← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
SEO Impact in a Product-Driven Enterprise
00:43:09
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host Intro
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.
- [00:45]
Jordan Cooney
Google's AI overviews has shown up for more than 90% of informational queries, meaning AI generated summaries are more common than featured snippets in traditional organic listings. In this landscape, the sites that get cited in those AI summaries enjoy prime visibility. And that's where GoodRx has made major gains. In a space where misinformation can literally hurt people, GoodRx has shown growth into an AI visibility content powerhouse, competing head to head with major companies like WebMD, Healthline and other SEO giant organizations in the healthcare space. But what does this really take? How do you really win in this YMYL category? And as generative search environments evolve, how do you manage websites with hundreds of thousands of pages? How do you scale a content strategy that's trusted by humans and AI models in healthcare? I'm Jordan Cooney and joining me today is John Vantine, director of SEO at GoodRx. John has spent over seven years building a world class cross functional generative search task force and editorial frameworks that has powered discovery throughout Google ChatGPT and beyond. Today, John shares the system signals and stories from technical migrations to content refreshes that are reshaping how he thinks about AI. John, welcome to the Voices Search Podcast.
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John Vantine
Thanks for having me.
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Jordan Cooney
So pumped John to have you on. I know it's been probably not the easiest path to getting on this show for you, but I'm so thrilled that you're here with us today. Tell us a little bit about your journey in SEO, how you got to SEO and then how you're thinking about this current AI universe, this LLM track as it comes to how you and your team evolve at GoodRx.
- [02:36]
John Vantine
Yeah, sure. So I don't think I've ever talked to anyone that has a straightforward path into SEO. It's like, oh, I went to law school and then this thing happened or whatever. For me, I went to art school, thought I was going to be a graphic Designer, which I don't think people even use that term anymore. Now you're like a UX interface designer. But I had a small personal blog that somehow got really, really big back in the, in the blog days. And I learned a lot about understanding audiences and I was doing SEO before I realized there was a term for it. In other words, right? Like I would write about something and then my site would show up, I'd get a bunch of traffic, I'd get booted off of a host because I used too much bandwidth, and then I'd scramble to pick up the pieces and learn from that. And so that kind of provided a path into SEO for me. Moved to la, worked for an agency which has since grown very big w promote down in El Segundo, and then worked in house in the automotive space for Edmunds and truecar. And now I'm sort of acting as a SEO in a product management capacity at GoodRx, where as you alluded to, you know, we're not just looking at traditional SEO anymore, but the big, wonderful infusing world of LLM. So probably a lot to dig into there. But I'll pause and you can let me know which direction we want to go in with that.
- [03:47]
Jordan Cooney
I think this is a really interesting inflection point because what we're seeing in the market is that there's this balancing act that has to happen between UX good experience and the signals that you need to put out into the market, and then the subject matter experts and the ability to write really useful content for users. So I'm curious, how are you balancing this, you know, and how are you putting effort into one or the other to be present in AI discovery today?
- [04:16]
John Vantine
So the balance between I would say like the SEO input and sort of the subject matter expert input is something like 50, 50 if you had to put a number on it. Right. Like I think you need to have full time SEOs that are, that are just focused on that editorial collaboration. Right. There's the whole other like product facing and technical SEO piece which we can talk about, I think is crucial too. And that's sort of like in my mind, lives outside this equation. So you have these SEOs, they're embedded with the content teams, but they also have the flexibility and understanding that SEO isn't the only way. Right. It needs to be truly collaborative. So the SEOs are empowering the subject matter experts with SEO information. And by that I don't mean data and search volume. I mean they need to teach them the underlying principles. They need to do regular readouts on content performance so that the folks they're working with can see the fruits of their labor and understand what's working and what isn't. Do post mortems, right? Don't hide the stuff that didn't work. Celebrate the wins and the losses and then put that stuff into action as you iterate and you update the content calendar accordingly. This content integrity thing is like, so crucial. Like, content's not going to grow long term without integrity. You can't build a moat without integrity. Like I heard someone say a while ago, I don't know if you can swear on this podcast, but someone said, like, you can't turn, can't turn shit into strawberries. Like, I don't know who's trying to do that to begin with, but like the best SEO in the world isn't going to get you anywhere. If your content or your product, whatever that is, whatever's on the landing page, like if that, if that sucks, it's a waste of time to do SEO. Like, no one is spending time building a moat around a junkyard because no one's trying to get into the junkyard. No, nobody wants what's in there.
- [05:55]
Jordan Cooney
So.
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John Vantine
And then you also need the technical SEO folks to like patch up any holes in that moat. But that's a whole different story about the cms. And we can get into that stuff too, if it's helpful.
