05/17/2026
I have a Ph.D. in English, and I’ve spent years working in marketing (now specifically in SEO). In that time, I’ve read countless articles about content strategy, keyword optimization, domain authority, and E-E-A-T. I’ve built dashboards, tracked cornerstone content, and watched pages reach over a million impressions. But in all of my strategizing, there’s one word I’ve never seen in the same sentence as “SEO”: rhetoric.
To me, that’s a strange omission. Rhetoric—the art of effective communication, of constructing arguments that are credible, logical, and audience-aware—is the oldest framework we have for evaluating whether a piece of writing (or a text) actually works. Aristotle codified it in the fourth century B.C.—it’s been taught in universities ever since. And it describes exactly what Google’s core updates have been measuring all along.
The SEO industry developed its own term for this. E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—is Google’s attempt to create credibility signals at scale. “Bad content” is filled with ads, typos, and unpolished writing. “Good content” is writing that serves its audience.
The March 2026 core update—the most volatile on record—reshuffled rankings across every content vertical, making this clear. The winners were specialist sites, institutional sources, and credentialed voices writing within their domains of genuine expertise. The losers were aggregators, content farms, and sites that published at volume on topics outside their core competencies.
Some may call it an “algorithm update.” But through a different lens, it aligns with the core components of rhetorical evaluation.
So, why isn’t anyone making this comparison?
The Vocabulary Problem
The SEO industry has spent the last decade building an elaborate technical vocabulary around evaluative criteria that already existed.
Google’s framework for evaluating content quality has become the organizing logic of every core update since its introduction in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. SEO professionals have spent years trying to operationalize it—building author bios, acquiring backlinks from credible sources, and demonstrating first-hand experience in content. What they haven’t done is recognize the connections between E-E-A-T and rhetorical modes of persuasion.
Ethos is the credibility a speaker brings to an argument. It’s not just credentials (though credentials matter); it’s the accumulated sense a reader develops that this writer knows what they’re talking about, has earned the right to speak on this subject, and can be trusted to represent it accurately. The terms “speaker” and “writer” are interchangeable; in Aristotle’s day, oration was the dominant form of authoritative communication.
The parallel between Aristotle’s teachings and SEO strategy holds across the full rhetorical framework. Logos—the quality of the argument itself, the internal logic, the use of evidence—maps directly onto what Google calls “original analysis” and “unique perspective.” The consistent losers in recent core updates are pages that summarize existing content without adding anything new. In rhetorical terms, their argument doesn’t hold up because it isn’t an argument—it’s a rearrangement of what’s already been said.
Pathos describes audience awareness, or the ability to meet a reader where they are and give them what they actually need. This maps to Google’s “helpful content” standard. A page that technically answers a question but fails to serve the person asking it is not aligned with its intended audience. Google has been trying to measure this since the Helpful Content Update first rolled out in 2022, when it introduced the concept of “content written for people, not search engines.” Remove the engineering specifications, and you have one of the oldest concerns in rhetorical theory.
The SEO industry didn’t invent these concepts. It rediscovered them, renamed them, and built an entire profession around optimizing for them without ever examining what they actually are.
What “Rhetoric” Means
Rhetoric has a bad reputation. In everyday usage, it’s synonymous with empty language—political spin, academic jargon, hollow corporate messaging, words designed to obscure rather than bring clarity. In its classical sense, however, rhetoric is simply the art of effective persuasion. It’s the study of how communication works—what makes an argument convincing, what makes a writer credible, what makes a text actually connect with the person reading it.
Ethos, pathos, and logos are the modes through which any communicative act succeeds or fails. A cardiologist writing about heart disease has a strong ethos, i.e., credibility. A content farm producing five hundred words on heart disease for affiliate revenue does not.
Logos asks, “Does this actually hold up?” By nature, humans like proof—whether in the form of direct evidence, visualized data, or validation. If a prescription medicine makes a claim, we want to know whether it’s true. The same applies to the content we create and ingest daily. A piece that summarizes three other articles without adding anything new fails to express logos—not because it’s technically wrong, but because it isn’t making an argument at all.
