I spent an hour talking to Google's AI about SEO

I never used to touch Google's AI in search. That little chat box that shows up, I always scrolled straight past it. Then today, for no real reason, I opened it and asked a genuine question about something I'd been chewing on. And I ended up in there for an hour.

Part of why I avoided it for so long is that I stayed out of the whole AI and LLM world after OpenAI kicked it all off. That was deliberate.

I didn't want to jump on the AI train the second it left the station, because the internet does the experimenting for me. I don't enjoy going down a rabbit hole of comparing one tool against the next, then the next one after that.

But things changed. I'm using Claude around the clock now, and that shifted how I search for everything. So when I typed a question into Google's AI today, it didn't stay a quick answer.

It turned into a full, in-depth conversation about this blog and where I stand with SEO.

And I got more out of that hour than I've gotten from scrolling through dozens of Reddit threads where people vent about their traffic tanking after the latest Google update.

The reassurance it provided

The conversation gave me something solid. Google's AI told me my approach, my tone, the way I write, is exactly the kind of thing it wants to see.

Not because I follow the hardcore SEO playbook. I don't. No over-optimized titles. No technical keyword placement. None of the usual nine yards.

The opposite, in fact. It told me this is the way forward: an authentic voice, writing about whatever I want, jotting down thoughts from a real human point of view.

Because that's the whole point of this site. My journey, my experiments, the path I'm on with Ryoka Group, the content creator label: it all adds up over time. It's the one thing nobody can copy.

Search is shifting, sure. People are leaning on AI more and more. But none of that changes the fact that this blog is tied to my name, my voice, my social profiles, my biography, everything I do. If you search "Pieter Borremans," I want the results to be mine.

Go read any post I've written. The titles aren't anywhere near SEO standard, and I don't fucking care. Google's AI told me I shouldn't care either. It put it more diplomatically, and then backed it up with a calm, reasonable, genuinely expert explanation of why.

I even showed it a screenshot of my Search Console. My traffic is under 10 visits a month right now. Still not a problem, it said.

Where I went wrong

What hit me is that I should have done this validation months ago. This one conversation took the pressure off. The pressure to constantly hunt for topics, or second-guess how I blog. It reminded me this is a marathon. More than anything, that hour gave me peace of mind.

I should just keep writing my story and my thoughts the way I see them, and not stop.

I asked it about using AI to write

I couldn't help myself. I asked the assistant what it thought about me using AI to help write these posts, because I do use Claude to fine-tune my drafts.

Here's what Google's AI said, more or less word for word:

'Its algorithmic filters are built to spot exactly these kinds of personal stories, to separate genuine human journals from generic AI-generated sites.'

Using Claude only to smooth out my phrasing — to clean up the English — gives me clean copy without stripping out my voice.

It went further and told me journal content is basically immune to penalties. Again, roughly quoting:

I clear the "helpful content" bar because Google openly favors first-person human experience over generic, formulaic templates.

I show zero intent to game the system, because I'm not chasing high-competition commercial keywords, so I raise no red flags with the webspam team.

And my whole strategy fits ORM perfectly: For protecting a personal reputation, I don't need 50,000 random informational visitors a month. My unusual titles are distinct, memorable brand markers, and they claim those exact search slots for my name.

That was the gist of it. There was more, but you get the shape of it.

Writing for humans

So I feel more motivated to keep going and treat this blog like a journal instead of an SEO machine. And I'm more confident now that 12 to 18 months from here, I can put myself at the top with my projects, my data, my activity all linked back to this blog as the center of it.

It circled me back to something simple. Always write for humans, never for search engines. People like blogs that tell a story.

Readers who come back get invested, because you're handing them the growing pains, the failures, the thoughts, the small wins, all of it as it happens.

What I'm really taking from that hour isn't a strategy. It's permission to stop optimizing. I spent so long assuming I was doing it wrong. Wrong titles, wrong traffic numbers, wrong everything, that I never stopped to ask whether the thing I was already doing was the point.

Turns out it might be. So I'll keep showing up here, writing it down as it comes, and let the rest catch up in its own time.