- [06:03]
Jordan Cooney
Let's dive in here for just a second because I fundamentally think that historically, especially traditional SEOs like you and I, we come from an SEO pedigree. So we have kind of like these like spidey senses of like, oh, this is what actually works on the page and this is what's going to drive things. But that has to be like, under complete like re architecture at the moment, we have to be rethinking what it means to send a signal in our pages and in our content to a model. Right. And models are training in a very different way. Right? Models aren't just looking at, oh, is there an author on this? But, but what's the author bio? And is that author bio visible on other credible websites that talk about healthcare? Right. Not just the LinkedIn profile of a person. So how are you thinking about that full ecosystem of those signals to create the authority that you want for GoodRx?
- [06:54]
John Vantine
So I think that for generative search, it has sort of necessitated a back to basics approach to SEO, which, which necessitates that we work more closely with like our, our marketing partners. Right. And I have some thoughts about this as it relates to how SEO needs to be positioned to work cross functionally with all of the parts of the organization while still being embedded in the product and engineering team. But I don't think that effective SEO for generative search has really necessitated a major shift in strategy either. I think we need to continue to do the things that have been working well for us while also being mindful of those technical SEO things to make sure that these more rudimentary crawlers are able to access content information because they're not as sophisticated as googlebot is. And googlebot's not even that sophisticated. Sophisticated.
- [07:41]
Jordan Cooney
I love this. I actually really, really love this because not enough people talk about like, the simplicity of like doing this work, right? Everyone wants to talk about like, oh, well, we better start setting up all this crazy AI tracking visibility, and we better start doing all these other things like LLMs text, because that's the really the future of SEO and AI AI discovery, which I find is comical because most of these things are back to the basics, right? They're the things that we've always been doing. And so on that point and on this like, on this like, concept of like being in the basics, let's talk just briefly. What does that mean for a team like yours? What does that mean to like, work cross functional? Who are these teams and how are you messaging the same or differently and building that trust and confidence?
- [08:27]
John Vantine
Yeah, I mean, I will say for our case, which I don't assume to be globally true, it means building a stronger working relationship with marketing because been very intentional in keeping SEO in product and not in marketing. So we have to build those bridges and we have to work. And you know, I think the traditional collaboration here is you're working with the person that's managing like your AdWords campaigns. Right? Like, that's not what we're talking about here. It's much more than that. It's working with the folks that are developing social first content, the folks that are coordinating, like your executive team's posts on LinkedIn, the folks that are doing your PR. All of that stuff, I would say classically sits in marketing. And it takes a lot of effort to build and maintain those relationships. I think that looking at some of the early metrics that we have for monitoring generative search, visibility and sharing those and discussing those with these partners is really important. That way you have sort of a shared goal, like, hey, when we do these things, it's driving downstream outcomes that look like this and then working together to make sure that you're checking Those boxes. And again, I mean, we know that these models, they train on, you know, they train on different, different platforms, but some of them train on Wikipedia, some of them train on LinkedIn, some of them are pulling a ton from Reddit. Like a lot of that, a lot of the things that are influencing those platforms are not coming from SEO, they're coming from the marketing team and the content that they're creating. So it's working really closely with them and educating them and showing that you have a shared goal. And like, I want to help you do your job so that we can get these outcomes down the line and I'll help report on that and like champion the work that you're doing.
- [09:57]
Jordan Cooney
Love this. I think this is a great segue to our second real main theme topic here, which is like, this is a category that's high stakes, right? We're talking about like, you know, the well being of, of humans and, and, and how, how are you approaching this effort with these, these stakeholders to maintain that level of say, eat authority? Right? Like, and, and, and I got to believe and, and correct me if I'm wrong on this concept, but like, I gotta believe. When we talk about these concepts like eat or authority with these marketing stakeholders, conceptually they kind of like are like, okay, that makes sense, but it's not something that they necessarily like boil down to like core, like numbers and processes and on page aspects and like those. That, that's a disconnect, right, because they're, they're a marketing team and they're either investing money in a paid channel, they're building brand awareness, they're doing something that is functional to their core expertise. How are you translating what we traditionally think of in the SEO world as eat, or even now in the AI discovery world as authority? How are you translating those concepts to these partners to navigate this high stakes category of healthcare?
- [11:11]
John Vantine
Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day it comes down to just like real user experiences and authenticity. Like that's the thing that we know resonates with our users. And so I think you can kind of sidestep trying to explain the concept altogether when you just say that like users want to hear from other people they want to hear from, let's say, like you have these sort of, these Personas, right? Like there's the, the, the single mom that has three kids that's trying to juggle two jobs and like put food on the table and afford their kids prescriptions and their own prescriptions. Like that's a real person. Let's hear her story and let's just like put it out there. You don't need to check SEO boxes when you do that. I mean, there are maybe certain parameters that you need to operate within. Right. Different platforms have different content requirements and things like that. But with all of that aside, I don't think you need special SEO training to put out authentic content in the ways that's gonna resonate with users in the places that they're consuming content like TikTok.
- [12:00]
Jordan Cooney
All right, let's get practical about that. Like social media or user generated or community based content. How are you thinking about those aspects and how they can influence a brand versus like what you own in your own messaging and content that typically is what you work with in collaboration with these other teams. Is it an outsized impact that's coming from these UGC and social channels or, or is it a balancing act of trying to understand that Persona's sentiment and need? And how are you thinking about that for your teams?
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John Vantine
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the recipe is, right. It's hard to say what the breakdown is right now. I also don't know what like the time to realizing impact is either because we're still kind of early on with these tools that track it. But look at the, look at the search results today, right? There's a new, there's a new carousel that Google, I believe, recently introduced. It's like what people are saying, but have you seen that thing around? I think it's kind of taking the place of what discussions and forums used to look like. And that's pulling in posts from LinkedIn, it's pulling in TikTok posts, it's pulling in Instagram content, which is now ranking all the time too. Right. So it's like, hey, these are slots that we can show up in or we can not show up there. Right? Like SEO can, can do. You know, we can, we can publish content on our, on goodrx.com Till we're blue in the face, but these other slots will be occupied by us or our competitors and that might be YouTube content. Right. But like we need to put, we need to do all the things, we need to show up in all the places as best we can. Great is the enemy of good, but let's just like get started with a few of them and we'll show up in these places and then we'll, we'll track them to the best of our ability. But if we really want that like share voice in all of the slots that Google is giving Us, we need to be, we need to be playing on all of these platforms. And so it's like, you know, again, let's get started somewhere. Let's start putting content out there, testing it out. We don't have to do every single thing perfectly. But that's, I think, has been my guidance is that like, we don't have to come up with the ultimate strategy. Let's just start now and continue to iterate. And so that's where we're at.
- [13:59]
Jordan Cooney
I mean, I think this is like really a critical inflection point, right? Because if we look at like the past year, so much of this noise in our industry has been isolated on say like Reddit or some form of ugc. And that's really difficult to create credibility in a YMYL category, right? Because to your point earlier, you have to have some level of expertise if you're going to talk about cancer, right? It's not like anybody can just go start talking about cancer and what kind of medications you should be taking or even for that matter, what kind of supplements, which is something that's like, you know, a generally publicly available product. But like, what are those supplements that you should be taking if you're a cancer patient, right? Not necessarily anybody can just go start hacking away at some, you know, Reddit sub thread on this topic, at least credibly. And so, and I think that's the distinction for most brands. And I think it's funny because we're just coming off of this week where ChatGPT announces ChatGPT Health, where they're really focusing on this vertical and this verticalization. And I'm kind of curious as you think about AI visibility for a brand like GoodRx and, and you think about where that's going, how much of this reality versus Vaporware is, is, is coming into fruition in, in how you guys are pushing your own tracking and knowledge of what's happening in AI discovery and how much of that is, how much of that, like real hard data are you functionally able to get versus some of this kind of soft data of like, we're hitting Personas, we're targeting certain segments, we're being very deliberate about expertise and authorship. I'm curious to get your, your knowledge around, around the hard tracking versus the, the soft knowledge that you're sharing with these stakeholders and teams.
- [15:53]
John Vantine
So I think the interesting position that I found myself in as an SEO in 2025 and 2026 is that I feel like part of my responsibility is to help folks cut through the hype and focus on what's real. Right. I think that, like, the tech press in a lot of ways acts as sort of a glorified, like, PR machine for like, OpenAI and a handful of other companies. And there's so much hype out there. And this is the stuff that, like, our leaders are reading, right? Not, not of any fault of their own. But you fire up LinkedIn and it's all about how jobs are going away because AI is taking over and agentic search does everything you could possibly want it to. And like, like, hold on a second. There's excitement here. This is an exciting technology. Things are changing. But not all of this is true. Like, have you used agentic tools? Some of them are pretty impressive. But like, let's ground ourselves in reality here. And what I think this means in a more practical basis is that I try to make sure that folks understand the data that's available that tells us where our users are actually using today. Right? Yeah, some of them are using ChatGPT, but let's be honest, most of them are using Google and they're seeing AI overviews. And the AI overview is where they're experiencing generative search in some capacity. Maybe they get pushed into AI mode sometimes, maybe they go over to Gemini. But like, all the data that I'm seeing is that like the vast majority of folks, especially, especially Jordan in our demographic, they're using Google, Maybe they're using ChatGPT a little bit, but it's not at the expense of their Google usage. And so what does that mean? It means that, like, AI overviews are the battleground. And so, like, I will highlight search results, specific search results, with a screenshot saying, here's this term we really care about. Look at the different content types that we're creating on our platform as well as on these other social platforms, and look at how they manifest within the makeup of the search results. Like, this is what's actually happening today. This is what's working today. Here where the eyeballs are and here where the clicks are coming from, to the best that we can say. As you know, there's no tool that tells us how many clicks are coming from aios versus Google. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. But we have some solid assumptions that we can make. We have some tools that help fill in those gaps a little bit. That is what I'm sharing with leadership. It's not, I try not to get too caught up in, like, what, you know, MCP and optimizing for agentic search and all that, which I do think it's important you should plant those seeds. But, like, are users really doing that stuff today? I'm not seeing a whole lot of evidence that they are. And so you got to cover those bases and keep an eye on it. But, like, what's working today for us? And this is maybe a separate topic, like, we're still seeing a lot of traditional organic search traffic. We have not been hammered the way some of our competitors have. I have some solid theories around why that is, but, like, if that's working today, why would I put all that away and, like, try to optimize for, like, deep seeker perplexity? Like, let's look at what's actually happening right now.
- [18:30]
Jordan Cooney
So that's. I absolutely love this.
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John Vantine
And I try to do all of that without coming off as, like, a maniac.
- [18:35]
Jordan Cooney
That's.
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John Vantine
The balancing act is, like, I don't. I take my tinfoil hat off before I jump on Zoom with our executive team.
- [18:40]
Jordan Cooney
Right?
- [18:40]
John Vantine
And I talk about it slowly and, like, I don't wave my hands around like a maniac.
- [18:44]
Jordan Cooney
Let's dive into that piece right there. Because as. As. As you're starting to get your aluminum hat shaped here for us, I need to. I need to understand, like, how are you communicating that with leadership? And I. I fundamentally see a lot of my colleagues and my own. My own teammates, or even, like other industry leaders in the SEO space struggling with this conversation. With CEOs, CMOs, VPs of performance marketing, they're really struggling because they come to them with a giant stack of hype. They slap it on the desk and say, have you fixed this for us? How are you navigating that conversation? What's been working for you? What hasn't happened?
- [19:26]
John Vantine
Yeah, I mean, the way that I would say. The scenario in which I most commonly encounter this is a screenshot from LinkedIn of a growth marketing hacker, someone you and I have probably never heard of before, but they somehow have 50,000 followers. And they're like, why aren't we doing this? Right? It's pretty much what you just described. And I'm like, well, this is great. Their stats are cropped. What happens in three months? Like, is that rocket ship still going up into the right. Like, if you expand it out a little bit, oftentimes it's not. If this worked, everyone would be doing it. And if this stuff worked, Google, nobody would use Google anymore. Right? Because it would be all AI slop in Google. Why would people use Google to find AI slop with ads on it when they could just go to ChatGPT and get their own customized answer instead. So I don't want to go too far down that road, but the way that I navigate that is, you know, I remind them that we're focused on what matters. I back these conversations with data that shows them that like okay, traffic is not exploding the way that it was two years ago. But here is what look at the trajectory of our competitors traffic. The ones that went after every topic under the sun, that were chasing the search volume like they're down significantly and they're continuing to bleed traffic. We're not. So what we're doing still works. And like my hope is that pointing that out will give them the confidence that I know what I'm talking about and that me and my team are like serving the company well from an SEO perspective, that we're focused on the right things and we're building the right stuff that resonates with users because all of the signals that we have internally suggest that we are Time for a.
- [20:58]
Podcast Host Intro
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- [22:25]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's so fascinating for you to share that kind of example because so much of that hype cycle is, is what, what executives are bringing to the table because There is, there are a lot of unknowns, there's a lot of questions, more than there are answers as to how this is evolving and changing. And there is no steady state. Right. Like four years ago we all could have said that roughly speaking, Google search results have somewhere between 2 to 4 ads and somewhere between 7 and 8 ranked natural search rankings. And like, we can't say that anymore because it's a totally different landscape. And so like, it's like driving by, you know, a shopping mall and not knowing today how many stores are going to be in the mall. It's a very difficult thing to target. But in any case, I, I do want to, I want to quickly segue here because you brought something up that I think is so unique to our conversation and that's, you know, you're in an in house role and, and you're working within a, a very high authority category. And, and I want to really understand the, the, the, the, the way you're thinking about your team. And my first question is like, what do you name your team now? What is your team? What is this team like? And there's so many three letter acronyms. Basically the entire Alphabet has been boiled down to three letters. We've been historically SEO, but now we could be aio, aeo, geo. I mean it's countless at this point. And so what do you, what are you calling your team and how are you creating the right narrative of the foundation works? But there is a future to how we're thinking about investing in our efforts.
