PageRank’s genius was a proxy: it could not measure trust, so it measured links, and links correlated with trust well enough to build an empire. The proxy was always an approximation, and approximations drift.
A language model does not need the link proxy. It has co-occurrence, citation context, entity consistency, and the sheer statistical weight of how often a claim is repeated by sources it already trusts. The trust graph and the link graph were always different objects; for two decades they were close enough to conflate. They are diverging now.
This is why unstructured mentions — your name beside a trusted entity, with no hyperlink at all — increasingly outperform a paid link. The model reads the neighbourhood, not the anchor tag.
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.