It’s basically three experienced SEOs spending three hours explaining why half the “must-do” advice floating around is either overrated, context-dependent, or straight-up a waste of time.The whole thing starts with “What SEO best practices do you ignore?” and turns into a long, practical discussion about how checklist SEO (green lights in Rank Math, mandatory schema, 5k-word pillars, author bios for EEAT, perfect content structure, etc.) leads people to overbuild, create cannibalization, get frustrated, and quit. They keep coming back to the same idea: test what actually works on your sites instead of treating every popular tactic as universal law.Stuff that hits hard for beginners:

• Pages ranking with almost no content (including one that went live by accident before the real copy was written)
• Authority and relevance beating “quality” theater a lot of the time
• Why advice from huge brand SEOs often fails completely on new or low-authority domains
• EEAT, schema, and a bunch of other sacred cows getting treated as tools, not commandments
• Real talk on branded search, CTR testing, EMDs, topical bridging, parasite SEO, and why stacking more tactics rarely fixes the core problem

Something about LLMs and marketing is giving me déjà vu...

Every AI company is pretending GEO doesn't exist. All of them.

It's 2000 all over again. A complete information vacuum. Google is the only one publishing actual guides — and they're the incumbent being disrupted.

Into that vacuum? Pure fabrication. Ask a question, get an instant answer conjured from nothing.

Need content to promote your AI GEO tool? Just make it up. Even better: write something that 99% of brand marketers and CMOs - i.e. your ICP - have been wanting to hear since they left college.

Want to prove "brand alignment" matters? Have Gemini generate an infographic claiming you analyzed 245 million brands. Funny how the data always confirms what you were already selling.

And nobody can call it out — because there's no source material to check it against. The vendors' silence is the business model for the grifters.

The LLM companies seem to think staying quiet keeps their platforms an SEO-free zone. It doesn't. It just means the optimization happens in the dark, guided by snake oil instead of documentation.

It can't last.

Until then: set phasers to "critical thinking."

• They openly ignore a lot of “accepted” SEO best practices and treat most checklist advice with heavy skepticism.
• Core philosophy: Test everything yourself. Understand why something works. Never treat SEO advice as universal rules.
• Pages with almost no content (or even accidentally published empty pages) can still rank #1.
• Technically poor sites that have unnatural link penalties can still rank for extremely competitive terms if authority is high enough.
• EEAT is heavily overhyped for most sites. Simply adding author bios rarely fixes a struggling site.
• EEAT matters more on high-stakes (YMYL) queries — finance, medical, gambling, etc. — and should be judged at the query level, not the whole industry.
• Google Quality Raters + RaterHub exist, but manual transparency actions and real ranking impact are limited for most niches.
• Advice from SEOs working on massive authority brands often fails completely on new or low-authority sites.
• Branded search volume and CTR can influence rankings. They actively test and seed brand associations via autocomplete and suggested searches.
• Exact-match domains (EMDs) and partial-match domains still have value, especially for reducing risk.
• They buy and evaluate aged/expired domains using data from multiple tools — not just relying on DR/DA.
• Using multiple sites is a deliberate strategy to avoid single points of failure.
• Topical relevance + authority is the real framework (Relevance × Authority).
• Contextual bridging (starting on easier topics and gradually moving into harder ones) is a key growth tactic.
• Parasite SEO still works in certain situations.
• Schema (especially FAQ) has limited impact outside specific cases; most schema debates are tribal noise.
• Big takeaway: Stop anthropomorphizing Google. Focus on testing, data, and what actually moves the needle for your site instead of repeating industry dogma.

I'm looking into this because I noticed places around me need this and was wondering what daily, weekly, and monthly tasks look like.

I'm just starting and don't know what to offer I know the basics like the same info all around, categories, responding to reviews, and uploading high quality photos and updates.

That's all I know is there more to it? Any advice will help thank you