SEOs: The Unsung Heroes Behind Google’s Trillion-Dollar Success

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Let’s be honest: SEOs have been doing Google’s dirty work for decades.

We clean up the web. We format content so their bots don’t choke. We spoon-feed them useless tags like schema. And we keep playing by their rules, even when they rewrite them mid-game, all the while scraping our content for AI answers.

While Google claims to “organically surface the best content,” the truth is: SEOs are unpaid QA testers, content stylists, and part-time spam janitors for their trillion-dollar empire.

Over the years, we’ve heard many stories bashing SEO’s. They often point to low quality word salad pages with pop ups and other nonsense that nobody (especially REAL Seo’s) wants. All SEO’s have cringed from time-to-time at these stories. <steps up on soapbox>, it is time to set the record straight: Google wouldn’t be Google without SEO.

Google’s dominance in search didn’t happen in a vacuum! Google was built in part by the entire SEO industry. While we SEOs often find ourselves at odds with Google’s shifting algorithms and opaque updates, the reality is: we’ve helped Google more than we hurt it! From cleaning up the web to structuring content for bots to crawl, much of what SEOs do feeds directly into Google’s success,  and sometimes even props it up.

Top Ways that SEO’s Help Google:

1. Clean Up the Web

SEOs improve site structure, fix Google crawl errors, eliminate duplicate content, and enhance usability – all of which make the web easier for Googlebot to index and rank. This ultimately cleans up the index.

2. Content Optimization

SEOs organize and rewrite content so it’s more relevant, scannable, and aligned with  user intent. In other words: we do Google’s job of surfacing better answers for users.

3. Schema Markup

By adding structured data (like Product, Article, FAQ schema), SEOs make it easier for Google to parse page meaning and generate rich snippets in the SERPs.

This is a double edged sword that the pubic simply doesn’t know about. In almost every side-by-side test we have seen, it does nothing to help rankings, but there SEO’s are doing it because Google wanted it. If not for some random language settings, there is little value in SEO’s doing this, but we all hope it will some day.

4. We Beta Test Their Pet Projects

SEOs promote and implemented features (even when they suck) like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Core Web Vitals, and now AI Overviews – often before they’ve proven any ROI – simply to try to stay competitive in rankings.  Seriously – half of it breaks – none of it lasts – but we just keep dancing with them.

5. Fuel Google’s Training Data

Every well-structured blog post, guide, or product review written with SEO in mind gets scraped and becomes high-quality fuel for LLM training and AI Overviews. SEOs produce the web’s cleanest content at scale. Even at our own peril. They’re literally feeding off SEO content and still acting like we’re the problem!?

6. Encourage Indexation of the Long Tail

SEOs create and maintain very deep content catalogs (e.g., thousands-upon-thousands of long-tail queries and FAQs), which help Google expand coverage of niche and emerging topics.

Don’t think that matters? Ever search for a model number to that broken widget? Ya Baby – thank an SEO that helped you find that! We do it all day!

7. Test and Surface User Behavior

Through content testing and quality A/B experimentation, SEOs unknowingly teach Google which headlines, structures, and formats actually work. These are feedback loops Google then uses in algorithm updates.

It was an SEO that discovered the famous “Golden Triangle” that finally made sense of how people generally use webpages. This radically changed the web from a mismash of choatic user interfaces into something more like we use today.

Measuring click behavior? Testing format tweaks? That’s us! Google watches what wins, tweaks the algo, and pretends it was AI magic. The truth? They train on us more than we train on them.

8. Support Google’s Monetization

argh. It’s true – we prop it up. There is a very old saying into SEO: “Those that can get rankings, do get rankings. Those that can’t, please see AdWords“.

By building sites that rank well, SEOs often push users into ad-heavy high-click SERPs. Many SEO-driven businesses also buy Google AdWords to supplement organic traffic, further funding the ecosystem.

9. Local Ecosystem Cleanup

Local SEOs claim listings, fix NAP data, upload photos, and fight spam in Google Business Profiles – cleaning up the local map experience for free.

10. Reinforce Google’s Market Share

Despite loud complaints, SEOs continue optimizing for Google almost exclusively. That dependency signals to clients, developers, and advertisers that Google is still the only game in town – reinforcing its dominance.

The bottom line is that SEOs aren’t just playing Google’s game; we’ve been the grounds crew, stagehands, and sometimes even the scriptwriters. We fix the messes, format the web, and help users actually find what they’re looking for. And we do it all while adapting to a search engine that shifts the rules every couple of months. Google’s AI doesn’t magically know what works! Google learns by watching us. So the next time someone dismisses SEO as gaming the system, remind them: there wouldn’t be a system worth gaming without us and that everything going forward, is all on them.