Nick LeRoy

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are AirOps and Jolly Search. Over the course of this year, we’ve talked about the “easy button” and how many corporate leaders are blindly trusting AI to run their businesses. Since we already covered AI scams, the legal consequences of using AI, and what happens when people are held accountable for their AI slop, I want to try something different. I want to try to defend the AI “easy button”.

A company contacts a publisher to correct an outdated author byline, job title, company description, or slogan. The publisher agrees. Kind of. They’re happy to make the change. But only after the company pays an “editorial processing fee.” That should be a red flag for all of us. Unfortunately, I can see a not-so-distant future in which “edits for AI” becomes the next publisher money grab. And we’ve seen this before.

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search. If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you likely heard that Anthropic announced machine-readable watermarks for Claude-generated text. Manually created watermarks to make fun of watermark fear (made in Paint.NET) CMON! Why do you really care about watermarks, or honestly, any other signal indicating that AI touched a piece of content? Are you worried that people will discover you’re publishing crap?