Search Engine Optimization

“If you think about SEO, right? It was like, can Google understand the page? And then we had AEO, which is can AI cite the answer? And now we're entering this web MCP era, which is basically, can the agent finish the job?”

“Because SEM doesn't work, we've done, we've gone the SEO route.”

“The only way that you can market a consumer-facing business that I know of, the only ways, I should say, are virality, word of mouth, SEO, it's all the, it's the free stuff, because you can't afford to spend or invest any money on marketing, and that's why, on…”

“Adding links to your calendar does not work. Saying we do SEO does not work. Like, I think people care less about what you do, but more about the outcome and what you can do for them.”

“So for example, SEO used to be why you could win the market. SEO right now is just something everybody has to do. It is not going to be the reason that you win. Same with SEM.”

“SEO is now like, how do you have, how do you grab attention within LLM search results? The consideration phase of helping people, you know, feel comfortable with your product is now mostly third party conversations, right? Through social or other places. They …”

“What does everyone think about the Google search going agentic? Like, this is the nail in the coffin of SEO.”

“So I don't think it's very different, honestly, no, because What the AI does is, is it searches the web and like finds answers and then it gives it to you. So it is very similar.”

“I think much of the practices that worked very well in SEO continue to work, but the contrast is turned up on, on some of the sub bullets. In particular, the importance of information gain. So adding materially like net new information to the market through th…”

“The more specific you can get, like cold outreach email for some sector or whatever, like for automation, that's going to rank as high as it can faster than something general, just like TaskMagic automation.”

“If AEO is in 2026 is where SEO was in 2010, first movers will own these niches for years.”

“And now what is happening, it's going through another shift where all that keyword research, all that SEO oriented, like put content in, get revenue out. It doesn't work anymore. So what does still work is like real expertise, but that's really hard to do.”

“This was the early days of SEO. Like you had your clients have problems, you answer them and that's how you get traffic. So. It's not working like that anymore because AI can answer that. You don't need a person”

“If you do SEO correctly, you will rank within the top three to five listings almost every time, even on a brand new channel.”

“Like, you still have to invest in SEO if you want to have the baseline of growth. But is SEO gonna be the reason that you're gonna win in your business? I don't think so. It's just something that you have to do. This is not gonna be the reason why you're gonna…”

“I would say for directories, the moat is definitely data and your SEO, like, if you have really strong backlinks.”

“And I think you don't even need images for a directory to rank and get traffic.”

“And I think this kind of idea works well because for the people looking for this, like if they don't assist with dementia, that's a deal breaker. So what are like the deal breaker features that people make decisions off of? And how can we create like very spec…”

“If your timeline is To make money in less than six months, I would not build a directory.”

“Not down, actually up. Because there are so many more things that need to be done today.”

“There's going to be almost certainly a cottage industry of companies that are going to come and say, I'm going to help you optimize ads in ChatGPT. There's already companies that help you optimize placement In what is called these answer engines called AEO ins…”

“In those moments where you're delegating basically decision making to your agent, it really changes a lot of the mechanics and economics of the internet. SEO, SEM, all these things that have been awesome, optimized towards persuasion of humans, all of a sudden…”

“A product that's sold really well direct actually doesn't do well in things like social and SEO and vice versa. If you're getting a lot of traffic through SEO, adding ads often like costs a lot and doesn't really move the needle”

“Not a lot. I think three people right now. It's not that big, but they're not doing exclusively SEO, but they have extensive know how about, you know, what to do in order to become SEO friendly, I would say.”

“My second prediction is that over-reliance on SEO will be problematic for mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders, actually for any SaaS founder.”

“If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing? Influencer marketing. And across all of the social pl…”

“I think enterprise sales will be a big one. So I want to focus much more on that. We are just like scratching the surface when it comes to that SEO has been proven to be very important also for people in our space. So we are going to be doing more of that. And…”

“SEO, as I'm sure you know, in any other language instead of, besides English, is kind of like marketing on easy mode, or like SEO on easy mode. Ok, so let me show you why this works so well. When you're doing SEO in another language, it's kind of like doing SE…”

“I think the transfer is pretty high in areas like customer support copywriting SEO, like some of these marketing related areas.”

“Performance drives SEO. SEO is an input into AEO.”

