← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
AI/LLM tracking and the value behind Answer Engine Visibility
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- [00:00]
Eli Schwartz
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:44]
Jordan Cooney
For over a decade, SEO was simple rank higher, get more traffic. But our pre visible state of AI study analyzing 1.96 million LLM sessions shows that AI now sits before the click and it is quickly rewriting how decisions are made. Here's the paradox. AI traffic accounts for less than 1% of total organic sessions, yet it disproportionately lands on pricing, industry and tool pages where buying decisions are actually happening. Enterprise SEO teams are racing to track AI visibility citations in ChatGPT, mentions in Google, AI overviews, dashboards Lighting up all over the place. And yet a whole industry has emerged selling AI visibility dashboards counting mentions tracking these citations. And here's the uncomfortable question, if AI mentions don't reliably drive qualified traffic pipeline and revenue, are visibility tools measuring impact or just giving teams something to report? Right now, Generative Engine optimization looks a lot like impression tracking without attribution. I'm Jordan Cooney and joining me today is Eli Schwartz, Growth advisor, strategic consultant and author of product led SEO. Eli has helped companies like Tinder, Coinbase, LinkedIn and WordPress generate millions in organic revenue. Today, Eli's challenge is entering this premise of AI visibility and what it really means as a success metric in explaining why we need real intent, demand and distribution around topics like GEO and SEO traffic. Okay, Eli, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast.
- [02:31]
Eli Schwartz
It's great to be here. I don't know if you know this Jordan, but this is my third time being on this podcast, so I expect some equity after this time where I'm not coming back.
- [02:41]
Jordan Cooney
Equity granted, equity granted. You know We've had almost 1500 guests on the show, but by all means you are one of our frequent guests and we're very appreciative to have you here. And on that note, let's talk about 2025. 2025 is probably one of the most transformative years in organic traffic or SEO. It has changed dramatically in terms of just how we think about the industry and how we work with clients and support the industry at large. Tell us about your year. How's it been? What's been working for you?
- [03:14]
Eli Schwartz
So this has been one of my most challenging years as a consultant. Not that any, you know, real, they're not real challenges. Consulting is great. I don't want to ever have a full time job. I love working with so many brands and so many people. But in my seven years of consulting, this has been the most interesting. Whereas the year started off really, really well, ended off really, really well. But the middle was kind of weird where all of a sudden no one wanted to spend money on any SEO. And the reason why was because this belief started settling in that SEO is dead and we can pinpoint where it came from. Not going to name names or point fingers at people, but there's been a lot of talk both on social media and in traditional media. There was just a Wall Street Journal article that came out about this that SEO is not as viable and not the best place to invest as it has been for the last two decades. And I think that part of this could be true. You know, if you think back to all the Google updates over the last 25 years, I think that the Panda update, which was in 2011, 2012, right around then, was what was the most impactful updates where Google really cut down on very thin and useless content. But in the decade plus since then, sites figured out how to push that content back into the feed and back out into search. So Google need to push back against it and they launched a helpful content update. They started like three years ago, right before ChatGPT launched. So there started being the signal of like SEO doesn't pay off anymore for many sites. They got hit by the update. Another thing that happened was that, and this is going back about a year and a half ago, two years ago, where Google launched SGE search, Generative Experiments or something, whatever SG it was, that's what they called AI overviews. And it actually took away a lot of traffic. So again, another signal that maybe SEO wasn't a great investment. And then you have all this media hub hub about like, hey, SEO is dying. Yep. So combination of those three things, traffic actually going down and also having this media hub hub about SEO being dead, companies didn't want to invest. So I was having these conversations and they're like, well, we don't really want to invest in SEO, but what are you going to do in AI? And you know, my belief, and we'll dig into this, is that AI visibility isn't necessarily a thing that you want to invest in for long term. So I don't want to go sell it. I don't want to offer something that I can't really do. And I firmly believe that SEO is here to stay. So if I'm advising a company to do something around organic traffic, I want them to invest in organic traffic. I want them to invest in SEO, not invest in some fly by night tactic that may or may not work in Perplexity or chatgpt or even Google.
