Google’s Danny Sullivan, the former Search Liaison, said not to create bite-sized chunks of your content because you think Google’s AI results and other LLMs like that type of content. He said, “we don’t want you to do that” and that he spoke with Google engineers about it and they said the same thing – don’t do it for LLMs.
More details. Danny Sullivan said on the Search Off the Record podcast that was published yesterday:
“One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are really bite size, right?”
He then said, don’t do that. He said:
“So we don’t want you to do that. I was talking to some engineers about that. We don’t want you to do that. We really don’t. We don’t want people to have to be crafting anything for Search specifically. That’s never been where we’ve been at and we still continue to be that way. We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.”
But it works? Well, he addressed that too. He said, “Let’s assume that, in some edge cases, let’s even assume maybe in more than some edge cases, you’re finding you’re getting some advantage here.”
It will only be temporary. You will be changing or making new pieces of content, in this new format, because you think it works for LLMs and Google’s AI results. But then these ranking systems will continue to improve and move towards rewarding content written for humans, and then those pieces of content you specifically designed to rank well for LLMs, the chunked content, will no longer do well.
He said, “the systems improve, probably the way the systems always try to improve, to reward content written for humans. All that stuff that you did to please this LLM system that may or may not have worked, may not carry through for the long term.”
As they say, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
The podcast. Here is the podcast where he said this at the 18 minute mark:
Why we care. Yes, I know even this site has published a lot of columns on the value of content chunking. But again, if you think about it how SEO strategies have evolved over the years, it all came back to writing stuff your users want. Building an audience so you are not dependent on Google or LLMs. Sure, there may be short-term gain, but is it worth it if it can hurt your reputation with your users?
Of course, as SEOs, you need to test what works and go with the data. But what might work today, might not work tomorrow.
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