By Ryan Whitwam
Publication Date: 2026-01-09 20:27:00
Signal in the noise
Google only provides general SEO recommendations, leaving the Internet’s SEO experts to cast bones and read tea leaves to gauge how the search algorithm works. This approach has borne fruit in the past, but not every SEO suggestion is a hit.
The tumultuous current state of the Internet, defined by inconsistent traffic and rapidly expanding use of AI, may entice struggling publishers to try more SEO snake oil like content chunking. When traffic is scarce, people will watch for any uptick and attribute that to the changes they have made. When the opposite happens, well, it’s just a bad day.
The new content superstition may appear to work at first, but at best, that’s an artifact of Google’s current quirks—the company isn’t building LLMs to like split-up content. Sullivan admits there may be “edge cases” where content chunking appears to work.
“Great. That’s what’s happening now, but tomorrow the systems may change,”…