- [05:53]
Jordan Cooney
Let's talk about sustainability a little bit later, but let's stay on this theme of the industry and where it's really shifting and changing. One of the themes you brought up here is a traffic just isn't the same as it used to be. And in prior to 2025, I called it the publish and pray strategy. You just publish stuff and it would just, you just flow it through your blog or your website and just keep publishing. And you'd pray long enough and traffic would come.
- [06:18]
Eli Schwartz
Right.
- [06:19]
Jordan Cooney
And those days are gone. That doesn't work anymore. And so as you think about how the future of benchmarking and how you're working with clients or just the industry, like educating the industry right now, how are you messaging? What is the KPI? What are the things we should be looking at if traffic isn't the thing that's working anymore?
- [06:39]
Eli Schwartz
Well, I'm telling them to read the book I wrote now almost five years ago where I felt like with industry was going the wrong direction. And I, when I wrote the book, I never intended it for it to be obsolete. I had my viewpoint on really SEO is about building around users and the metrics are whatever successful for a user, whether it's a lead or a sale or any sort of conversion. And many in the industry still want to measure rankings and traffic. So I think, you know, and again, obviously my book didn't touch an AI. I didn't have any insight that it was going to come out. But the concepts remain the same, which is you want to build around users. You want to build something that users are going to like, not just search engines are going to like. And I think we're like boomerang back to this, which is, yes, I can publish all this content. You can even get rankings. You know, the content's out there. You can get LLM visibility, but you're not driving any sales. You can get rankings in search, but no one's even scrolling to your visibility in search because they're, they're pausing on the AI on Whatever the AI response is. So when we're thinking about what SEO was always meant to be, it was around the thing that is good for the business. Just creating traffic. There have been. In my consulting career, I've met many companies who wrote a lot of content that had absolutely nothing to do with conversions. Early in my career, I consulted for Mixpanel. They had a fantastic blog around analytics, but didn't drive any conversions. Because if you're a reading a blog around analytics, you're in a different place in the funnel. If you're learning how to use Mixpanel, you're not really in the funnel to go buy. Mixpanel consulted for Tinder. They also had a fantastic blog on like best places to say I love you and you know, top 10 Valentine's ideas. That is not for Tinder. That again, they got a lot of traffic, but that is not driving the meaningful impact that Tinder wants from a financial standpoint. Getting traffic. If traffic is all you want, there are lots of ways to get traffic. But if conversions is what you're looking for, the entire SEO effort has to be around how do you bring people into this funnel? How do you convert someone into whatever it is that you're trying to do as a business?
- [08:38]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I, I'm, you know, reminded of a, of our AI study that I mentioned in the Cold open, we analyzed 2 million LLM sessions, and of those 2 million LLM sessions, 300,000 of them had some kind of conversion event. Whether it be they downloaded a resource, they signed up for a newsletter, they bought a product. That is a really remarkable conversion rate Right on these sessions from LLMs. Absolutely. Your book is predicting that, hey, we have to build things that users actually want to engage in and work with. How are you working on messaging this when for so long the concept of more equals more traffic has been the core thesis of a lot of the work that's being done in SEO. How are you changing that mental mindset?
- [09:32]
Eli Schwartz
So on a one to one basis, every time I talk to a prospective client, I always begin the conversations with what do you do as a business? I don't ask them about their rankings, I don't ask them for their favorite keywords, I don't ask them about their backlinks and their domain authority. I begin by asking them, what do you do as a business? And then I ask them, where did you get your clients from? My favorite example of this, and I have another book eventually coming out on really how to understand customers. But my favorite example of a company that came to Me for SEO. And they were currently working with an SEO agency that who they were paying. And I've talked about this, the crazy rates people Pay agencies on LinkedIn. They're paying this agency $15,000 a month. And this company was a B2B company where they did something in the IT space and on their website, on their homepage, they had amazing logos. They had hp, they had Coke, they had Pepsi, they had Kraft, like really great, great brands. So I asked them, I just understand their business. How did you get Dell? How did you get hp? How did you get Coke? And the guy says, well, I used to work at Coke. Oh, craft. Yeah. My cousin is the VP and he went through all this and I'm like, this is your network. None of this is SEO. Go and take the money. Take $15,000 a month plus whatever else you're spending on SEO. Go take that money and build a better network. Make parties, have dinners. So whenever I talk to prospective customers and clients, it's really around. What do you do as a business? Tell me about your buyer's journey. If a company is in an E commerce space, their buyer's journ journey is most definitely SEO. If they're in some sort of long sales cycle. B2B. Maybe not. But that's where I start. I have that conversation and I find that if the end of the conversation is, hey, maybe we shouldn't be investing in SEO, I'm not opposed to that. I want someone to be happy with what they're investing in and not for them to say, well, we'll, we'll hire you as a consultant and then we'll be very disappointed in four months when you've never done anything, I'll do stuff, but you've never amounted to anything because it wasn't the right channel for them. Right.
