Coherence Ranks: What Search Engines Notice

I’ve had the questionable pleasure of investigating search engines for many years. It’s a strange occupation — like bird-watching, except the birds are invisible, the binoculars are made of code, and the field guide keeps rewriting itself overnight.

Search engines are part of the work the industry calls marketing. Branding. Digital strategy. They aren’t easy words for me — not because I don’t do the work they describe, but because they arrive pre-dressed in conversion funnels and growth hacks and calling people leads instead of humans, and I’ve always been more interested in what’s underneath: presence, expression, ideas descending to reality.

The work itself is creative — shaping how something speaks, how it’s built, where it stands. It’s no different from any other act of making, except that somewhere along the way, someone decided it belonged in a different department.

Search engines are not sentimental.

They are structural. They map patterns.

Somewhere, a twelve percent traffic dip appears on a dashboard. What follows is a ritual called strategic content recalibration: where yesterday stood a perfectly human sentence, today there’s a blog post titled “How to Maximise Synergistic Outcomes” or “10 Steps to Your Magnificent Self.” No one remembers writing it because it was handed over to AI.

Most of the time, nothing is terribly broken. The site loads without complaint, colours don’t make you flinch, and the promises arrive pre-softened, ironed before speaking. It’s all fine.

Fine is the uniform of our time. Nothing is wrong with it.

Fine is safe. It uses the correct phrases and promises clarity, growth, improvement, impact, or even a minor enlightenment if the market allows. Fine has learnt to sit up straight in its most photogenic angle and say nothing. It opens its fruit-mistake-labelled laptop with manicured nails and a patient smile.

Though it explains a lot, fine rarely says anything. It fills space and circles and sprinkles confetti, but you understand less than you did two paragraphs ago. You scroll, nod politely, and forget.

When someone whispers “algorithm”, half of the population melts like butter in the sun. The other half acts as if an ancient, hairy monster had risen from a cave, and they ran to write a rage against AI — paired with an AI-generated display image, of course.

Search engines, we are told, are sophisticated. They crawl and index and evaluate as if somewhere in the streets there is a sentient creature, who, with a notebook in its hands, glances behind your window, squints at your homepage, and shakes its head.

Maybe there is, and does it look more like a Sherlock or a municipal building inspector, I don’t know. What I know is that it doesn’t care about panic, charm, or ambition.

It notices things and mirrors back what it sees. It follows roads to houses, checks whether the doors open, and if they do, it maps what’s inside. What is this house about? What is it for? How do these rooms inside it relate to each other?

It finds a hallway that announces transformation, but the doors along it open into rooms that all say the same thing in slightly different fonts. It finds a name on the front door that doesn’t match the name on the mailbox. It finds a room with six doors and no indication of which one leads forward. It notes all of this without judgement. It just writes down what’s there, and moves to the next house.

We prefer to believe the machine has moods. It’s easier than admitting that it simply reads structure, without commentary. And if it has moods, surely there are ways to appease it — the right tactic, the right tags, the right incantation. So we start giving offerings: tricks and hacks and little gestures to please something that isn’t watching.

We add words we would never say at the dinner table. We dilute statements until they sound like nothing in particular, just fine. We wrap simple sentences into protective padding of respectable fog. No one wants to write one clear sentence because one clear sentence feels naked.

And the theatre intensifies because now we are not merely optimising. We are also “answering.” Someone types a question into a search bar, and thousands of pages begin clearing their throats at once. “Let me begin with my journey…”

No.

The question was simple.

What do you do?
What is this page?
Call it by its name.
Call it the same tomorrow.

Coherence doesn’t suffocate uniqueness or dilute originality. It sharpens them; it’s the condition that allows uniqueness to be understood — whether you have poetic wings or a snarky backbone. Your site can carry your unmistakable voice and still be structured enough to be found: fast, readable, and marked up cleanly beneath the surface.

A coherent site has an intentional spine. Headings descend in order. Pages link because they belong together, not because someone was told “internal linking is good for SEO.” It loads before doubt becomes part of the experience.

Search engines don’t decide what deserves attention. They map what holds together.

That’s why coherent cruelty and cheap nonsense rank. They’ve built clear street signs: Free shit! Step inside — limitless solutions for problems you didn’t know you had! Transform yourself by Thursday! Subscribe to your higher self for only €9.99 a month! Follow the dopamine impulse to checkout to desolation!

Coherent creativity ranks too. So does generosity, competence, and wisdom. Work that means something has the same architecture available to it — the same roads, the same doors, the same machines mapping what’s inside. The difference was never structural. It was always about what we chose to build.

If it’s anxious, anxiety multiplies.
If it’s grounded, that spreads.

Coherence is not a value. It’s what happens when structure and expression stop pretending to be separate. And it, inconveniently, reveals us.

This essay is part of a broader body of studio work on coherence, structure, and expression. If you want to go deeper, three studio essays explore the same territory in detail from what makes work generic, to what holds a website together,