Chris Green: Patents, Bots & the Cannibalization Reversal

Fifteen years of SEO theory was built on Google’s patent literature. Chris Green of Torque Partnership takes the two load-bearing ones, PageRank and Reasonable Surfer, and asks what survives a web where most of the traffic hitting your pages was never a person. He is also the sceptic on markdown companion files, and the sceptic is the useful voice in that argument. Key takeaways Patents are principles to reason from, not rules to obey. Simulating link equity is a fine way to picture a change. Betting a rollout on the simulation is the risk. Agent traffic is polluting the analytics your budget rests on. Worst when the agent rides a real user’s browser, session and device, where the usual bot tells are absent. Markdown companions are near-free on a small site and a governance problem on a big one. The cost is not authoring. It is who owns the drift. Nothing on the internet will tell you your markdown is wrong. Search Console flags broken HTML. No equivalent exists for a companion file. An isolated client test found three to four selectable links to be a citation sweet spot. He labels it as isolated and does not oversell it. On this page Patents as principles, not blueprints What agent traffic does to your data The sceptic’s case on markdown companions The cannibalisation reversal, and access logs Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Patents as principles, not blueprints We know when the patent comes in, we know when it’s established. We don’t often have a consistent concrete understanding of for how long that mechanism is at work or what other systems intertwine with it... learn them, be aware of them, be conscious of them.— Chris Green The distinction he is drawing is between using a patent to picture a system and using one to justify a decision. You can move PageRank around a site convincingly in a simulation and change visibility by nothing at all. If you know how to test it and you know how to be skeptical then it’s still valuable, still highly valuable.— Chris Green What agent traffic does to your data User behavior collapses, like things like dwell time, click frustration points, call to actions, everything like that is turned on its head... it pollutes all of my other data, which then ruins decision making, which then eventually potentially ruins my budget and my remit.— Chris Green This is the part of the agentic shift that arrives before any of the interesting parts. Agents do not pogo-stick, do not hesitate, and do not read. Every behavioural metric you use to argue for investment quietly stops describing humans, and nothing in the...