- [11:26]
Jordan Cooney
I want to dive into this concept of awareness and building your awareness funnel, because I think a lot of that is what we're focused on right now as we try to understand how LLMs are engaging with our brands, with our services, with our platforms and content that we have. So, fundamentally, awareness is one of those key ingredients that I think a lot of the industry has taken off with. We see a lot of visibility, tracking and a lot of kind of what traditionally used to be ranked tracking in the SEO space. But before we get to that, tell us how you are envisioning the awareness and consideration components when you talk to your clients. Besides the discovery of understanding their business, what is the next layer of work or understanding that helps you unlock their ability to scale that awareness and have more events or produce more or better product descriptions for their commerce site.
- [12:26]
Eli Schwartz
So I think it really comes down to thinking of SEO as a holistic part of marketing and not just its own silo channel. So for most of my career, I thought of SEO as siloed. So paid would go and do something and they measured themselves by ltv. But SEO, we stopped and we did something else. We measured ourselves by rankings and clicks and, you know, impressions. And I think you need to bring it all together, which is everything is working hand in hand. Brand traffic. Now, I talk about this all the time and I shared on LinkedIn and I always get heat on this on LinkedIn, which is, I've never, ever met an SEM team that doesn't take credit for brand traffic. They never walk into a meeting and say, you know, we spend $4 million a month, $3.9 million of that is our own brand name, where we're being extorted by Google. Now you need to be extorted by Google. That is just what you have to do. But they're not saying, well, the truth is we're, we're a team of five, but we're responsible for $100,000 in non brand. That's all we do as a company. No one's doing that. They're just saying, we're a $4 million team and look at our LTV for more. $4 million. Now when it comes to SEO, the SEO team, they don't report on brand. They're just like, here's all our non brand keywords. Instead of saying, this is our big bucket of SEO traffic we've driven. If you read later in the deck or read later in the, you know, whatever they're sharing, here's the breakdown of brand versus non brand. But they don't need to be upfront about that. They need to do exactly what the other teams are doing. Now both of those teams, SEM and SEO, are benefiting from the efforts that the brand team does. Now let's, let's focus on the brand team for a second. I've worked with a lot of brand teams. None of those teams don't take credit for everything possible. I've seen these, these presentations from the brand team where they talk about having 8 billion impressions. There are 7 billion people in the world. How the hell do they have 8 billion impressions? They do, right? They get doubles, they, whatever it is they have to do. And also, you know, there's not 7 billion people in the world that are going to see their Impressions on the side of a highway or see their TV not happening. So I think SEO has always been the ones are like, well you know, there's our non rank keyword and this is the monthly search volume we need. Again, SEO is part of this holistic marketing effort. SEO is benefiting from brand, brand is benefiting from SEO. Paid is benefiting from all of it. And that's the way I view it. So there's SEO is part of awareness, SEO is part of churn prevention, SEO which is retention. SEO is part of acquisition. It may be a lower funnel in acquisition, but if you think about how SEO is hand holding and being handheld by those other channels, so there might be a keyword or might be a positioning that is very difficult to buy from an SEM standpoint. But what you do is you use organic to get someone high in the funnel, create that awareness and then use paid from a retargeting standpoint. Or maybe paid gets them to become a social media follower and then the social media team's gonna convert them downstream a month later or email will convert them downstream a month later. So really SEO is a part of this holistic marketing effort.
