Hey hey!
Picture this:
It’s 10am on a Friday. You’ve got a proposal to finish, three unanswered emails from potential clients, and a blog post to finish that could bring in your ideal client.
Instead, you’re on your fourth consecutive LinkedIn scroll, telling yourself it’s research.
(This is the 10/03/2026 issue of my newsletter – subscribe here)
You’ve also spent 20 minutes tweaking the headline on your homepage (it was fine before), registered for a webinar about AI search that you’ll definitely watch live (you absolutely won’t, the recording will sit in your inbox until August when you’ll guiltily delete it because it’s out of date), and you’ve checked Google Analytics twice to watch the same 47 visitors do the same things they did yesterday.
Sound familiar?
I get it, because I’ve done all of it. Probably already this morning.
Human beings, and people with a business to market in particular, are absolutely fucking brilliant at creating the feeling of productive work without doing the actual thing.
It’s not laziness – it’s the opposite. It’s a kind of industrious avoidance, staying so visibly busy that nobody – including ourselves – notices we haven’t sent that email to the company we’d genuinely love to work with.
SEO has always been particularly good at feeding this. Every era produces its own category of technically-plausible busywork, and the current one is no different.
The classics never die
In the early days, people were submitting their sites to hundreds of directories, spinning articles through software to create “unique” versions, and stuffing keywords into white text on white backgrounds.
Then there was the town and city landing page era – creating dozens of near-identical pages for every location within a 50-mile radius, changing “copywriter in Sheffield” to “copywriter in Rotherham” to “copywriter in Barnsley” and calling it a local SEO strategy. Weeks of work. Reams of identical content. (If you haven’t heard of this one before, please don’t give it a try – Google figured it out embarrassingly quickly, and most of those pages either got ignored or actively hurt the sites they were on.)
We’ve always been awesome at looking busy while procrastinating wildly and hoping no-one noticed.
Welcome to a new era
These days the busywork has a new name: GEO. And it comes with a whole new set of tasks that sound important and do very little. Here are just 3.
Adding an LLMs.txt file
The pitch: create a special file telling AI crawlers what to index on your site, and you’ll get better visibility in AI search results! Plausible. Technical-sounding. Even some of the SEO tools have started treating it as an error if you don’t have one.
Also a complete waste of fucking time.
Reboot Online tested this properly. They published LLMs.txt files on two established websites, created test pages that could only be found via those files, and waited three months. Not a single AI bot visited the test pages. Meanwhile those same bots were crawling other pages on both sites without any trouble.
The bots weren’t ignoring the websites. They were ignoring the LLMs.txt files entirely.
Creating markdown versions of your pages
Cloudflare launched a feature that converts your HTML pages into markdown for AI crawlers, on the basis that markdown is more “token efficient” for large language models. In came a wave of website owners creating parallel versions of their content for bots.
John Mueller from Google called it “stupid” on Bluesky. Fabrice Canel from Bing pointed out you’d be doubling your crawl load, and if the two versions don’t match, you’ve accidentally created a cloaking problem – which Google has been penalising since the early 2000s.
There’s also no evidence any major AI platform prefers markdown, rewards sites that use it, or cites them more often. A solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Adding a table of contents to every page
This one’s slightly less shiny but the same pattern. Someone decided tables of contents help with AI Search, and now people are adding navigation blocks to 300-word pages about their opening hours. Only a couple of weeks ago I saw a three-item table of contents on a page shorter than a LinkedIn post. It added nothing. It helped no one. It ticked an imaginary box.
Tables of contents are a valid navigation tool. They help readers of genuinely long content jump to what they need. They’re not a ranking tactic, and your 400-word service page does not need one.
What all of these have in common
They’re measurable. They’re billable. They create visible activity. And they let everyone involved feel like something important is happening.
Which is exactly what redesigning your logo for the third time does. Or reading another 12 SEO blog posts instead of implementing the advice from the first one. Or checking Search Console at 9am, 11am, and 2pm on the same day as if the numbers will have dramatically changed between your second, third, and fourth coffee.
The work that really grows businesses – writing the proposal, sending the pitch email, fixing the page that’s been broken for six months, creating content that answers a question people are really asking – tends to feel considerably less satisfying than a morning of productive-looking busywork procrastination.
Same as it ever was. The tools change, the avoidance doesn’t. Don’t fall for it.
Worth your time this week
Speaking of which – here’s what’s worth your time this week. One read, one listen, one subscribe.
Read: Google filed a patent about AI versions of your website that’s sent LinkedIn into its usual spiral of panic posts and “THIS IS HUGE” hot takes. Before you do anything drastic, here’s what it really says – and what it probably means for your website.
Listen: Yes, it’s my own podcast, and no, I’m not embarrassed. This episode covers the three free SEO tools you need – and why ignoring them is one of the most expensive mistakes a website owner can make. Episode 16 is here.
Subscribe: I’m bringing Giada Nizzoli into my Ascend cohort for a masterclass because she’s genuinely one of the best people I know at helping women service providers own their expertise without the apologetic shrinking that most of us were conditioned into. With IWD fresh in mind, her newsletter feels like the right recommendation this week. Join her list here.
That’s it for this week, now go do that thing you’ve been putting off!
Always non-wanky,
Nx
P.S. I’ve opened up some monthly pay spaces on the non-wanky On-Page SEO Course – £20 a month, no busywork involved.
