A huge amount of the text on the Web is written more to satisfy Google than to please or persuade readers. The name of this game is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. Websites maintain blogs not to inform, but to get in keywords that will improve their search ranking. There are sites that have blogs for no reason except to improve their search ranking. Writers make money from this — or at least they will till AI does it better. (Having machines create text to please other machines seems entirely appropriate.)

There is software to enhance SEO, analyzing pages and suggesting keywords to add. At the same time, Google’s software includes tests to detect keyword stuffing, repeating phrases incessantly for their own sake. I’d give an example, but that would hurt my search engine rank. :) There are WordPress plugins dedicated entirely to SEO. It drives trends, sometimes in a good way; people who wouldn’t add HTTPS support for security reasons will add it to get a slight boost in search rank.
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