If you want to understand why your site isn’t ranking, you have to stop listening to the “Google Illuminati.”
About 20 years ago, the SEO industry split into two distinct camps. You need to understand this history, or you will spend your entire career parroting buzzwords you don’t understand.
The first group—let’s call them the Illuminati Believers—convinced themselves that Google was a god. They believed the algorithm could “see” and “know” everything, that it had an innate sense of quality, and that if you just “wrote for humans,” the rankings would follow.
The second group—the Math Realists—knew the truth. We understood that Google’s winning mechanism was PageRank. We knew that underneath the hood, the engine wasn’t a literary critic; it was a calculator. Its breakdown was mathematical, its simplicity was superb, and we played it for exactly what it was.
Two decades later, nothing has changed. But if you look at the modern state of SEO, you’d think we were living in a different universe.
The Rise of the “SEO Ideologue”
Today, the industry is overrun by people who grew up on the “Illuminati” worldview. They are allergic to the idea that PageRank is still the primary driver of search.
Instead of math, they sell you Confirmation Bias.
You see this every time a “content writer” claims their poetic prose is why a page ranked #1, ignoring the domain authority holding it up. They seek to re-affirm their pre-committed biases—that “Google loves content” or “Google loves great writing.”
Let’s be clear: Google is agnostic. It processes HTML output. It does not “love” your technical stack, it does not “admire” your React framework, and it certainly doesn’t “enjoy” your blog post. It scores them.
The New “Holy Grails” (GEO, LLMs, and Tech SEO)
Because the reality of SEO (building authority/links) is hard work, people are constantly inventing “unicorns”—special secret sauces that promise results without the grind.
1. The “Tech SEO” Trap
There is a prevailing myth that having perfectly validated Schema or a 100/100 PageSpeed score is “SEO.” It isn’t. It’s hygiene. Google reads the HTML output. Whether that output came from a headless CMS or a static HTML file from 1999 doesn’t matter to the crawler. Yet, agencies sell “Technical SEO” packages as if fixing a render-blocking script is going to double your traffic.
2. The “GEO” Disinformation Playbook
Now we have Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and the rise of LLM SEO.
The new gurus will tell you that AI search engines are somehow “immune” to spammy backlinks. They use colorful, emotive language to convince you that LLMs.txt is the new meta-tag that will save you.
Figure 1: While gurus chase AI trends, the mathematical reality of the web remains a graph of authority nodes.
It’s a fantasy. LLMs are trained on the open web—spam and all. They don’t magically know your “topical authority” unless you have the links to prove it. “Intent matching” is just a fancy re-branding of keyword planning. LLMs.txt gives you zero advantage in ranking. It’s just another distraction.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Why does this “Primary Position” make people so angry? Why does merely mentioning PageRank evoke triggered downvotes and “LoL” responses on Reddit?
Because admitting that SEO is Math strips away the magic.
If you admit that SEO is essentially Marketing + Math, you have to admit that it requires hard work, strategy, and capital. You can’t just “tweak” your way to the top with a new plugin.
Here is the reality check you won’t get on LinkedIn:
-
Google hasn’t changed. It is still a link-based retrieval system.
-
New “techniques” are usually mirror-myths. Brand mentions, sentiment analysis, “helpfulness” scores—these are often just proxies for authority.
-
You need to live through it. If you didn’t see the evolution from the front lines, you are likely just parroting techniques that stopped working in 2012.
Stop Chasing Unicorns
SEO is not about chasing the latest algorithm leak or optimizing for a robot that doesn’t exist yet. It is about creating a work model and sticking to it.
Stop looking for the special meta-tag. Stop believing that “content is king” in a vacuum.
The game is still PageRank. The game is still Authority.
Everything else is just noise.
Executive Summary
-
Skepticism is a Skill: Question every new “trend” (like GEO or Tech SEO audits) by asking: “How does this impact the math?”
-
Back to Basics: If your traffic is flat, don’t look at your
LLMs.txt. Look at your referring domains. -
Ignore the Noise: The industry makes money by selling you “change.” You make money by realizing things stay the same.
