Lately, a strange trend has been emerging in the SEO world. Seasoned professionals, who spent years honing their skills, are unknowingly losing their expertise.
It’s not that they suddenly became bad at their job. No. It’s that they started delegating more and more tasks to tools promising them less effort and more results.
And less effort also means less learning.
Two key factors have accelerated this phenomenon: the rise of generative AI and the overconsumption of social media.
On one hand, ChatGPT and its cousins arrived with a seductive promise: Stop doing everything yourself, stop writing, stop thinking—we’ll do it for you. On the other, social media has turned into a visibility factory, where publishing fast and as much as possible has become an obsession, even at the cost of quality.
When you combine these two dynamics, you get the perfect recipe for a downward spiral in SEO expertise.
The scariest part? Many don’t even realize it. So, how did we get here?
The Era When SEO Was Learned the Hard Way
SEO has long been an empirical discipline where learning primarily came through experimentation.
There were no lectures, no official schools teaching how to optimize a site for Google. You had to test, make mistakes, understand why things didn’t work, and try again.
For those who started before 2010, it often looked like this:
- Building a website from scratch, back when WordPress wasn’t as user-friendly…
- Wrestling with HTML, CSS, and meta tags, wondering if bolding a word (strong or b?) made any difference at all.
- Reading articles and participating in forums where discussions were passionate (and sometimes heated).
- Testing borderline tactics just to see how far you could push without getting penalized.
- Struggling to figure out why your site wasn’t showing up on Google and spending hours analyzing search results.
It was a craft, where skills were honed through experience.
At the time, SEO training was rare—and it still is. Some were lucky enough to have dedicated modules in marketing courses, but for the most part, expertise was built in the trenches.
Then, one day, everything changed.
AI Arrived, and Suddenly Everyone Became an SEO Expert
Until 2022, AI was a fairly niche field. It was mainly used by researchers, machine learning engineers, and a handful of technical SEOs who knew how to tinker with Python and text-generation models.
Then ChatGPT arrived. And everything changed.
Suddenly, everyone had access to an assistant capable of generating content in seconds, explaining SEO concepts, writing title tags, and even suggesting optimization strategies.
It was mind-blowing. You asked a question, and it responded with structured, fluent, and clear explanations.
For newcomers to SEO, it felt like magic. But there was a problem.
In reality, ChatGPT and other generative AIs don’t create anything new. They just average out information from their training data.
They can’t:
- Analyze SERPs in real-time.
- Provide recommendations based on specific data.
- Differentiate between a solid SEO strategy and an outdated myth.
- Tell you when they’re wrong.
But because AI-generated text sounds smart, many people started using it without any critical thinking.
Bit by bit, AI began replacing human reasoning.
Full articles, written by robots, flooded the web. Some started offering SEO advice sourced entirely from ChatGPT, without ever testing what they were advocating.
Suddenly, people who had never done any real SEO were publishing in-depth guides on “The Best SEO Strategies for 2025″—without ever having touched a single robots.txt file in their lives.
Social Media: When Noise Replaces Expertise
At the same time, social media became the perfect playground for those looking to establish themselves quickly in the SEO industry.
A well-crafted LinkedIn post, tweet, or skeet could reach hundreds, even thousands of people. And in this race for visibility, one thing mattered above all: publishing frequently. Algorithms love fresh, regular content. So, the more you post, the more reach you get.
Very quickly, a pattern emerged:
- Less thinking, more content.
- Less analysis, more bold claims.
- Less expertise, more grandstanding.
We started seeing “Top 10 Must-Know SEO Techniques” that were just recycled SEO clichés.
Intellectual shortcuts became the norm. Since a good post needs to be punchy, people started oversimplifying everything.
But SEO isn’t something that can be boiled down to three catchy bullet points.
When you start seeing statements like:
- “Backlinks are dead.”
- “AI will replace all SEOs.”
- “Google only favors ultra-long content.”
…you end up spreading misinformation.
And since AI is in the loop, it will absorb these falsehoods and regurgitate them to new users, perpetuating a cycle of mediocrity.
The problem isn’t that people share SEO advice. The problem is that everything sounds the same, everything gets repeated, and no one takes the time to verify what actually works.
Social media has turned SEO into a series of slogans and fleeting trends instead of a discipline of analysis and optimization.
And it’s only getting worse.
When you combine the quest for visibility with AI-driven automation, you get a real disaster.
AI: A Brilliant Trap
Now that AI is accessible to everyone, anyone can generate an article in 10 seconds.
On paper, that sounds amazing. In reality? It’s often… mediocre.
AI-generated content is polished, well-structured, and readable. But just because a text is well-written doesn’t mean it’s useful.
When you take a step back, you quickly notice the limitations:
- The content is generic. AI just stitches together phrases based on statistical probabilities. It doesn’t create anything original.
- The analysis is superficial. It doesn’t grasp market nuances, audience specifics, or unique SEO strategies.
- The advice is often incorrect. AI doesn’t reliably verify whether what it’s saying is true.
And yet, hundreds of websites started mass-publishing AI-generated content, without any human review.
That’s how we ended up with SEO articles that are completely hollow, following the same formula:
- An introduction announcing the “next big SEO revolution.”
- A list of generic tips, often outdated or vague.
- A conclusion that simply restates what was already said.
In other words, pure fluff.
And the worst part? Many don’t even realize it. Because AI-generated text sounds good. It flows well, it’s structured—it feels legit.
But SEO isn’t about sounding good. SEO is about analysis, understanding, testing, and context.
AI operates without context, without real data, without testing. It can assist, but it can’t think for us. Yet, instead of using it as a helpful tool, many have turned it into a crutch.
And that’s where it gets dangerous.
Because when you delegate too much to AI, you eventually lose your ability to think SEO.
That’s just the start. The real danger? Forgetting how to learn.
Want to avoid ruining your SEO career? It’s simple:
- Keep learning.
- Use AI as an assistant, not a substitute.
- Don’t fall for the content volume trap.
- Join real expert communities.
AI and social media can accelerate your SEO career. Or destroy it.
It all depends on how you use them.
Now, take a breath. Put the keyboard down. Exhale.
Remember, you’re part of a community. The SEO community. The web marketing community.
Let’s try to get better—without taking shortcuts.
