Vibin Babuurajan, Co-founder, Epic Slope Partners
Everyone wants SEO to move faster.
That’s hardly surprising. Every new AI SEO tool promises to help you publish more content, cover more keywords, and grow traffic in less time. Thousands of pages in days. Programmatic SEO promises entire keyword categories overnight.
None of these are inherently bad. Speed has always been useful.
But, what often happens is speed becomes the objective instead of the advantage.
If you listen to most conversations about SEO today, they’re usually about publishing more. The question we don’t hear enough is whether the strategy will still be working 12 months from now. That’s where I think the difference lies between an SEO program that’s built to rank and one that’s built to last.
I’ve always found it helpful to think about SEO the same way I think about investing.
A trader reacts to what’s happening today. Every movement feels important because the next move is the opportunity. An investor expects volatility. Some investments perform well, others don’t, but the goal isn’t to win every day. The focus stays on the quality of the portfolio because that’s what decides how it performs over time.
SEO behaves much the same way.
Anyone who’s been in this field for a while knows that rankings never stand still. Some pages lose visibility, others perform far better than expected, and every algorithm update changes something. That’s never been the intriguing part of SEO because it’s unavoidable. What matters is whether the website is becoming more useful, more trusted, and more valuable despite those changes.
This is where I think many businesses lose their way.
SEO starts producing results, and, naturally, the next discussion is about scale. If a thousand pages produced growth, why not publish another thousand? If one content format is working, why not produce ten times more of it?
The answer often becomes thousands of thin programmatic pages or endless AI-generated articles that add very little beyond another keyword variation.
For a while, the strategy might appear to work, and everyone celebrates.
It works. Until the next algorithm update.
The irony, though, is that many companies don’t kill their organic growth because SEO stopped working, but because it started working.
Success creates the temptation to over-extract. The instinct is no longer to improve the website. It’s to uproot as much value from it as quickly as possible.
It’s the equivalent of finding a goose that lays golden eggs and deciding the fastest way to get more eggs is to cut the goose open.
Finding a source of sustainable growth is difficult. What’s harder is resisting the temptation to push it beyond the point where it’s creating real value.
When an algorithm update exposes those weaknesses, recovery takes months or can even break you entirely. Even websites that have played by the rules often spend six to twelve months rebuilding trust.
That’s one reason I think the current conversation around AI misses something important.
Most AI content platforms are built on the assumption that publishing content faster leads to better SEO performance.
There’s some truth in that. Yes, publishing faster can accelerate growth. But velocity without judgment also accelerates mistakes.
You might get a short burst of results. But you won’t have a business left to compound!
Every growing website eventually reaches a point where publishing another hundred pages creates less value than improving the hundred pages that are already there. That’s usually when judgement becomes more important than production. You spend less time asking, “What else can we publish?” and more time thinking, “How can we make this website genuinely better for the people using it?”
The winners over the next decade will be the companies with the discipline not to publish when a page doesn’t deserve to exist. They’ll build websites that become more useful every year instead of simply becoming larger. To me, that’s the difference between building for rankings and building for longevity.
One approach is always chasing the next result. The other is building something that deserves to keep succeeding, even as search continues to change.