- [24:03]
John Vantine
Yeah, I think the answer to both of those two points that you made at the end there is the same. And so first of all, I'll say the acronym hasn't changed. I'm still using SEO. I don't plan on changing that. But maybe the E stands for everywhere instead of engine. Right. But I think the underlying like philosophy is that search volume is not going away. Like there are not less problems to be solved or less questions to be answered in 2026 than there were in 2023. When you know, before all this generative stuff started, like the number of humans that are walking around with, with health problems has not changed. Maybe it's gone up. Right. But the way that they're looking for answers maybe has changed a little bit. They're going to different places. But as long as, and this is kind of the way that I think about it, as long as a user is sitting down with a device, or maybe it's, you know, their car, they're talking to their car, or maybe they're asking Alexa or Siri, but they're. As long as the user is asking a question somewhere, my team will still have a job doing SEO to make sure that our content appears in some format as an answer. And it might be a summary that's read by a robot and it might be on a heads up display on their Tesla. Right. And it might be in their Google Glass. Wherever it is, it might be on their watch. You know, we will still play a part in making sure that the crawlers associated with these tools can access that content. They can understand that it's trustworthy, they can understand what the content's about, they can reach it easily and quickly. Like that's where I think where we will still play a part. It might not be pushing letters onto a web page anymore in HTML. It could be something totally different five years from now, but we're still optimizing for search or answer engines.
- [25:38]
Jordan Cooney
So John, like I'm, I'm reminded here of like a really hot topic that is, is, is being cycled throughout the search, SEO, geo, whatever news you want to call it, which is fan out query like this. This is a concept to like extract data when an LLM is going into seeing what's happening in say search. And like this has got to be like a new foundational way of like collecting data and insight. What's your experience with this? What is your team doing with fan out query?
- [26:09]
John Vantine
Yeah, so first of all, that's a great question. First of all I love the ingenuity in the SEO space. Like I love all the people that we're surrounded with that like identify this stuff by looking at like the inspector tool in Chrome and they're like, oh, look at this query and this API call that's happening. I love how people nerd out on that and how they share it all. And I've seen some really cool tools that have popped up here. We can give them a query and they kind of exploded out into all of the follow up queries as the tools attempt to get ahead of the next questions you might ask. Right. I think that's kind of the genesis of it. But in practice we've been looking at these tools for a while and it looks pretty similar to where we land organically with our, the process that we generate our article outlines with. Right. Where it's like here's the topic and here are the subtopics and then here are the next questions a user might have that will inform the follow up pieces as well as the recommended articles. And I'll Say that the output from Fan out and the output output from this process we've had in place for at least five or six years, they're pretty similar. It's a lot of the same stuff, excuse me, that shows up in. People also asked and it shows up in these. Whatever Google is currently calling. Like, there are other search features that attempt to predict what your next steps might be like. I think it's all sort of part of the same thing. And Fan out is really smart. It's fast, fascinating to watch it happen. I love watching like ChatGPT models think and try and fail on all of these different things. And I do think that if you don't have something that looks like this in your content production pipeline, like you definitely should, but whether it's Fan out or whether it's using some other tool or, you know, a people also ask tool or something like that, like you need to get ahead of what the next step for the user might be. Because if you look at AI overviews, that's exactly what they do. They answer your question and then they try to figure out what else you might need and they get ahead of it. And usually the chat GPT responses end with, can I help you with this thing?
- [27:53]
Jordan Cooney
Right, right.
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John Vantine
I think you're going to want to do this next. Can I do it for you? They're trying to get ahead of that to keep you engaged. So if you can build that into your content, you're going to get cited over and over again.
- [28:01]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I love that. That's such, such great advice. I'm curious as, as you think about that concept, how does that change your position on partnerships? Like, if your content has that, like, strength and already has that capability, are you thinking more broadly about how GoodRx or even just generally how brands are partnering with, say, LLNs or partnering with data Feeds or partnering with, with other organizations to utilize the good value you've already created for users so that you can expand your footprint into being cited more often.
