It’s taken me all day to read this, but it’s worth it. In The Verge, Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive into SEO – the scammers, honest brokers and how (whether?) Google has gotten mostly useless these days (hint: it’s less about AI than you may think.)

I’ve run web design and dev teams for almost 20 years and avoided SEO for almost all of it. Lewis’ piece touches on a lot of reasons why, but to me the hardest thing to convince clients of is that it’s slow and there isn’t always a clear cause-and-effect.

The algorithm is just too opaque, too complicated, and too dynamic, making it easy for scammy SEOs to pretend they know what they’re doing and difficult for outsiders to sort the good SEOs from the bad. To make things even more confusing for, say, a small business looking to hire someone to improve their Google ranking, even a talented SEO might need a year of work to make a difference, perhaps implying a good SEO was a scammer when in fact, the client was just being impatient or refusing to implement essential advice.

It’s a great piece, and also introduced me to DJ Lily Ray, whose SoundCloud page is full of excellent music to work to.