“Help center is actually a great place to do that because help center is you talking about how your product works and what it does when it does not do. And so help center optimization is not something you would focus on for SEO, but you would for answer engine …”

“I think it's hard for early stage companies, which is why I mentioned when a startup asked me what they should do in SEO, I say, don't work on it and wait until you're larger. Wait until you're, you know, series A or later, maybe series B and later, because it…”

“I think it's five X, at least five X LMs, maybe 10 X, depending on the category. So it's way bigger than AEO.”

“We didn't spend anything on a marketing strategy. We didn't spend anything on SEO or PPC or anything like that. It was like bare bones, free tools, super cheap shit, whatever we could do to save the buck. And like, I think that in retrospect, that really is a …”

“SEO foundations are unchanged. And what I mean by that is some of the same systems that we rely on to get our websites indexed, our content seen, visible, crawled by Googlebot, and the rest of the internet are still the same systems that LLMs and generative en…”

“If you do the things that are good for SEO traditionally, you're going to benefit from it. From GEO. And that's already been proven by many companies who already start to get a lot of organic traffic from generative engines, even without optimizing for those m…”

“All the people that knew all the stuff before about online marketing or SEO or whatever it is, the things that I'm working on, you know, they had 10 years of experience. It was always the same. Now all that wealth of information is all obsolete.”

“There's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's gonna ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still vali…”

“We've gotten some of our, like, top paying customers at 50,060, 70,000 dollars ACV using SEO.”

“So there's certain things and it's like SEO on your website and YouTube. Are the two biggest things that pop out as kind of this evergreen content. And if you think about it as profit per minute, every minute you put into doing amazing YouTube content or amazi…”

“And over the next year, if you wanted to do this, you could put together 3000 backlinks. Your domain authority on S on on your website, on your SEO, Would go up to 60, 70, and your hits per month will blow up.”

“The world wide web is unhealthy right now. Most of the things on the internet are crap, and they're crap, and we know that they're crap, but they SEO optimized crap, so how do you decrapify that?”

“That was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change. And then this is prob…”

“Everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO.”

“Dot dash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with good housekeeping, all recipes, Investopedia. It's the, it's probably the most successful SEO company of all time. And it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LMs as well.”

“SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. And the reason why is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated and everyone, and then it becomes bes…”

“If you do what I just described, like you get impacts, like literally 24 hours later, right? And it's way different than traditional SEO where it's like, oh, it's this very long buildup.”

“Where SEO was looking for clicks and links, that was our whole strategy. What we're calling GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is looking for answers. So we have to reorient our content strategy around what are the prompts and what are the answers that peopl…”

“It should be a much bigger market because the agents are going to take actions. I mean, the agents are already taking actions for people. And so in a world where there are actually actions being taken at the endpoint, it's not just presenting a link to somebod…”

“SEO is about 50, 15% of the 90% organic to date, so it used to be our number one channel, but now our sort of like user flywheel, word of mouth, and people sharing designs are our biggest.”

“This whole thing about SEO being dead is, is stupid. It's dead for folks that don't have a brand, don't add value and don't have reach.”

“In AO, it's just the opposite. It is about actually putting value disproportionate amount of value of whatever's coming from the horse's mouth. Right? So whatever it is that we're putting out there. So a press release, you may not have done one lately because …”

“If they don't understand what they're going to do about the fact that search is going from SEO to chat CPT, and I don't know the answer, but I know the issues probably can't hire them.”

“GEO takes its cues from SEO, and so search engine optimization has a variety of ways of telling just how authoritative a link is and how meaningful it is, and that's the current way in which we're measuring a lot of the generative engine optimization scores, i…”

“And we started seeing returns on that within Three months and it's scaled up over the next couple of years to become a massive driving engine for us. And it still is a massive source of traffic for us.”

“I think it's easier to build an average product, give it away for free, collect a lot of leads and sell them into something else where people in that space also pay for. And then now you got a cheaper flywheel than spending money on Google ads or trying to do …”

“You don't even have to know what all of it is to be honest with you. Just that Claude will find it and Claude will do it.”

“The way you show up in ChatGPT is by doing good SEO. There's really like, I have not seen really one unique strategy that is different from just doing good foundational SEO to go and show up in LLMs.”

“If you do good SEO, it's going to rank you well in ChatGPT anyways, and perplexity anyways”

“We rank number one in the category for all high intent keywords. We capture about 60% of the traffic that is on the web looking for AI grading simply for essays.”