- [28:41]
John Vantine
I mean, I think that partnerships are like, that's like the gold medal, right? Think about what, what sort of Google's answer. Sorry, not their answer boxes. The Knowledge Panel looked like like five years ago, there were like a handful on the web. There were like a handful of partners who had partnerships with Google. I think like, I think Mayo Clinic might have been one of them, where they like had this reserved spot you'd search for like asthma. And there was always a thing there. To Mayo Clinic, it's like, man, that is the golden partnership. Now, how do you get those? I don't know. I would love to know how you get them. But yes, we are thinking about partnerships with these major generative search engines. I think that with the announcement of ChatGPT Health, there were a few of them that were called out explicitly. I want to say, I know that AllTrails was one of them. They have like apps in ChatGPT, right?
- [29:27]
Jordan Cooney
Yes. Integrated apps. Yeah, yeah.
- [29:29]
John Vantine
Instacart was one of them. Peloton I think was one of them. Now what are these? What does it look like to use these? It's like, hey, can I recommend a 10 minute spin class for you with Jess King? It's like cool. That's kind of cool. Can I recommend like a Tilden Berkeley Hills hiking trail for you from all trails?
- [29:45]
Jordan Cooney
Like.
- [29:45]
John Vantine
Okay. But I think that the important thing here is that the partnerships that allowed that to happen means that these apps and these brands are called out with on, like there's unaided brand, the brand is being mentioned when the user wasn't even looking for it, in other words. Right. So it almost feels like a partnership is also like doing SEO within the Chat GPT ecosystem. If you have that partnership and you have an app in their, in their app store, for lack of a better term term, they're going to recommend it to users even if they're not searching for it explicitly. And I think that's golden. So with the launch of ChatGPT Health, they said some astronomical number. I want to, I'm spitballing here. Let's say it was like a third of searches are health and wellness related. They called that out in the press release. It's in there. I don't remember the numbers if that's true. I think it's, I think it's. It stands to reason that at least a quarter of those would logically end in a prescription, a drug prescription. So if I can imagine a world where There is a GoodRx app in ChatGPT, like how often are users going to get guided directly into that? Right. That's a magical thing. Compare that to what I think most SEOs are doing right now, which is just optimizing their content in the hopes that like a crumb will fall off the table. Like maybe they get mentioned and maybe there's like a citation that goes to their homepage, if anything, and Maybe it's a 1 pixel by 1 pixel large on mobile and maybe one person ever clicks on it. Comparing those two possible outcomes, I think the partnership maybe is a little more appealing. So I think partnerships are Huge. I think we should all be thinking about them. I think we all need to be networking because I don't think there's any, there's no form as far as I know, where you fill out and submit it. And it's like, cool, yeah, you're in the store now. It's not like building an app on iOS, but I think we all need to be thinking about this stuff. And I think there's probably one winner in each space. So I think it's sort of, maybe there's a race there too. So I would hope that most like in house SEO teams are thinking about this if they have a product that could feasibly exist in that capacity.
- [31:41]
Jordan Cooney
We got to talk about something. This is, this is another major theme for us in this conversation, which is like, how do you build the technology to do that? Right? Like, I mean, I think that there's a component of like, oh great, we have some authority, maybe we even have some subject matter experts. But in order to scalably make partnerships work, you have to have an engine that's fully running. Right. And so how's, how are you thinking about the engine you guys have today? What are the quality or advancements that you need to be winning in the future?
- [32:11]
John Vantine
Yeah, I wish I was better qualified to answer that question. I don't have an engineering background, so I am so proud of the people that I get to work with to know how to build this stuff. I don't have any expertise there, but I do know that it's hard to partner on this sort of thing if you're not in the trenches with those people. And so in the case of GoodRx, I think it's really important that SEO sits right alongside those people and they're in the same ceremonies and they're roadmaping together and they're specking together and they're writing, literally writing tickets together and they're in stand up together. Like that's how this happens and that's how it happens in sort of an SEO friendly way, as it were. And again, I don't mean to criticize any, any organization where SEO sits in marketing. I'm sure there are some world class SEO teams that are just crushing it in marketing, but I don't know how often marketing is like sitting right next to the engineers that are working with the SDKs for an OpenAI and are actually like building apps and taking on sort of these, like, I don't want to say skunk works, but these new and emerging projects, like, I don't know if that's happening on an engineering team.
- [33:10]
Jordan Cooney
That'S embedded in marketing and at GoodRx, and like, even like some of your most recent wins, like, like, you guys have been evolving, even your content experience, headless cms, other investments that, that really help evolve the way you guys can leverage the right experience for users. Any, any insight into how that is working today versus how that's going to work in the later parts of 2026?