- [15:22]
Jordan Cooney
We've been talking a lot about this, just you and I, and I know a lot of other industry leaders that all the marketing channels are kind of collapsing in on themselves. And I know you've mentioned this in your newsletter. I wanna hear about that newsletter, how people can get access to that information. Because I don't think that this is a uniform message. It's something that we all have learn in the industry based on our core businesses marketing channels. Like some, some businesses have a strong and huge brand team, some have massive paid teams. And so there's a slightly different approach depending on who you're navigating as a part of your marketing partners. But they're all collapsing in on each other as this whole AI discovery revolution happens. So couple questions here for you, Eli. First of all, tell us about how the newsletter can help unearth some tactics or ways to approach your partners. And then also secondly, let's talk about those marketing partners and why you need to understand the prioritization of how your company is winning in order to become better at doing SEO.
- [16:30]
Eli Schwartz
Yeah. So thanks for bringing up the newsletter. It's been my personal goal for this year to really grow that. It was sort of like it's now been around, I think a little over two years. It was, you know, I was dabbling with opinions I would write on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn was character limiting me. So I moved on to substack and can say all the things I want. And then people subscribe, which is a huge honor because they don't unsubscribe. And then the couple. About a month ago, I launched paid subscriptions, where I'm now adding in different features and different things that are only available to paid subscribers. And what the newsletter really is centered around is not just opinions, but the things I'm hearing in the industry and the conversations I'm having. So there was one where I've had the exact same conversation. And this is a recent post I did in my newsletter about annual planning. So I would meet companies and they would say, we need you to come in and help us plan for our SEO year. And again, I don't like to dive into stuff, like I said earlier on understanding potential clients and what their business is. So I'd say, same thing there. I'm not like, well, here's my template. Let's go make an annual plan. I ask them questions. Who is the audience? Who are you presenting this annual plan to? What happens if you hit your annual plan? What happens if you miss your annual plan? Now, the overwhelming answer to that question was the audience is the executives. They sit there in the meeting on their phones and totally ignore the presentation. And then if I hit the annual plan, I don't know, nothing happens because no one ever checked. And if I miss the annual plan, same. It's just kind of a plan. So they spend like a quarter planning something no one's ever going to check back on. Now, product teams don't do that because product teams are allocating resources and they do stuff and they say they're launching something and the engineers are sitting around doing nothing if they don't actually do that. But SEO teams like to make these big goals. So that became a post on annual plans. Annual plans are really should be something where you're actually going to present something and you're going to stick to it and this is what you want to do and how you're going to do it, and then you can be successful. Now, whether you're measured against it or not. Hard to know, right, that some companies are just not going to measure, but this is going to be an artifact that you want to do and you want to allocate your resources and you're going to accomplish things. Because I think most people want to accomplish the right things at their job and want to have work to show for it when the year is up or when they go on to another job.
- [18:38]
Jordan Cooney
So with respect to the planning process and the execution of that for SEO. How are you advising the SEOs that you're working with or the teams that you're working with to reconsider the awareness contribution of their work? I think this is one of the things that I'd love for you to maybe dive into because and you think about changing this landscape, one of the things we have to start talking about is like, hey, we can't be the SEO team that just doesn't account for our homepage, that just doesn't account for our brand, that only focuses on non branded keywords, that only drives these wild goose chase requests of how we're going to rank or be seen for things that our business really isn't known or seen for. How are you messaging that to the teams that you work with? Both, maybe the SEOs, but then maybe the other executives or partner teams who are involved in these annual plans and are kind of looking for what is SEO measured against?
