I first talked about “radical transparency” in my SEO ebook, and I coined the term “Weaponising Transparency” – with regrards to online marketing – in a later meeting with a recorded interview with SEO Jamie Irvin (which in itself was a demonstration of the actual principle of the actual meeting was (a discussion of radical disclosure) using the Marketing Cyborg Technique and Creative Inference Optimisation). A very meta strategy using AI tools to influence AI tools.
Why this influx of new terms?
It’s all based on the principles of E-E-A-T. Google has told us that Trustworthiness is the number 1 ranking concept.
Folks today deride the concept of Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, but give it a few years and I wager E-E-A-T will be the very definition of the only thing on the web that’s not considered “dead internet”. It is going to creep up like Mobilgeddon and one day be ubiquitous as the foundation for a trusted ecosystem.
E-E-A-T is built into the modern idea of commerce. It is going nowhere.
Transparency = Trust. Weaponising transparency is simply boosting the T in E-E-A-T in search and answer engines using verifiable facts.
There is no getting around it, and trust is the number one ranking concept – it’s called this in the webmaster guidelines on helpful content and in trial disclosures (called Q* – Q-Star, we found out in the DOJ Trial), and it’s called out in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. This is where Google are moving for the humans left on the web for what’s left on the web.
Google use many mathematical proxies, like Topicality, the A B C of ranking, Popularity and the notion of Trustworthiness (Q Star) to work out where a page ranks in SERPs or if it features in other systems like AI Overviews.
Weaponsing Transparency
Weaponising Transparency means publishing verifiable facts about your business and making your intent crystal clear and trustworthy in substance and in style. Everything about it: it is the clear antidote for what I term “Junk Marketing”. You know the stuff Google’s next spam algorithms are gearing up to take out.
These facts directly influence how these engines will select content in the future. I mean, for really important matters, you always want an expert giving it the once over, yes?
Yes, so does Google. It’s as simple as that.
It is the art of weaponising transparency through inference optimisation. Inference optimisation (another term I coined in my ai seo book to describe the tool/output/artwork process I was taking part in) in itself defines the E-E-A-T you need.
Shaun Anderson
Hobo Web
2/11/2025