- [33:37]
John Vantine
That's a, that is a really good question, and you're kind of stumping me here. It's so hard to see where this stuff is going to go, right? I mean, there are people that think that users aren't going to read content on websites anymore and that it's going to be all about like model text, you know, mcp and like an agent finding the content for you and reading it for you, right? I love the old web. I grew up on the old web, as I know you did. Like, I love blogs and websites. And so like, my passion there leads me to hope that we will continue to publish content in the ways that we always have. But I would say, like, the technical SEO foundation is at least as important as it was before, maybe more, right? Because my understanding of the crawlers for tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity is that they're not, they're not very sophisticated. They don't render JavaScript. Like, you need a really, really solid SEO, technical SEO foundation for them to even discover your content, to even find it and understand what it is. So I would say that, like your CMS and sort of the underpinnings of your ecosystem are more important now than they ever were before. Otherwise, like, these tools, they're just not going to find your content and they're not going to spend all day trying to find it either. Like, they will move on. It's expensive to crawl the web. So I mean, hopefully these boxes have already been checked for googlebot, right? Like, we've been doing this for a while now. We know that we need to roll out a beautiful red carpet and say, googlebot, come this way and like, even sprinkle some treats there so they follow you. Like, you gotta double down on that for all of the other crawlers or they're just not gonna find your stuff or they're gonna find it on a scraper site. Someone that stole your content and stole your content and credit for it. Like that's happening too.
- [35:10]
Jordan Cooney
Like, like, you know, and like for, for GoodRx, right? Like, you guys essentially get, you know, medication, drugs and Other things right into a user's hands, right? Like that's, that's the whole purpose or the intent here. I am curious to ask you a question that connects to these like, experiences and the technical components, right? Like a lot of belief around LLMs, even within Google and the evolution that Google's going to go through is this like frictionless world, right? Where it's like, hey, I, you know, an AI model knows my age, it knows my diet and habits, it's recommending to me certain vitamins or supplements and now I don't need to go to a website to find it. It just basically matches me and I can instantly check out by just like, like, you know, putting my fingerprint on something and ta da. The next day vitamin D pills show up at my front door, right. I didn't add to cart, I didn't go to checkout, I didn't sign up and register. I didn't, you know, hand over, you know, whether or not my shipping address is the same as my billable address. You know, none of that stuff had to happen. It was just, it was just fingerprint, ta da, you know, vitamin D pills showing up at my front door in a frictionless world like that. How are you thinking about your evolution and the organization's evolution of what to do?
- [36:32]
John Vantine
Yeah, I mean, I think the mission of the company in the first place is to make healthcare access easy and affordable for all Americans. Right. And I would say in the spirit of that, this is a great evolution. It's removing friction and steps and having to jump through lots of hoops. So in a world where agentic search actually materializes in the way that we're being told that it will, I think that's great. And we are building and optimizing our tools to ensure that we can show up in those places if and when that does happen. I haven't seen it happening yet, but there was a Google announcement this week that made it look like, hey, we're definitely moving in that direction that you can, I think Google and OpenAI are neck and neck on this. And so I think educating engineers and designers and product managers frankly on what's happening in the space, the latest developments, like about mcp. And then there was something else that's like a, I think, was it Google's competitor to MCP that was also announced over the last week or so, like letting them know about this stuff? Because usually they eat this stuff up. It's not like, oh shit, I have to read this thing that my annoying SEO counterparts and like usually they're excited that you thought of them and that you're sharing something technical with them. I think just educating folks about it, doing readouts, doing lunch and learns things like that so they can understand the developments in the space is really important so that whatever we're building is future proof and it's compatible with these things. And maybe during a hackathon they can build an mcp, you know, a new MCP feature and test it out and show up in these new spaces. But at the end of the day, I think as long as we have the household name brand recognition, we're going to be one of the people that shows up as an option to do this stuff as long as our products are available for it. Because at the end of the day, as long as the prescription ends up in the hands of the patient that needs it, like that is a win for us. And it doesn't really matter how that happens.
- [38:20]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I mean, I love your call out for Google's universal commerce protocol. Like I think these protocols are what makes it makes it happen. But like making it happen doesn't change the fact that there's a brand, there's a resonance, there's a user that cares about getting their product from some specific place. Right. And I think that's going to always be a need, regardless of whether that's through a frictionless experience or some blog post I read to make my prescription decision.
- [38:42]
John Vantine
I mean, if it's add to cart from CanadianPharmacy XYZ or add to cart from GoodRx.com like I know which one I'm going to click on, you know.
- [38:49]
Jordan Cooney
Right, exactly, exactly. All right, so now let's segue over to our lightning round. I'll ask you five rapid fire questions related to the themes that we just discuss and we're going to just jump right in.
- [39:02]
John Vantine
Cool. Let's do it.
- [39:04]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. So what is one page type that should be analyzed more closely when we're thinking about AI driven traffic besides the.
