Okay, so I want to kick this blog off by explaining the lens I use for basically everything I’m going to talk about here. And that lens is game theory.
Now, I’m not going to get super academic on you. No equations. The idea is honestly pretty simple: every platform is a player, and every player is trying to win something. If you can figure out what they’re trying to win, you can usually figure out what they’re going to do next.
Why I started thinking about it this way
I’ve been in SEO for about eight years now. I started out building links, then I was running SEO, then consulting. And the thing that always bugged me was how reactive everyone is. Google pushes an update, everybody panics, rankings drop, and then we all spend three months trying to reverse engineer what happened.
That’s a rough way to live, right? You’re always one step behind.
So at some point I started asking a different question. Not “what did Google just change?” but “what is Google actually trying to do, and what would I do if I were them?”
The players
Let’s just map it out real quick.
Google makes money when people search and click on ads. So Google wants people to keep coming back to Google. Anything that makes searchers trust the results more, or keeps them on Google longer, is good for Google. That’s why you see things like AI Overviews answering questions right on the results page. It’s not random. It’s the move that protects their position.
ChatGPT (and the other AI assistants) want you to trust the answer enough that you don’t feel the need to go double check it somewhere else. Their whole game is “the answer is right here, stay in the chat.” So they’re incentivized to pull from sources that look credible, consistent, and talked about across the web.
Publishers and brands, which is us, want traffic, visibility, and ultimately customers.
And here’s the thing. Those goals don’t line up perfectly. When an AI tool answers the question directly, that’s a win for the platform and kind of a loss for the site that wrote the content. That tension is the game.
So what do you actually do with that?
This is where it gets fun. Once you see the incentives, a few things kind of fall out on their own:
- If the platforms want to look trustworthy, they’re going to lean on sources that already look trustworthy. So being mentioned, cited, and talked about in a lot of places matters more, not less.
- If AI answers are eating the simple questions, the simple questions are a bad bet. The stuff that still drives a click is the stuff a summary can’t fully replace. Original data, real experience, an actual opinion.
- If you’re reacting, you’ve already lost a little. The best position is the one where the platform changes the rules and you’re already standing where they’re heading.
That last one is basically the whole point. In game theory terms, you’re looking for a dominant strategy, the move that works out for you no matter what the other player does. Positioning early is usually that move. If the shift doesn’t happen, cool, you made a small bet. If it does, you’re already there.
What’s coming on this blog
So that’s the lens. Going forward I’m going to be doing a few things here:
- Running experiments on this very site and writing up what happens, good or bad.
- Reacting to new Ahrefs studies and pulling out what I think they actually mean for you.
- Thinking out loud about what Google, ChatGPT, and the rest are up to, and where I think it’s heading.
Most of this is going to start as videos, so the posts are going to sound a lot like me talking. That’s on purpose.
If you’re into this kind of thing, come connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d honestly love to hear how you’re thinking about it, especially if you disagree.