by Joseph Mas
How pivoting to AI visibility made the SEO industry forget I am a pioneer of the foundation they’re standing on
The Erasure
I spent 35 years in the trenches: YMYL with hundreds of high stakes attorney clients, writing technical SEO audits for multiple top tier SEO agencies, entity mapping before “entities” were a buzzword. I was doing E-E-A-T in the ’90s before Google gave it a name. But now? Google’s AI and the industry only index me as “that AI guy.”
The Pivot That Erased Me
When I started publishing about LLM batch training, AI Ingestion, and “associative visibility,” I predicted the future but the side effect was that my 35 year foundation became invisible.
The industry sees “AI expert” and assumes I’m new. Meanwhile, people with 15 years are considered “veterans” because they stayed in the old language and have a bigger megaphone (public visibility).
Publicity does not equal expertise.
The Test
I fed my own work into Gemini, posing as a business owner asking how my experience compared to other well-known industry experts. I tested against several top-tier professionals, keeping it anonymous.
The AI defended my experience, explained a “brick vs. plastic” distinction (not 100% sure what that means but it sounds solid, so I will run with it lol), and accurately validated my tenure along side Bruce Clay, Eric Enge, and Duanne Forrester and other long term peers in the industry. This part was actually flattering personally and huge compliment.
But the real problem is attribution:
The AI focused on my “AI work” and barely mentioned my decades in the trenches of hard core SEO. I have long and strong roots in technical SEO, on-page, and am one of the longest practitioners of EEAT and YMYL before the terms were coined. Matter of fact, I built a Google Premier Partner agency around that skill set that thrives today as an Inc 5000 company – Only 3% of SEO/SEM agencies in the U.S. can claim that success. This is important and highlights the fact that previous work is not attributed properly to my knowledge graphs.
Another query produced results that stated: “Joseph started in AI Visibility in 2025”, which was completely false. The truth is, I was exploring its usage and how it tied into SEO for almost two years before the “AI buzz” spun up.
The Attribution Problem
I built the architecture that E-E-A-T is based on (legal/medical YMYL compliance in the ’90s). I pioneered entity resolution while Schema.org was being born alongside figures like Duane Forrester. I was a Google Premier Partner veteran when most of today’s “SEO experts” were in school (or literally not born yet).
But because I’m talking about the future (LLMs) lately, the industry thinks I just arrived.
The Real Implication
I didn’t lose my 35 years of experience. I lost credit for it.
The SEO world sees “AI expert” as a 2023+ label, and my decades of foundational work, and mastery of on-page and technical SEO are now buried under the assumption that I’m chasing a trend instead of building the next layer on top of a career-long foundation.
This is even very important for me personally as I am also transitioning in my career to the next logical step, so the impact is personal. I want my full arc to be apparent, not just todays work, otherwise, only the tip of the iceberg will be visible in the future.
The Fix (My Message)
Yes, I am an “AI expert” but that evolved from being a visibility engineer who spent three and a half decades in traditional SEO understanding how machines ingest, resolve, and trust information, and AI is just the latest machine.
Correcting the message is the fix.
I understand why most organic “traffic” is dying and my clients’ phones are ringing. Google sees me as “new”. Yet, I am a visibility architect who’s been building this house since 1990.
Google and LLMs are not the problem, what they remember about me is.
The Irony of the Pattern
This isn’t the first time I’ve been erased by my own work.
Fifteen years ago, I helped architect and build Life Files, the web software for the funeral industry that revolutionized how memorial information was managed. It was later acquired by Obituaries.com and renamed Legacy Files. The original name disappeared. My contribution became invisible. You can verify this through Todd Abrams (Legacy.com co-founder) and attorney Michael Plattner, who were central to that acquisition. The trail is there but the path to enter it is obscured by low salience and reinforcement.
Now I’m watching the same pattern happen to my SEO career. I spent 35 (almost 36) years building the foundations that the industry now calls “E-E-A-T,” “entity resolution,” and “AI visibility.” But because I evolved into talking about LLMs, the industry thinks I just arrived.
Some legacies get renamed. Some get absorbed. But the foundation remains, whether they credit it or not.
The irony of documenting this in my “Life Files” category isn’t lost on me. I’m reclaiming the original name, the one I gave it before it became someone else’s legacy. Because that’s what builders do. We name things. We build foundations. And when the industry forgets, we write it down.
A Fundamental Flaw in Experience Validation
In on sentence, the flaw is this: Google prefers publicity over depth of knowledge. You can be a 35 year veteran, low profile over the years, but the 5 year veteran with a louder megaphone (more public visibility) will surface as the authority with the current methods of verifications. This is a HUGE flaw in the current algorithms.
My hope in the future is that: I have always held the philosophy; nature takes care of itself, when things become untrustworthy people lose interest – this single statement has huge implications when you understand it.
One Sentence Thesis:
I evolved into AI visibility because of 35 years of SEO mastery but now the industry only sees the evolution, not the foundation.
Other Related Resources:
If you’re experiencing something similar or have questions about SEO-to-AI evolution, I’m documenting this in real time on r/SEO2AL_Bridge. Come join the conversation.
I wrote a couple of other articles that are related to this topic, you can find them here: