The recent "pressure relief" events signal that it's time to to cut losses from SEO and embrace the new game: LLM optimization. Today you can still influence LLMs by feeding content to their crawlers. But this will be soon be replaced with pay-to-play as OpenAI et. al. seek to monetize their trillion dollar infrastructure gambit.
There will be a landrush: the first few businesses to successfully influence ChatGPT for viral success will have advantages that won't be available when ChatGPT's attentions are divided. But in a decade, ChatGPT will be schilling for the same corps who dominate search rankings today -- the same ones who have the budget for Super Bowl ads, followed by other high margin firms (the law offices of Ambulance & Chaser). When there's little growth to be had from large clients, LLM Companies will start to build up the LLM equivalent of "local SEO" where models will be fine-tuned to serve information about a state, city, borough or neighborhood (giving less profitable entities a chance to pay to influence a smaller region.)
Whatever companies do in this landrush might be interpreted as "sardines upon peanuts" by the author of this article. But it's just the cost of doing business.