- [19:38]
Eli Schwartz
Yeah, so my big thing is I don't think that SEO teams have enough swagger. I think SEO teams, they speak a different language. They come in and they start talking about black boxes and algorithms and LLMs and what are all sorts of dumb ranking things that SEO teams talk about. And then you have SEM teams and they talk about dollars and ROI and LTV. And that makes a lot of sense. CFOs love it. But the SEO teams, they come in to the CFO and ask for a budget, but they don't when they want it, like be put on the hook for what are you going to do with that budget? Well, I don't know, because black box and rankings don't really equal traffic and traffic doesn't equal conversions and the CFO doesn't want to give money. So I think what SEO teams need more of is swagger. SEO teams need to come in and say, look, this is something I did when I was at SurveyMonkey and this is something I did when I was at, you know, every single company I consulted for when I was at Surveymonkey, I always noticed that the SEM team had a very easy time getting budget and the SEO team did not have an easy time getting budget. And the SEM team, like that earlier example is responsible mostly for brand bidding and brand traffic. So what I did was, and the reason SEM team that they were getting all that budget was because they were using last click. It's very, very difficult to do a blended click and blended attribution. So they were using last click because Facebook and Google Liked them to use last click because then it made them look like all that paid traffic was working out. So I had our bi team model out SEO first click. And when I had the model at first click, it turned out that I was responsible from a first click standpoint for $200 million of revenue. Two thirds of revenue had an SEO touch as the first part of their journey, so that gave me a lot of swagger. So when I came into meetings, I started with that number. So SEO is responsible for 2/3 of our conversion. Now I'd like to talk about another head. And another head was going to cost me, you know, 200, $300,000. All in. A lot easier to have that conversation when I'm talking about $200 million to start rather than, well, SEO is responsible for 4% of conversions compared to the 65% of conversions on paid. That makes it very, very hard to make a request. Yeah, I worked with Automatic Automatic parents come to WordPress, same idea there. SEO was responsible for almost all of their conversions, but they were losing out on attention to paid because they would come into meetings and say things like, here's our non brand keyword, we're being beaten by Squarespace, we're being beaten by wix, we're being beaten by all these other brands. And I said, let's start coming into meetings and saying we're WordPress. WordPress is the number one word in that entire whatever you want to call it, development, design, website, industry, it's the number one word by far. Come into meetings and say, look, we rank number one on WordPress. That's the biggest word. Yes, it's the brand. There's all the traffic we drive from the word WordPress. And there's a lot of brand words that come off of WordPress, like WordPress themes, WordPress templates, WordPress plugins, WordPress ranked number one and all of those things. A lot easier to have that conversation when you can say we're dominating the broad part of the world. Instead of saying, well, we're number three for web development, we're number four for web design, whatever. Those keywords are much, much bigger. So every company I've ever come in, I would always start with that. Let's think about brand, let's think about the contribution we're making. Maybe it's not a last click, but it's definitely a first click.
- [23:01]
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- [24:29]
Jordan Cooney
So I want to transition. We've talked about the industry, we've talked about kind of awareness and how teams can kind of build this awareness and then build the skills to message the right winning components starting from the top, not working their way from the bottom, but starting from the top in terms of impact they have to the business. And I want to go to kind of where our industry has been shifting lately, which is this aggressive, aggressive over saturation of the concept of visibility. So if awareness is a key driver of what SEOs and content teams and marketing teams need to do to win in the AI discovery race, how does visibility sit in this crossover with that concept?
- [25:14]
Eli Schwartz
I would push back against the way the industry is approaching visibility right now. I think they're getting too granular on what visibility means. And it reeks of rank tracking from many, many years ago, which was completely fake. Where you're being charged for the number of now it's called prompts, but back then it was called queries, the number of words you had. You know, when I was at SurveyMonkey, the word survey, if I was charged for that tracking that word, and if I pluralized it with surveys, I was charged again. And if I called it online surveys, I was charged again. So we're back to that place where now we're measuring prompts instead of measuring customers. And it's really, really hard to measure this because first of all, you don't know if any of those prompts are real. They might not even be real. You don't know where in the funnel those users are. In many cases, I've had access these tools. I can't replicate the prompt experience that the tools are claiming that I had. Like, I don't see the websites that the tools say that were there. And I think that we're zeroing in on something that doesn't matter as much as some are saying it should. Instead, I want to think about broader visibility, which is a share of voice. Again, harder to measure. But I like what Semrush has done. I like what Ahrefs has done. I like the way the tools are looking at. Here are the general words you have. Here's some short sort of share of voice where we're normalizing versus all your competitors. Is that accurate? Maybe, maybe not. But I would start putting that together just to say in the conversations, you know, we talk, let's say, you know, another company I worked with in the past was Gusto. Gusto has very defined competitors. So take example queries and say share voice. Are there words where ADP is showing up and Gusto is not? Are the words where paychecks, again, general prompts, general words, Paychecks is showing up and Gusto is not. That would be a negative share voice. Now, if Gusto is showing up all the places the competitors are showing up, that's what you want instead of like, let's measure. Oh, I need to go all in on this, you know, California payroll software platform because Paychex seems to be showing up for. That would be meaningless. I would say what are the general prompts and general words that you see competitors showing up for and make sure that you're, you're sort of there and not to get too granular. I think getting too granular is where we get into the rank tracking space.
