Last week a client came to us with a problem. Eight figure company. In-house SEO team. New articles going live and never showing up in search. Their hard work (seemingly) being ignored by search engines like Google.
So they email us with a bit of concern. “Can you scope helping us understand and fix why our new article are not being indexed and ranked by Google?”
What some in-house marketers might do in the wave of AI
Some in-house marketers might go to their favourite LLM. I dropped a client-redacted version into one, and this is what I got when I asked it to diagnose why this was happening.
Next steps:
- URL Inspect 3-4 unindexed posts to see which status bucket they land in
- Manually request indexing on a couple as a stopgap
- Check Crawl stats in GSC for anomalies since May 1
What does URL Inspection show for a couple of these posts? This was the output from the LLM.
Wow, LLM. That sounds like quite a bit of work. It’s akin to asking to check if your valve pistons in your car are bent before seeing if the keys are in the ignition.
Human led intervention has seen this song and dance before
Any seasoned SEO knows exactly what’s coming next. We jumped into Google Search Console. Thirty seconds in, we had the answer: nobody had submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console in eight years. Not a unique URL issue. Not a plugin issue. Not a crawl budget issue. A basic step that got missed and stayed missed. The LLM also simply presumed this was done (or doesnt exist).
Here’s what that thirty-second check covered:
- Confirmed the site had a working sitemap.xml file
- Checked whether it had ever been submitted in Search Console
- Reviewed crawl and indexing status against the sitemap
- Emailed our client back that we submitted the sitemap(s) on their behalf
AI tools have a hard-time diagnosing these issues because they trained to be plausible, not always valid. It’s a step that was never taken, sitting quietly in a settings panel nobody opened, and LLMs couldn’t possibly have known that. It took me three more specific prompts about sitemaps to surface that we should check if it was ever submitted.
That’s the case for keeping people in the review process alongside the tools.
The best practices diagnose, find, articulate and solve in fractions of the time it takes an LLM to understand core problem.
Automated audits are good at telling you what’s broken. They’re not built to notice what was never done and deduce validity.
The story of SEO agencies’ life in the age of AI.
Every month, quarter, year our team is being asked to come in and clean up the beautifully visualized, but critically flawed strategies, execution, and thought-patterns of semi-LLM created organic strategies.
Some recent favourites:
- Entire website redesigned with AI and published with no-index set. Millions of dollars in yearly revenue from organic traffic lost.
- Sitemaps never being submitted to various search engines, making it much harder for a website to be crawled.
- Dozens of pages cannibalizing the same query and intent, dropping valuable bottom of funnel search from page one all in the name of “clustering”
Use your humans, and their brains. We like using our brains.