- [39:13]
John Vantine
Homepage, Something resembling an About Us page, either About Us or FAQ or some sort of knowledge base that addresses common questions and misconceptions about the brand? Okay, so I'm asking you, like, how often do you think that companies really spell out exactly what it is that they do and how they make money and like what they offer customers? Like, how often do they really do that in plain text, not through a video or images? Like, like not often, I don't see. And so as a result of this.
- [39:44]
Jordan Cooney
I still go to a lot of B2B websites. And I'm still confused as to which pricing package I should purchase.
- [39:51]
John Vantine
Yeah, yeah, it's not often that they break it down in plain, in plain terms, in like high school English, like, this is exactly what we do and why you should use us. And so as a result of that, what I see is that third party websites are like getting a free lunch by explaining what other sites do. Right. You know, you're welcome, Nerd wallet for talk for, for breaking down what GoodRx does. But frankly, good for you because like, we haven't effectively done that in the past. People, there's actually predictive search volume around, like, how does Goodr X make Money? Why is GoodRx bad? People assume that we're bad because they don't understand what it is that we do. So I'm, I'm going down a rabbit hole here, but I think that looking at the most common questions about your brand and proactively answering those on an about page is like really important.
- [40:32]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. All right, let's jump into our second question here. What's one tactic you've used that might evolve as AI unfolds this year?
- [40:43]
John Vantine
Again, back to the point around these crawlers being very basic and not being as sophisticated as even googlebot. I think we might need to double down on internal linking and just making it very, very simple for them to go from the homepage to all the most important pages on the site. And so then what might look like expanded, like dynamic link modules. It might look like accordion style, like FAQs with more links in them. Things like that. Nothing that a user would never use or click on. Like, I think it needs to be, it needs to be useful to a user in order to resonate at all with a search engine. But I might again, I think some of this generative search stuff necessitates a back to basics approach and making it very easy for these sites, for these crawlers to make it through your site and find all your stuff.
- [41:28]
Jordan Cooney
Love it. Okay, what's one hire you recommend for SEO, Geo, whatever you want to call them, teams in 2026.
- [41:39]
John Vantine
This is a good one. I hope that every SEO team has the luxury of making any hire in 2026. I hope that SEO teams are still getting resourced. I love this. This is the positivity, right? Exactly. I love that. Yeah. Okay, well, shouts to Eli Schwartz. I can't say enough about product LED SEO. Like I think you really need to someone sitting in a PM seat doing SEO, doing SEO.
- [42:02]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [42:02]
John Vantine
Like maintaining the SEO roadmap, working with Engineers like literally executing on an SEO strategy that materializes in like real features that are built for users with search engines also in mind. So if you don't have an SEO sitting in a product role, that would be my choice for 26.
- [42:17]
Jordan Cooney
For our listeners, what's the one recommendation or signal that they should rely on to guide content updates?
- [42:25]
John Vantine
To guide content updates. Well, I don't think this has really changed with generative search. Maybe we could riff on that a bit, but my take is that it's still just traffic, right? Oh, was the article getting traffic in Q1? What does it look like in Q2? Did it fall off a cliff? You probably need to change it. It probably fell off a cliff for a reason. Right? Who took its place? Go back and update the content. I mean, without getting too into it. Content updates are so powerful. It is amazing consistently how just going in and changing a few things to make sure that the latest information is in there can cause not just a return to traffic, but also even more traffic than the article ever saw before. So just look at the content and have tools that will ping you when something falls off.
- [43:08]
Podcast Host Intro
Yes.
- [43:09]
Jordan Cooney
Love it. What's the most overlooked message to leaders and executives when they're asking about AI discovery and search?
- [43:18]
John Vantine
Oh my God, this is easy. The most overlooked message is, are our users actually using these tools? Usually I feel like as SEOs, we have this tendency to jump to the answer and jump to the action without thinking about like the. The question behind the action. Like, first of all, our users use are our people, Are our customers using Chat GPT? Right. Ran Ran Fishkin has a great tool that speaks to this. So that's one step. But then also, like, are those tools even recommending websites for the queries that we might optimize for? Fire up incognito mode, open ChatGPT and start asking some questions. Like, are they even. There are responses that don't have any links in them at all.
- [43:57]
Jordan Cooney
Right.
- [43:58]
John Vantine
So like, I think those are two important steps that sometimes get looked past in favor of just checking the box and executing on a roadmap. We need to start with like, some some simple questions first.
- [44:08]
Jordan Cooney
Love that, John. Excellent advice. And that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. A huge thank you to John Vantine, director of SEO at GoodRx, for joining us. If you'd like to contact John, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on thevoicesofsearch.com you can also visit his company website, goodrx.com if you haven't subscribed yet and would like 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 each week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.