- [27:25]
Jordan Cooney
And so you brought up a lot of themes there in that, in that answer. I want to, I want to, I want to hone in on a few of them, which is this lack of integrity on input factors. So if we're going to track visibility, if we're going to try to understand what's happening and we're not going necessarily yet to a share voice or some sort of market indicator, we're literally looking at our own website trying to understand what are the prompts or what are the, the requests that users, real people are putting into an LLM to get a response back from give us some kind of clarity around this kind of mystery meat of input factors, because today there isn't a really clear way to get data on what's happening in an LLM today. ChatGPT isn't kindly sharing with us what all the prompts our consumers are putting in today. There isn't some sort of URL identifier that tells us what the prompt could have been or the intent of the prompt could have been before they landed on our page. None of that exists. All of that did exist, by the way, for keyword data in all of the rank tracking tools. So at one point, and still to this day, Google sells or shares some keyword data from the paid advertising realm of the world. Google does still give keyword data in search console. Arguably it is somewhat anonymized or structured in a way, but there is some data that is justifiably head against a real source of truth. How are we doing that for LLMs and how are the input factors to this tracking actually providing any genuine real insight?
- [28:58]
Eli Schwartz
They're not. I think the biggest problem, and this goes back to the book I'm almost done writing, which is the biggest problem I think all marketers have, whether it's SEO or any other marketers, is they don't view themselves as customers. When they're doing their marketing, they don't view themselves as customers. So I love when I think about LLMs and think about like what I should be doing from an SEO standpoint, being a customer. And I think that most of the things that I do specifically in Gemini or even AI mode, they're not search queries and they're very, very personal to me. Like I use Gemini to find a paint color of a wall. I'm going to buy the paint. Gemini told me what paint color is and I'm going to buy the paint. But that website is going to have no idea that I started with Gemini. So if I think about that from a query standpoint, you know, the companies that I'm going to buy that paint from, there's nothing they could have done to show up and have their paint color match the paint of my wall if they didn't deserve to be there. Like, everyone's like trying to put, oh, we want to show up. Like, I don't know paint color matching. Like, well, you don't sell the right paint, don't show up. I don't want an LLM that gives me the wrong paint. So I think if when marketers figure out that they should be thinking about their own utility in their own way that they're experiencing LLMs, they'll realize that LLMs and visibility is not the right answer to everything. So I think a lot of the visibility that's being tracked may be fake, but even if it isn't fake, it doesn't matter. This stuff is personal and it's going to lead to so much direct search, dark searches that no one's going to be able to track back.
- [30:27]
Jordan Cooney
Love that. Let's, let's take this a bit further too, because there's another concept in this whole awareness realm or tracking realm that I think has been hugely overhyped this past year, which is the concept of mentions and where you're showing up. Arguably there's been a lot of content written about being more present in Reddit. Showing up in Reddit means you're going to show up in LLM. I hear a lot of CMOs conflating and mixing those two together. What does this really mean? And like how you know, to your paint analogy, like is it that a certain paint brand, if they just happen to be mentioned enough times with that hex color code, tada. They might have shown up in that LLM response.
