Directory submission blasts and citation packages from 2011 still circulate with new labels. Trophy keyword campaigns chase phrases with national competition while your buyers search with a city in the query. None of this damages a site outright. All of it converts a marketing budget into paperwork.
Tier two: decline firmly
These offers sound modern, and that is the danger. A vendor proposes an llms.txt installation as an AI visibility strategy, as if a courtesy file were a ranking factor. Another sells placements in listicles assembled to be cited, roundups where every entry paid for its chair. A third offers review generation, phrased carefully, at scale. A fourth promises schema sorcery: markup layered onto ordinary pages until the code describes a business far more impressive than the one your customers meet. Each tactic has the shape of a mechanism and the record of a fad. Answer engines cite sources with a history of being right in public. Purchased applause leaves a paper trail, and the trail is the tell.
Tier three: end the relationship
These offers end businesses' presence in search entirely. A proposal to show AI crawlers different text than human visitors is cloaking with a new audience, and Google removes sites for it. An expired domain offered as your new home brings someone else's history, and sometimes someone else's penalties, into your name. Fake locations, fake practitioners, and a network of friendly sites exchanging links all belong to the same family: fabricated evidence of a reputation. The engines audit evidence for a living now. When the audit lands, the penalty lands on the domain, and a new domain starts from zero in an era when zero is a long way down. Any consultant who proposes tier three has told you exactly how the engagement ends.
The sixty second test
Run every pitch through three questions before money moves. First: show me a client you kept through a Google update, and let me call them. A record survives updates; a scheme rents the calm between them, and the calm always ends. Second: what happens to my domain if Google disagrees with this tactic? The honest answer names a risk and a recovery. The dishonest answer changes the subject to rankings. Third: put in writing what you refuse to do. Every consultant I respect keeps a refusal list, and the list is longer than the menu. A vendor who will do anything you can pay for has told you who absorbs the penalty when the audit arrives. It will not be the vendor. Domains are expensive to rebuild and impossible to rush: a new one earns trust at the speed trust is earned everywhere else, one kept promise at a time, in public, on the record.
What to buy instead
Buy the record. Publish under real names, with real experience, on a site that answers customer questions in the words your best people use across the counter. Google's quality guidelines give that record a name, E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, earned in public and assessed in the open. Keep the information current: Google's AI reads today's pages today, while the standalone chatbots answer from a memory months old, so a business that updates its facts competes where freshness counts. When an AI answer gets your business wrong, correct the record at the source; my guide to correcting AI answers walks through that work. Refuse the three tiers, fund the record, and let your competitors rent the shortcuts. One more refusal belongs on the list, and it is the easiest to keep: refuse to panic. Every update produces a week of frightened buying, and the frightened buy the tiers. The record compounds quietly through all of it.