Good SEO was never just about the robots, or the humans

Google published an insight earlier this month telling brands to stop optimising their websites for bots and start optimising them for people.

If you read only the headline, it looks like a direct contradiction of everything QBD has been telling clients for years. Marketing to robots first has always been our line, and here’s Google, seemingly saying the opposite.

Read past the headline, though, and the message lines up with ours more closely than it first appears. Google isn’t telling you to ignore the algorithm. It’s telling you that the algorithm already rewards the same things that real readers value. That’s not a contradiction of ‘market to robots, so the robots send you the humans’. It’s the proof of it.

In this blog, we unpack what Google said and how it might affect your digital marketing.

What Google said

The piece, from Google’s VP of Search & Commerce, sets out five things that brands can stop worrying about in the age of AI Search. They are:

• Stop chasing new acronyms like GEO, AEO or AI-SEO. Foundational SEO already covers you, because AI Mode and AI Overviews are built on Google’s existing ranking systems.
• Stop writing for bots specifically, since keyword-stuffed copy and artificially chunked content don’t move the needle any more.
• Stop producing generic content when specific, first-hand expertise is what stands out.
• Stop neglecting the basics of a good website.
• Stop getting distracted by vanity metrics because leads, sales and sign-ups matter more.

The line that carries the most weight is buried in the middle of the piece. It says that good SEO is good GEO, which is what we’ve always maintained. If you strip away the acronym of the month, that basic advice is the same as it’s always been. If you create something genuinely useful, the algorithm will find a reason to trust it.

Why ‘optimise for people’ is only half the story

Google’s right that keyword-stuffed content that panders to the robots has stopped working. We’ve never told you to write that way, either. Nobody wants to read a page that repeats the same keyword 20 times, and neither does Google’s algorithm.

But that framing leaves out an important nuance, which is what we’ve been preaching for years. Before a single person reads your content, something has to crawl it, understand it and decide it’s worth showing to anyone.

Robots and humans aren’t two audiences competing for your attention. They’re the two gates your content must pass through, one after the other. If you write only for the algorithm, you’ll get indexed pages that nobody wants to read. And if you write only for humans, you risk producing something brilliant that never gets the chance to be read by anyone, because the robots never surface it in the first place.

Google telling you to focus on people isn’t permission to ignore the mechanics of visibility. It’s a description of what those mechanics reward. The target hasn’t moved. What’s changed is how directly the algorithm can now recognise genuine quality when it sees it, which means the old tricks for faking quality no longer work.

Why E-E-A-T is more important than ever

If you look closely at what Google asks you to do for a human audience, you’ll find Google’s own quality framework sitting underneath it. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is the lens Google’s own quality reviewers use to judge whether content deserves to rank.

We’ve covered E-E-A-T extensively, so we won’t go into the same detail again here, but if you’re interested in finding out more, check out this page. However, the key points are as follows:

• Experience – Write with direct, personal knowledge rather than research alone, and you’re demonstrating experience.
• Expertise – Put real names, credentials and authority behind what you publish, and you’re demonstrating expertise.
• Authoritativeness – Earn genuine mentions and citations from other trusted sources in your field, and you’re building authoritativeness.
• Trust – Get the facts right, correct them when they’re wrong, and keep your site secure and transparent, and you’re building trust.

The qualities that make your content useful to a small business owner reading it at 10pm are the exact signals Google’s systems use to decide whether that article deserves to be shown to anyone. Demonstrating real expertise isn’t a job you do for your readers and a separate job you do for the algorithm. It’s one job, read twice by two very different audiences who happen to be looking for the same thing.

That’s what we meant by ‘marketing to robots’ all along. It’s not about tricking the gatekeeper. It’s about giving the gatekeeper something worth letting through.

Authentic content is the strategy, not a side effect

Google’s article makes this case better than most SEO guides manage. It compares a hypothetical example of a local running shop publishing a generic ‘top ten things to consider’ article against filming a genuine breakdown of why one customer’s shoe collapsed. The generic piece could have been written by anyone, about anyone, for anyone. The specific one couldn’t have come from anywhere else. That’s why it works.

Every business we work with has a version of that running shop story, whether it’s a manufacturer who knows why material choice matters in a particular application, or a financial adviser who’s talked a client through a decision most guides gloss over in a single paragraph. Their knowledge is what separates content that ranks from content that just exists.

Writing authentically isn’t a nice thing to aim for once your strategy’s decided.

It is the strategy.

If you can say something only your business could say, and back it with real experience, you’ve done the work that satisfies a human reader and the algorithm evaluating that reader’s experience.

What this means for your content strategy

None of this calls for a complete rebuild. Instead, it’s about making sure you’ve got the fundamentals right, rather than just assuming you have.

Write from real experience first, and use research to support it rather than replace it.

Put a real person’s name, background and credentials behind whatever you publish. An anonymous ‘admin’ byline tells both your reader and the algorithm that nobody’s willing to stand behind what’s been written.

Structure your content so it’s easy to scan, with clear headers, short paragraphs and one idea at a time. That helps a human skim the content just as much as it helps a machine parse it.

Keep your website’s technical basics solid to ensure it’s fast, secure and mobile-friendly, because neither a reader nor an algorithm will trust a page that struggles to load.

And measure what you’re doing against your leads, enquiries and sales, not against your search rankings for their own sake.

Every one of these actions serves both audiences at once. That’s the point. It’s never been about choosing between them. It’s about optimising for both.

What to do next

You don’t necessarily need to reinvent your digital marketing to make sense of this. But you may need a strategy that puts the fundamentals into practice properly, with content that earns trust from a human audience, structured clearly enough so a machine can recognise that trust when it finds it.

That’s been QBD’s approach from the start, and Google’s latest guidance is a fairly strong endorsement that we’ve been right to stick with it.

So, if you’d like a second opinion on whether your content is doing both jobs at once, that’s the kind of thing we’re set up to help you with. It’s why we created QBD Pulse.

Every month, you get SEO blogs, social posts and email campaigns written the way we’ve set out here, with your readers in mind, but with the structure and signals that help the robots understand and recommend them. Pulse Score then shows you which of your subscribers are engaging, so you can see what’s working and follow up with the people most ready to buy.

Get in touch with our growth specialists today, and we’ll show you what a Pulse strategy could look like for your business.