Pathos is perhaps the easiest mode to understand. In teaching, I always liked to refer to the ASPCA’s advertisements featuring Sarah McLachlan when demonstrating pathos. Simply put, pathos is the content’s ability to understand and connect with its audience. A technically accurate page that buries the answer under three unrelated paragraphs isn’t optimized for its intended audience, and thus misses the mark. Sad images of animals set to sad music get their point across explicitly—and stay with the viewer long after the commercial ends.
Back To Google: What March’s Core Update Actually Rewarded
March 2026 saw the most volatile core update Google has ever released. Rankings shifted dramatically, and the fallout was significant enough that SEO analysts were still mapping the damage weeks after the rollout completed on April 8.
When examined closely, the winners and losers tell a coherent story—one that makes considerably more sense through a rhetorical eye than a technical one.
Analysts tracked a consistent pattern as rankings became unpredictable: visibility shifted away from intermediary sites toward what Google determined were “stronger sources.” The sites gaining rankings were official and institutional domains, specialist and niche publications, and established brands with clear topical authority. The sites losing rankings were aggregators, directories, and comparison-driven sites—pages that exist to summarize and redirect rather than to originate.
In rhetorical terms, the winners’ ethos was measurable. They had credible standing to speak on their subjects. The losers did not—or at least, not convincingly enough to survive a recalibration of Google’s quality standards.
The pattern is equally clear when looking at logos. According to post-update analysis, the most consistent losers across the 2025-2026 update cycle were pages that added no original perspective to existing conversations. Sites like HubSpot’s blog, which lost an estimated 70-80% of organic traffic, did so by publishing at volume across topics outside their core expertise. The content was technically competent. It just had nothing original to say.
Government and institutional domains saw strong gains in fact-driven queries. Government websites are not stylistically sophisticated sites, but they won because they understood exactly what their audience needed and delivered it without friction. No preamble, no filler—just the answer the reader came for. Pathos at its finest.
What’s notable about this pattern is that none of it required a new framework to predict. A rhetorician looking at Google’s quality signals in 2020 could have told you exactly which sites would win and lose in 2026. The signals were always rhetorical. The update just made them impossible to ignore.
What This Means for Content Creators
The implication is straightforward, even if the industry hasn’t caught up yet: the skills that win in search now are writing skills. Specifically, the ability to construct a credible argument, support it with original evidence, and deliver it in a form that serves the reader who needs it.
The SEO industry has spent years treating content as a technical problem—something to be structured, optimized, and distributed according to algorithmic specifications. That approach worked, for a while, because the algorithm favored it. What it rewards now looks a lot more like what a good editor has always rewarded: genuine expertise, original thought, and audience awareness.
The practical implications are worth spelling out. Building ethos means writing within your actual domain—not chasing traffic across topics you don’t know well, but going deeper on the subjects where you have real authority. It means establishing authorship clearly, maintaining a consistent voice, and publishing with enough regularity that both readers and search engines develop a sense of who you are and what you cover.
Building evidence requires doing the work. Original research, original analysis, original perspective. Not summarizing what three other pages already said—adding something those pages didn’t. Citing primary sources. Making arguments that hold up to scrutiny. Writing the piece that answers the question more precisely than anything else available.
Creating content that’s audience-aware means understanding your readers enough to serve them what they need (sometimes before they even need it). It means editing ruthlessly for clarity. It means respecting the reader’s time enough to get to the point.
None of this is new advice. Every good writing teacher, editor, and professor has been saying versions of it for decades. What’s new is that Google is now saying it too—loudly, and in the only language the content industry reliably responds to: rankings.
Back to Basics
There’s a certain irony in the fact that the content industry’s most technically sophisticated evaluation system—built by engineers, measured in algorithms, optimized by specialists—turns out to be running on a framework that predates the printing press.
The gap between rhetoric and SEO isn’t an accident of history. It’s a symptom of how the content industry has thought about writing—as a technical deliverable rather than something to be read. The era of optimization made that thinking profitable. The core updates are making it expensive.
What’s worth sitting with is the implication for anyone who took the humanities seriously and then spent years being told it wasn’t practical. The skills that English and rhetoric programs have always taught—how to construct a credible argument, how to read an audience, how to make a claim that holds up—are not just academically valid. They’re now algorithmically rewarded.
I don’t see the March 2026 Core Update as a disruption. Instead, it’s a vindication. Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually the one that’s right.