For years (almost decades now), algorithmic authority was accepted not because it was accurate, but because it was convenient.
Rankings, reach, and visibility offered shortcuts. They allowed people to outsource evaluations of others’ expertise to systems designed for scale rather than genuine insight or impact. These systems weren’t just flawed. They never actually measured authority in the first place.
I challenged this years ago at NakedPR, explaining why algorithmic authority can’t be trusted and why popularity is a poor substitute for determining true influence.
Those critiques were a bit ahead of their time, but now we’re seeing increased scrutiny by people consuming this algorithmically-driven information in search results, social media, and now AI chats.
As freelance writers, it’s important we understand these changes and what they mean for client content and copy in the future.
Why People Bought Into Algorithmic Authority
For a long time, algorithmic authority solved a practical problem. Who needs critical thinking and media literacy skills when algorithms can replace them with “objective” signals?
People were led to believe:
- visibility still required effort and competence;
- to sustain that visibility, content must continue to offer substance;
- popularity would therefore correlate with expertise.
But this was always wrong. Those seemingly objective metrics (often vanity metrics) were easy to game. And there were strong incentives for people to do that (SEO pros, social media agencies, etc.).
Those who gamed the systems became known as authorities, while true authorities often faded to the background.
What Finally Broke the Illusion
There was no defining moment that shattered the illusion of algorithmic authority. It’s been happening slowly in recent years.
Social media showcases one of the more common examples where users began noticing even their own source preferences (who they chose to follow) were routinely being overshadowed by algorithmic content suggestions they didn’t want to see.
But the ongoing change is about more than that.
- Visibility became cheap and repeatable by gaming systems.
- Familiar formats and regurgitated content have come to crowd out original thinking.
- Even non-experts are picking up on optimization patterns that don’t prioritize readers.
- Shallow, but plausible, content is easier to generate (partially thanks to AI tools), making it easier to create an air of authority without adding any real insight.
When massive amounts of content start saying the same things, in very similar ways, authority stops feeling earned and starts feeling more manufactured.
And when that happens, even casual readers and consumers start to notice the gaps between what sounds authoritative and what actually is authoritative.
What This Means for Freelance Writers
For freelance writers, this shift away from algorithmic authority could be uncomfortable for some. For a long time, it was possible to look authoritative by staying visible, parroting familiar ideas, and exploiting flaws in those algorithms.
Those who understood how those algorithms worked, even to a minor degree, could make themselves look more established than they actually were. Currently, they still can. It just won’t last.
AI has changed the economics of that game.
Low-effort regurgitation can now be scaled almost infinitely. By anyone. And as this derivative AI content continues to feed into LLMs (the large language models behind popular AI tools), we’ll see more of the same ideas, with less variation, and less original thought.
This kind of gaming of algorithmic systems used to take time and work, even if it didn’t require meaningful expertise. Now, it’s all but automated bulk work where the lowest common denominators will all compete with each other.
Writers and clients who pursue this strategy will almost certainly be exposed over time. While I’m sure this wasn’t your strategy to build your professional reputation, it was for many writers. And they’ll pay a price for that.
On the plus side, if you built your career on actual experience and subject matter expertise, a move away from algorithmic authority could benefit you.
Clients are more likely to value that expertise, and pay appropriately for it, to stand out against all the repetitive noise. As transparency and credibility become more important to them, they should become more important to you as well.
That doesn’t mean visibility doesn’t matter anymore. It just means visibility will no longer be a substitute for authority.
Even if this won’t change how you focus on your own positioning, just think about all the new work on the horizon as companies realize their years’ of shallow SEO content, and now AI-generated content, can do real harm. When they’re ready to clean up those messes and rebuild their own authority, they’ll need writers who understand the difference.
Will you be one of them?
