No keyword stuffing
Avoid repetitive keyword-heavy phrases. Keyword stuffing reduces AI visibility by around 30%.
Why keyword stuffing is worse for AI than for SEO
Old-school SEO rewarded keyword density. AI search punishes it. Research from the GEO paper at Princeton and Georgia Tech shows keyword-stuffed content gets 30% fewer AI citations than naturally written content on the same topic.
The reason is simple: keyword stuffing looks like spam to a language model the same way it looks like spam to a human reader. The model learned to distrust it from the same training data humans use.
What keyword stuffing looks like today
It is rarely the obvious 1990s style anymore. Modern keyword stuffing looks like a page that mentions the target phrase fifteen times in variations — 'Belgian CRM for SMEs', 'CRM Belgium SME', 'SME CRM Belgian' — because a content brief said so. The language model catches it every time.
How to fix it
- — Write for a human. Use the target phrase once or twice where it is natural.
- — Replace synonyms-for-density with actual information.
- — Read the page top to bottom. If it sounds awkward, rewrite it.
- — If you have a content brief forcing a keyword count, push back.