On the strange experience of learning more about oneself by explaining the world to those who don’t know it.
As a parent, there are moments when you hear yourself speak and don’t quite recognize yourself.
You’re explaining something to your children—how something works, why the world is the way it is and not another—and suddenly something unexpected happens: a part of you detaches and observes. You hear yourself from the outside.
And what you hear surprises you, sometimes moves you, other times corrects you.
It’s not that you’re teaching.
It’s that by teaching, you are giving order. By giving order, you are discovering.
And by discovering, you realize that many things you took for granted were just half-baked beliefs, ideas you’d never had to defend aloud.
Teaching our children is the most honest mirror there is.
Years after that revelation—my children were grown, and I had been in web positioning for over two decades—I came across a phenomenon that seemed familiar to me.
I’d been working with various artificial intelligence tools for some time.
Not like someone using a calculator, but like someone having a dialogue with something that responds, asks questions, and sometimes forces you to rethink what you thought you understood.
And then I realized it: it was happening to me again.
Explaining my work to a machine forced me to organize what I knew. To separate the essential from the incidental. To ask myself why I did things a certain way and not another.
And in that process, just like when I talked to my children, cracks appeared in what I took for granted.
Certainties that weren’t so certain after all. Mental shortcuts that had become habits.
Collaborating with artificial intelligence is not delegating. It’s confronting your own thinking with an interlocutor who doesn’t agree with you out of politeness.
Back to high school
In high school, I studied classical philosophy. I especially remember Socrates, his irony, his method. The *maieutic*: the art of asking questions that help others answer their own questions and develop their own ideas. At the time, I thought it would never be of any practical use to me.
How wrong I was.
Every time I work with an LLM (what we call an “AI”), every time I provide context, explain a project, or ask for help structuring an idea, I’m practicing maieutics without even realizing it.
The questions they force me to answer—or the ones I force myself to ask to give the model a solid foundation—are the same ones a good mentor would ask: What do you really want to achieve? Why this and not that? What are you assuming without verifying it?
For an SEO expert, giving the right answers is just as important as asking the right questions… (Cite in context)
Socratic irony also appears. Because when I give vague instructions to a machine, it returns vague results. And that forces me to admit that perhaps I wasn’t entirely clear about what I wanted either.
Questions teach more than answers. And those who don’t know how to ask good questions receive answers that are useless to them.
Back to the future
I’ve been cross-referencing results from different generative tools for some time now. Preliminary steps in one, conclusions in another, revisions in a third. And something becomes clear when you work this way: each model has its own character.
This isn’t cheap anthropomorphism. It’s observation. Some are more direct, others more cautious. Some tend toward synthesis, others toward development. There are differences in style, tone, and how they structure an argument.
And if machines have their own style, why would you give up yours?
I’ve seen too many people use these tools like photocopiers of other people’s ideas. A quick prompt, a generic result, copy and paste. The result is content that sounds like everything and nothing. That has no voice. That conveys neither judgment nor experience.
The result of your work with artificial intelligence is yours if the ingredients you contribute are yours. If you don’t add anything distinctive, the result will be indistinguishable from anyone else’s.
The threat of inbreeding AI
There’s a problem that few mention, but it’s silently eroding the quality of everything we read.
Language models learn from what they find. If what they find is mediocre content, generated in turn by other models fed on mediocre content, the result is a downward spiral.
A data inbreeding. A slow but relentless degradation of the average level of what circulates online.
This phenomenon has implications that go beyond literary quality.
It affects how search engines understand and classify information, how they process queries and branch out the results to try to offer something useful.
If the sources are contaminated, the results inherit that contamination.
But the underlying idea is simple: if you surround yourself with mediocrity, your communication starts to sound mediocre.
If your company feeds on poor sources to tell its story, it will end up sounding like everyone else.
The good news is that the antidote exists. It’s called discernment. It’s called real experience.
It’s called having something genuine to tell and knowing how to tell it.
In a world saturated with soulless text, an authentic voice becomes a competitive advantage (ES).
Original content, with its own criteria and voice, is not romanticism: it’s strategy (ES).
Message in the bottle
I’m not writing this to impress those who already know about SEO or artificial intelligence. I’m writing for those who make decisions in a company and feel overwhelmed by the digital noise. For those who sense that their online presence doesn’t represent them. For those who know something isn’t working but don’t have the time to figure out what.
What I do is help companies communicate who they are clearly, with structure, and in a way that both people and machines can understand and appreciate. It’s not about tricks or shortcuts. It’s about building on solid foundations, organizing what already exists, and shaping what your company knows but can’t express.
Teaching my children taught me to listen to myself. Working with artificial intelligence reminded me of that. And now, every time I help a client find their voice, the same thing happens: by organizing their message, they discover things about their business that were right in front of them but they didn’t see them.
You can remain part of the noise. Or you can be the signal someone was looking for. Let’s talk.
Ricard Menor SOLID SEO
This image is real, not generated. I found this rarity on May 19, 2025, in Palafrugell.
There is value and authenticity in the most unexpected places; we can search for them together.
Making of
This open letter—more than an article and much more than a blog post, it doesn’t even have a specific SEO keyword—was created from scratch in three separate work sessions.
Thanks to the following contributors:
- Your patience and interest in reaching these final lines.
- My current partner’s, in general :)
- My daughter and son, grateful for unknowingly giving me the idea during a family meal.
- My agent @GBM at Le Chat (Mistral), a European LLM with European legislation and privacy standards.
- My Copilot, Gemini, and Claude instances, which don’t feed their respective models.
- Last but not least, Ricard Menor @Person @Author.