- [31:08]
Eli Schwartz
Again, this is something that I think we're doing completely wrong. So the way backlinks and citations should have always worked is if you're legitimate, you earn the right backlinks. And that's what Google wanted when Google measured the world to measure the World Wide Web before marketers went and bought backlinks and poisoned the entire ecosystem by manipulating backlinks. That's what backlinks were. So now we're talking, now we're getting back to a world where that actually matters again, where you have I it's the craziest thing. My favorite non humble way of measuring how LLMs work is I just LLM myself whether it's on Gemini or Chat gbt. And yeah, you know, like this is one I should always rank number one on who's the best product led SEO consultants. I really hope that any LLM would say I'm the best because I wrote the book on it and I, I see what they cite and they cite like some random conference where like I have a bio page now that's not a citation I manipulated. So I think we're getting back to a place where the LLMs decide what citations matter for whatever sort of question that you've asked. And that's hard to manipulate. So I think what happens is you get this data set that says, oh, Reddit shows up very often in an LLM citation. So then CMOs and agencies rush into like, let's go and you know, game Reddit. But then I think the alums are learning and they'll say, well, Reddit is not really a reliable source anymore because it's been game. So then they'll go to Quora and then the call will go out, let's game Quora. And then Yahoo Answers is going to come back and they're going to gain Yahoo Answers. But really it's AI and AI is thinking like humans and AI is going to go and find the right citations that matter. So actually what I advise clients is to think about this as quantity over quality. So the more citations you get, the more likely some citation will matter. But if you throw all your eggs into the Reddit basket and then Reddit doesn't matter anymore, you have no citation. If you throw all your eggs into the high domain authority basket, which is something that the engines and LLMs are pushing away from, there are many, many high domain authority pages that never get crawled. So then you have no citations. But if you think about massive amounts of citations, which again is regular marketing, if you do good stuff and people talk about you, you'll have quantity. If you don't do good stuff or no one cares about you, you won't have quantity. So just kind of be real. But there's ways that you can encourage this quantity. You can pay for quantity, but that's what happens for real brands. Real brands don't need to go out and seek citations.
- [33:33]
Jordan Cooney
So we've been talking a lot about these misnomers or these misguided investments that a lot of marketing teams, CMOs and SEOs have been using throughout 2025. And you arguably put up one of the most, I think, engaging posts on LinkedIn calling out the amount of spending that companies are putting into tracking these things like AI visibility mentions these two topics that we just discussed and really calling out the fact that like, hey, there's a bunch of money being plowed into tracking something that A may not have the most valuable inputs, B, doesn't really sustainably give clarity around what our brand or product positioning is. What should the companies be doing then? How should the companies be navigating this path and investing that money and resources to be successful in what is very much a transformative error in how consumers are discovering brands and products.
- [34:27]
Eli Schwartz
That's the million dollar question. I think you'd have to hire me as a consultant in order to get the answer that, but I think that's the question everyone really wants answered. And it's hard because I think, you know, going back to earlier days of SEO, there were very specific playbooks that you could do that your competitors couldn't do. So you could be the worst T shirt company in the world, but have the highest rankings and sell the most T shirts. Now we're in a world where they kind of have to be the same. You can't have bad products and have good marketing. You can't have bad marketing on good products. It comes together so that. And the AI And AI is helping that out. One of my favorite things about AI from a user standpoint is you can write the stupidest prompts ever, but then the LLM figures out what you want. From an intent standpoint, it's not string matching the way queries are on Google. It's like understanding intent and then it finds you the answers. So AI is fixing all those problems. So if you've done, if you have a great product, but you've done very bad marketing, AI will still help you find it. If you have a really bad product, but you've done really good marketing, AI will squash it and you won't be found. So really the secret is to have a good product and have good experiences with your customers and then make sure that there is awareness baked into this good product experience. Now, if you don't, if you have a really good product but you don't have a website, then it's going to be hard for you to be visible in search. If you have a really good product, but you don't, go and do proactive outreach to make sure people talk about your good product. You may have word of mouth, but you may be missing some of this word of mouth that needs to end up on search. So that's what I would do, is just make sure that you follow best practices around SEO. Have a website that's crawlable, have content that talks about your products. One of my biggest wins, actually, and this applies now, and applied then for Tinder, when I worked with Tinder, is Tinder didn't have any pages about their products, about their, their subscription products. So when someone looked for Tinder Platinum, they found websites that ranked all dating apps. And they talked about Tinder's product that Tinder didn't have a page on. When we created these pages for Tinder, magically we ranked number one and we converted a crazy amount from these pages because, I mean, they're even brain terms. So now we own them. So that would still apply with AI. Make sure your product pages exist. Make sure that you, you follow SEO and search best practices to make that they're visible. You don't have to follow technical best practices like you used to years ago because again, the engines will make up for it. But that's still what I would recommend. Do good SEO and then create great experiences for customers that people want to talk about. And that's citations. Now there, there are some things around like, you know, how you structured content for LLMs and maybe follow that, but that could also change in three months.
