With all due respect to Michael but has he not used Google in the past years? This has been an issue since at least 2016. SEO won. Maybe some googlers can answ

With all due respect to Michael but has he not used Google in the past years? This has been an issue since at least 2016. SEO won. Maybe some googlers can answer this but i assume that Singhal was very conservative against AI for ranking. But when he left Giannandrea started rolling out the "natural language" queries with "let me just ignore your query because we know better" algorithms, also slowly removed operators/keywords used by power users. And well SEO really have gotten better so it all piles up.