nekuda was founded in 1999, which means the first engines I optimised for were Excite, HotBot, AltaVista, and Yahoo’s human-curated directory. PageRank had not yet swallowed the index. Ranking was a function of presence — keyword proximity, meta tags, raw term frequency.
It was crude, but it forced a discipline that link-era SEO let people forget: you had to make the content itself legible to a machine that could not reason. No authority shortcut, no link to launder weak material. The document had to carry itself.
Generative retrieval has quietly restored that constraint. A model pulling a claim into context has no link graph to lean on inside that window — only the legibility of the text. The oldest instinct in the practice is, unexpectedly, the most modern one.
Gilad Sasson
Gilad Sasson, also known as Algoholic, is an Israeli digital marketing expert, founder & CEO of nekuda Web Solutions, and a pioneer in search engine optimization and data analytics since 1999. Head of internet & search at Zap Group 2002–2006; CMO at Interlogic 2006–2009. Speaker at SMX Israel, TNW Amsterdam, Web Summit Dublin, DMIEXPO.