- [37:12]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And I think there are a lot is going to change. I mean, one thing that isn't going to change is your brand is still your brand. Your website is productled SEO.com right. And that's going to continue to be the case. Your newsletter, the future of SEO is going to continue to be called the future of SEO. And let's talk about that briefly. And the reason I'm bringing those two examples up is because you've stuck with the future of SEO when everybody else is calling it something else at this point. Geo, aio, aeo. I mean, I think you even threw a couple acronyms earlier. But essentially, if you take any three letters of the Alphabet, throw them together, it's actually SEO. And so what does the future of SEO look like for you in 2026? How are, how is your newsletter going to continue to educate us about what's changing and where things are going?
- [37:54]
Eli Schwartz
So first of all, I don't think search goes away. I think that there will always be two aspects to search, which is you're pushing something at someone and organic, which is someone's pulling. We're always going to live in a world where you pull things where I make requests. Now some of the answers to those requests are going to be answers and some of the answers to those requests are going to be search results. And interface of those requests are also going to change. In today's world, most of the interfaces we use are computers and phones. Very, very soon it's going to be cars, it's going to be wearables, it's going to be other. I mean, we're already getting into this is new and I just wrote about this in my newsletter that Gemini is now baked into all the Google products that Google sold. Like the, you know, the ones that talk to you. So the home assistants, I don't know if the nest talks to you, but they'll make another nest that talks to you and has Gemini in it. So now these things are useful. So those also become interfaces for search and they're going to create brand awareness. So now I'm going to go and talk to my thermostat and say, I need a new electric company because my thermostat is making me charge too much money. And it's going to tell you the name of a company and then you're going to pull out your phone and you're going to Google the name of that company. Note that that brand is never going to know it started with an LM search. Right? So that's what I think search will look like. We're always going to have that. It's going to transform. Now, should it be called SEO? You know, I wrote a blog, I wrote a LinkedIn post about how it shouldn't be called SEO because it's putting the onus and the focus on search engine rather than the focus on the user. But that's the name we have and the team we have, the agencies we have and the consultants we have, they're going to be responsible for this new way of searching. Whatever. Many years ago was like 15 years ago, we didn't create a new acronym for Mobile Engine Optimization. We just stuck with SEO. We're going to keep that acronym for LLMs. We're going to keep this acronym for wearables. This is the team that architects and optimizes visibility on whatever these new platforms are. So search will always exist. Search engines will always exist. The UI will change.
- [39:48]
Jordan Cooney
I love it. I think that there's a lot of great advice and staying current with our naming and the naming of what we've done. I think that there's so many principles that still apply to SEO that now are relevant to what we're doing in AI discovery. I think that one of the hot ones that we saw in 2025 was LLM TXT and just the whole concept of that, which, when I looked at those files and I started analyzing some of them, I was like, isn't this just a sitemap?
- [40:19]
Eli Schwartz
Yeah.
- [40:19]
Jordan Cooney
And so, like, I was like, back to the fundamentals of what we're doing is SEO, right? And so, and I do think that a lot of these models, ChatGPT, Perplexity and the like, are going to go through a lot of change to create guidelines and regulations so they can better ingest, use and serve accurate and useful responses to users. Because at the end of the day, this is all about users. Before we close out and go into our lighting round, tell our listeners a little bit about where they can find your newsletter and more about you.
- [40:48]
Eli Schwartz
So my newsletter is productled SEO.com definitely follow me on LinkedIn. So if you search Eli Schwartz and you don't find something that I own, then I haven't done good SEO. So I don't need to optimize my website to be number one. I just need to optimize me and it that that's what SEO is. We're optimizing for some sort of outcome. And it again doesn't matter whether it's your website that's number one or YouTube is number one. So search me, search Google and you'll find my LinkedIn. So definitely follow me LinkedIn and definitely subscribe to my newsletter productletseo.com My book is on Amazon. It's still relevant. I eventually will do an update when it makes the most sense, when the industry slows down a little bit, but there'll be an update. For now, the book is good. It's on Amazon Audio on Amazon, so. Or wherever you get your books.
- [41:31]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. A huge thank you to Eli Schwartz, growth advisor, SEO consultant and author of Product Led SEO for joining us. If you'd like to connect with Eli, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on the voicesofsearch.com you can also visit his personal website, productled SEO.com if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.