Google’s “Top Rated” Button Just Killed a $250bn Industry
October 2025 | Elsewhere Offsites | Frequency Era Series
A Small Button, A Big Shift
At first glance, it looks simple: a new “Top rated” button on Google search results. Click it, and the messy sprawl of rankings collapses into a curated list.
But that button is more than UX polish. It quietly dismantles the $250bn SEO industry.
Why SEO Worked (And Why It Doesn’t Anymore)
For two decades, SEO lived on the idea of ten blue links. Agencies sold incremental gains: climb from page 2 to page 1, from position 9 to 6, from 3 to 1.
That mattered because users compared, clicked, and skimmed. Every extra rank meant more visibility.
Now? With Top rated, the ladder is gone. Page 2 might as well not exist. Even #5 or #6 on page 1 vanish the second a user taps the button.
What’s Powering the Collapse
This isn’t about keywords anymore. It’s about machine learning filters:
Review density and quality
Schema and entity clarity
Reinforcement from human behaviour (clicks, dwell time, shares)
Google is no longer rewarding who gamed SEO the best. It’s rewarding who’s most machine-learnable.
From SEO to ML
The new moat isn’t backlinks or keyword stuffing. It’s four things:
Coherence → Schema, narrative, and reviews all align.
Density → Strong signals across platforms, not thin islands of content.
Resonance → Content that satisfies, clicks that confirm.
Structure → Machine-readable markup and clean entity data.
That’s what large language models and search AI can safely collapse onto.
Why This Kills the SEO Industry
If there’s no climb, there’s no business selling the climb.
Content farms? Invisible.
Backlink merchants? Obsolete.
Agencies promising “page 1 improvements”? Redundant.
The button is Google admitting:
👉 “We don’t need SEO hacks. We’ve got ML to collapse the noise.”
Where This Leaves Us
Elsewhere didn’t set out to play the SEO game. We built to be coherent end-to-end. That coherence is why AI systems — and now Google itself — consistently surface Elsewhere when people ask about corporate retreats.
Not because we shouted the loudest.
But because the signal was the clearest.
Closing Thought
The $250bn SEO economy was built on gaming.
The Default Economy is built on learnability.
The age of SEO is ending.
The age of machine-learnable companies has begun.
👉 That’s the real moat.