High Fidelity Representation: Why Sound, Smart SEO Matters More Now Than Ever In The Age Of AI Search

Gimmicks.

Sadly in search (and digital marketing in general) gimmicks are everywhere.

A gimmick, strictly speaking, is a method or tactic meant to temporarily improve or draw attention – often short-lived and shallow in nature.

Often these will be introduced as “the next big thing”, a hype cycle follows and a gold rush begins in an attempt to mine the gimmick’s “trick” or “play” window.

Gimmicks are used in the offline world, to be fair and may have a place in some marketer’s playbooks in certain industries or areas – these aren’t inherently bad, but can leave a bad taste in particular audience’s mouths, so to speak. There’s something artificial about them that feels “plastic” or inauthentic.

While the memory of those gimmicks can often fade over time in the offline world (to a certain degree), in the online world the remnants of those gimmicks can linger over a much longer time – and potentially tarnish the representation of a company (or person) in online spaces – including the search space.

In last week’s post I mentioned how many of these modern representation spaces are constructed – from tokenization to vectors to embeddings and processed through transformer architectures (and self-attention mechanisms) to create a shared contextual representation space used to produce responses.

I also reviewed the overlap between non-classical (quantum) representation spaces and these contextualized representation spaces in LLMs – the mutual overlap being the shared geometric properties of the underlying, primitive vector spaces.

In many of my past posts here I explained why visibility is getting harder to accurately measure as a result of these shared properties, like contextuality (and argue that the mathematical machinery used in quantum theory may be better than our current classical methods).

What does this have to do with gimmicks?

Every bit that goes online about a person, business or other entity can eventually find its way into these contextualized representation spaces – including gimmicked bits.

The more gimmicks are employed, the more they may be bundled – in context – with those entities as they’re ingested by search and other digital spaces.

As many of these gimmicks often betray the pure, authentic representation of a person, business, website or other entity, the further the digital representation can get from that authentic representation.

This difference, collectively, can diminish the representational fidelity of those entities in those spaces. In spaces where very small changes (“the little things”) can drastically affect outcomes (responses) – like the contextualized representation spaces in AI/LLMs — diminished fidelity can yield undesirable results.

On Fidelity

Fidelity, in simple terms, is a short hand way of saying “exactness” or accuracy in details.

Its use in the search world is limited ( perhaps it will be more after this post is published ), but in non-classical spaces (quantum), it’s quite common.

The overlaps between these two spaces (AI/LLMs & quantum-like systems) continue to accumulate, so it’s not surprising that fidelity is a useful concept in both, really.

In the quantum world, fidelity is a measure of similarity between two quantum states – how much they overlap, essentially.

We don’t need to dig into the exact calculations, but one can easily see why this is also useful in search and AI/LLM representational spaces – a relative measure between a company/brand’s authentic representation and their digital representation.

As it turns out, SEOs play a pivotal role in maintaining that fidelity.

SEO & Intrinsic Context

If you’re reading this, you likely have some SEO background so I don’t need to dig into the on-site particulars of search optimization.

One can think of this as a company or brands “intrinsic context” – what does a website’s collective internal technical and creative traits say about themselves?

What is the technical foundation? What is the theme? What relevant topics are covered? Who are they? What do they do? Whom do the serve? What do important web page zones mention? What technical enhancements support search efforts?

There’s little that an SEO doesn’t handle when answering these questions, and none of them exist in isolation – collectively forming an “intrinsic context” for the company/brand.

SEO & Extrinsic Context

Off-site SEO – what are others sharing, mentioning or discussing related to (and pointed back to) a particular company or brand.

Again, the particulars aren’t necessary here – it’s essentially how the company is represented by those outside of the company/brand (externally).

Collectively, these form an “extrinsic context” for a company or brand.

SEOs Create High Fidelity Representations Within Search (And AI/LLM) Spaces

As you can see above, a company’s intrinsic and extrinsic context is something that SEOs are uniquely positioned to maintain.

In spaces that are highly contextualized ( like the AI/LLM and non-classical spaces above ) – intrinsic context and extrinsic context must be maintained to a high fidelity to be accurately represented in the right – or relevant – contexts.

Changes in intrinsic context may indicate an identity modification, website issue or topical stray which may no longer match the extrinsic context; sharp changes in extrinsic context may indicate a sentiment change, artificial/manipulative behavior or other irrelevant activity that no longer is in line with intrinsic context.

Both have to be handled carefully and can effectively lower a company/brand’s fidelity within those spaces – even small changes may yield dramatically different results (responses), potentially making a company/brand less relevant in important moments.  A few weeks ago I mentioned how search/AI/LLMs are essentially decision making mechanisms – each make choices on presenting the most relevant information in any given context.  Those subtle mismatches can affect those decision making mechanisms after retrieval within those spaces, essentially.

Coming all the way around you can see how gimmicks can affect fidelity: even short-lived “gimmick events” on-site or off-site can cause a mismatch in either contexts.

As those gimmicks are ingested by these spaces, they can be difficult shake once attention binds them “in context” with an entity into these updated contextualized spaces used to produce responses.

It’s Not AEO, GEO, AISEO; It’s Just Sound, Smart SEO

Recently there have been attempts to change the name of SEO – GEO, AEO, AISEO, et. al.

I hope stepping back a bit and seeing what SEOs really do in fidelity maintenance (and largely relevance/context management) you can understand why there really isn’t a need to rename this field.

More notes next week and a return to our visibility measurement issues within these spaces.