This morning’s Reddit scroll unearthed a pirate’s booty of marketing plunder:
One user posed the question:
What’s probably the most overrated trend in digital marketing right now?
A top response?
Most overrated is AI for sure.
And if we take AI out of the mix?
SEO is runner-up. It’s not 2015 anymore, people—blogs and alt text do REDACTED all nowadays.
OK, settle down. AI and SEO didn’t break into your house last night and steal your breakfast. That said? I totally agree… with a few caveats.
AI Is Overrated… But Only If You Use It Wrong
I’m probably in the 99.9th percentile of people who use AI daily. ChatGPT has been my underpaid intern for years.
No, ChatGPT didn’t write this post.
Or any of my other emails, sales pages, or Christmas cards.
The reason marketers freak out about AI is because ChatGPT is trained on all information.
And all information is, by default, average.
Meaning ChatGPT can only generate average responses—it doesn’t distinguish between the top and bottom of the bell curve.
If most people are average, then it makes sense that most marketers would be nervous when a machine churns out the same quality of content in a fraction of the time.
Me? I don’t worry. I use AI to:
- Summarize long reports and research studies.
- Answer complicated search queries better than Google.
- Remind me that my daughter’s weird sleeping noises don’t mean she needs the ER.
So, yeah—AI is overrated for content creation but indispensable for efficiency. Ignoring AI is like a farmer rejecting tractors because he prefers the old ways.
Will AI Take Over Marketing?
Not anytime soon.
These models are already hitting diminishing returns—GPT-5 won’t be much of an improvement over 4, and 4 wasn’t a massive leap from 3.
MidJourney still struggles with human faces, cranking out nightmare fuel instead of photorealism.
For now, you’re probably safe. Why? Because the one thing AI is terrible at is understanding and capturing emotion.
And emotion is the key to understanding your market.
Which just so happens to be Stage 1 of my marketing process.
SEO: Dead or Just Evolving?
Let’s go back to that Reddit comment. Is SEO really the “runner-up” for the most overrated trend in digital marketing?
Hard agree.
SEO is dead!
At least, the way most people do SEO is dead.
And AI is part of the reason.
The Evolution of SEO: From Keyword Stuffing to EEAT
SEO used to mean vomiting thousands of keyword-stuffed blog posts onto the internet. Here’s what every website looked like in 2003:
Welcome to Bob’s Best Web Hosting! Looking for cheap web hosting? We have the best cheap web hosting with fast web hosting, secure web hosting, and affordable web hosting all in one! Don’t wait—get your cheap best hosting today!
Of course, you wouldn’t be able to read that because your screen would be plastered with blinking pop-ups promising “Hot Cougars in Your Local Area!”
Early internet—truly the Wild West.
Back then, Google’s ranking system was primitive. Keyword stuffing worked because Google didn’t have a better way to determine relevance.
Fast forward to today: Google has grown up. And so has the competition. There are a trillion blog posts on how to hire a plumber, and another trillion AI-generated ones published every day.
This is why 20-year-old SEO tactics don’t work anymore.
What Works Now? EEAT
Google (claims) to prioritize content based on EEAT:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
Translation? Google favors original work by real people who actually know what they’re talking about.
In practice? SEO has always been a crapshoot.
That’s why I don’t sell SEO services.
What I Do Instead
I pull the levers that actually make money:
- Emails.
- Sales writing.
- Ads.
None of this “pay me pallets of cash every month and hopefully, in two years, you’ll rank on Google” baloney.
Reject baloney. Embrace mortadella.
Want marketing that actually works? Join my waitlist:
