Sep 19, 2024 · 1h 55m · lennys-podcast
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)
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SEO advisor and author Eli Schwartz joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss how generative AI and AI Overviews are transforming search, outlining why companies must abandon legacy keyword tactics in favor of product-led SEO strategies that capture high-intent user demand.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 22.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.0 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 2.4 Lenny pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 11:54 Eli rejects Lenny's premise on search visibility
When Lenny asserts that AI answers push organic links down the page, Eli flatly disagrees, countering that content becomes fundamentally less relevant rather than merely displaced.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:21:39 Lenny counters the antitrust default framingLenny challenges the notion that Google's Apple deal is purely an anti-competitive block, citing Ben Thompson's analysis that the deal is a revenue-share model open to anyone with comparable ad monetization.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:37:20 Eli breaks down why keyword research tools failEli systematically demonstrates why bottom-up keyword estimates are wildly inaccurate and explains how to build reliable top-down TAM forecasts using demographic data and market penetration.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 38:36 Lenny reframes SaaS conversion mechanicsLenny intervenes to clarify the core distinction between intent discovery and buying motion, demonstrating deep domain knowledge about why enterprise SaaS requires human sales rather than self-serve SEO.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shifting Mindsets: From SEO Tactics to Product Strategy | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Lenny opens the interview by setting up the premise that AI answers are shaking up search results. Eli agrees and shares an anecdote about how an executive once reduced SEO to mere keyword stuffing and link-building. | |
| Sponsor Message: Pendo | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Lenny reads sponsor advertisements for Pendo and Brave Search. This is an ad segment with zero conversational power dynamics. | |
| Google's AI Dilemma: ChatGPT, SGE, and AI Overviews | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Eli breaks down Google's defensive reaction to OpenAI, detailing the launch of SGE and AI Overviews, liability risks, and rollout hurdles. Lenny prompts with foundational questions while Eli lays out the market timeline. | |
| The Search Funnel Shift: Top-of-Funnel Erosion and Mid-Funnel Value | 4 | 6 | 5 | 2 | When Lenny suggests AI overviews push links down and make content harder to find, Eli directly counters the premise, arguing that content becomes less relevant rather than just buried, shifting value from top-of-funnel to mid-funnel. | |
| The Realities of AI Impact: Structured vs. Unstructured Data | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Lenny shares an anecdote about his Hanukkah website being made obsolete by instant answers, which Eli quickly reframes to differentiate between structured data and LLMs turning unstructured content into direct answers. | |
| Disruption of Affiliate Directories and Meaningful Metrics | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Eli explains how software aggregation directories like G2 and Capterra face existential disruption from conversational AI answers. Lenny endorses the improved user experience of getting straight answers without wading through SEO junk. | |
| Product-Led SEO: Why Product Managers Must Own Search | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Eli argues that SEO must be owned by product managers rather than marketers, explaining that creating content for a defective product will never convert search users on self-discovery journeys. | |
| Case Studies: Zapier's Integrations and Tinder's Local Solutions | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Eli shares detailed case studies from his consulting work with Zapier's app integration landing pages and Tinder's localized loneliness-solution pages, explaining how both targeted mid-funnel intent. | |
| A Three-Step Framework for Building Product-Led SEO | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Eli outlines a practical three-step framework: cultivate customer empathy, define the programmatic asset, and design a product experience around search intent. | |
| Why Most B2B SaaS Companies Should Avoid SEO | 6 | 4 | 4 | 5 | Eli makes the contrarian claim that most B2B SaaS companies should avoid SEO because complex software requires committee buying. Lenny pushes back with nuance, clarifying that while users do search for solutions like SOC-2 compliance, the sales motion makes self-serve conversion unviable. | |
| Evaluating Costs, Trade-Offs, and Channel Fit | 5 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Eli breaks down the real expenses of SEO resourcing and argues restaurant websites are often a waste of money. Lenny synthesizes the trade-offs across core growth engines like paid, sales, virality, and SEO. | |
| Measuring SEO Success: Timelines, Conversion Metrics, and Quora | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Eli dismisses vanity traffic and ranking metrics in favor of actionable business conversions, sharing how restructuring Quora's sitemaps and un-gating answers quadrupled their organic traffic in three months. | |
| Building Monetizable Journeys: Templates and Programmatic Utilities | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Eli warns against blindly copying programmatic template strategies from companies like Canva or SurveyMonkey unless those templates directly feed a clear monetization loop. | |
| Sponsor Message: OneSchema | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Following a sponsor segment with Christina Gilbert of OneSchema, Eli and Lenny explore the explosion of low-quality AI generated content and why Google penalizes unhelpful content rather than AI assistance per se. | |
| Brand Authority in AI Overviews and Modern Link Building | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1 | Eli attacks traditional link-building schemes and paid guest posting as useless myths, explaining that modern search algorithms treat brand mentions and genuine PR as the real ranking signals. | |
| Programmatic vs. Editorial SEO: TripAdvisor, Zillow, and Scale | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Eli illustrates the difference between programmatic and editorial SEO using TripAdvisor and Zillow as prime examples of combining structured datasets to satisfy user search intent at scale. | |
| Unpacking the Google Antitrust Ruling and Search Distribution Power | 7 | 4 | 3 | 6 | Eli shares findings from the 286-page Google antitrust verdict regarding mobile market share and default distribution deals. Lenny pushes back with sharp analysis from Ben Thompson, demonstrating how Apple's default deal is a revenue-share model rather than an outright exclusive barrier. | |
| Why SEO Will Endure: The Human Need for Choice | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Eli explains why AI chat assistants won't eliminate search, emphasizing that human consumers demand multiple choices and comparisons rather than a single prescriptive AI recommendation. | |
| Debunking Common SEO Myths: Black Boxes and In-House Resourcing | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Eli debunks common SEO myths, asserting that Google is not an impenetrable black box and that most sites can achieve 80% of optimal SEO by simply following basic best practices. | |
| Gen Z Search Behavior: TikTok and Instagram vs Google Intent | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Eli addresses the claim that Gen Z searches solely on TikTok, explaining that video platforms serve top-of-funnel discovery while Google captures commercial mid-funnel intent. | |
| The Limits of Technical SEO: Why Simplicity Wins | 6 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Eli argues technical SEO audits and page speed micro-optimizations are rarely the solution for smaller sites. Lenny validates this insight by sharing his firsthand experience with PMs driving massive SEO wins at Airbnb without dedicated SEO specialists. | |
| SEO TAM Forecasting: Top-Down Modeling vs Flawed Keyword Tools | 4 | 8 | 4 | 2 | Eli delivers a masterclass on forecasting organic search demand, proving that keyword tools are frequently off by orders of magnitude and detailing how top-down population TAM modeling produces vastly superior business forecasts. | |
| Advice for Aspiring Growth Advisors | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Eli offers guidance for operators transitioning to growth advising, urging them to develop consultative sales, proposal writing, and client management skills while keeping their full-time jobs. | |
| Lightning Round: Influential Books, Blackberry, and Phone Utilities | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | In the lightning round, Eli shares book recommendations, his appreciation for the movie BlackBerry, his favorite mobile travel apps, and his wife's self-help book. |
Statements from this episode (34)
Schwartz: Marketers and SEO practitioners should not worry that AI kills SEO
“I don't think that's at all correct. And I don't think anyone, whether you're doing SEO as your full-time job, whether you're receiving SEO traffic as a part of one of your primary marketing channels, I don't think anybody has to worry about that.”
Schwartz: Google Has Not Solved the Monetization Conflict of AI Search
“So if you're going to show this AI answer on a search result, then you also can't have ads. You need to go all in on one of them. That was one issue, which they actually have not solved yet.”
Schwartz: Top-Of-Funnel Search Queries Will Shift Into AI Overviews
“So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google's going to own the entire search page forever and ever for at least for a very long time. But other engines, whethe…”
Schwartz: AI Overviews Will Devastate Generic Informational Sites Like WebMD
“So if you are WebMD, And you're writing content about the human body, just generic content that has existed since medical journals were created. AI overviews are going to be fantastic at giving you that answer. You know, you read a, you know, you have a headac…”
Schwartz: Pre-2022 SEO Was Simply Monetizing Unstructured Data
“So this entire idea of SEO get up until 20, 22 was monetized unstructured data. Whoever wrote the longest piece of content on Best beach hotels in Miami and then built the best links to it. They would win. They would win whether it's ads or win whether it's ho…”
Schwartz: AI Search Will Massively Disrupt Review Directories Like G2
“So G two is another G two and all the sites like G two, like the gardener sites, like Capterra, all going to be massively disrupted.”
Schwartz: SEO Is a Core Product Function That Belongs to PMs
“I think of SEO as a product. And I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question. Because it's a product question.”
Schwartz: Most SaaS Companies Should Avoid Investing in SEO
“I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO”
Schwartz: Tinder’s Early Inbound Organic Traffic Originated From Branded Searches
“All of Tinder's inbound came from the word Tinder.”
Schwartz: Mid-Funnel SEO Remains Highly Effective and Immune to AI Overviews
“So that's where I think SEO should be is you need to be in the buyer journey with the SEO you're creating. And it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because you're still solving the mid funnel problem with your SEO solution.”
Schwartz: Enterprise Giants Like Google Cloud Should Avoid SEO Entirely
“At a grand scale, Google Cloud should not be doing SEO. At a small scale, a lot of SaaS tools shouldn't be doing SEO because there isn't necessarily an SEO journey.”
Schwartz: SurveyMonkey Generated $200M Annually From Organic Search Traffic
“You know, when I was at Survey Monkey, we generated a couple hundred million dollars a year off of organic traffic because it was a freemium tool where you search for the product, the problem, you find the solution.”
Schwartz: Most Restaurants Should Neither Invest in SEO Nor Have Websites
“I don't think restaurants typically should have a website. Not only should they not do SEO, but I don't know that they should have a website because if you think about the buyer journey for a person looking for food, They don't typically go to a website.”
Schwartz: Zapier Invested for Years Before Seeing Meaningful SEO Results
“Like with Zapier, I think it took them a couple of years before they even saw any results because nobody's looking for it.”
Schwartz: Quora Quadrupled Organic Search Traffic Within Three Months of SEO Tweaks
“And there were a couple of things I was able to recommend to them. And within three months they had quadruple traffic.”
Schwartz: Programmatic SEO Fails Without Core Product Workflows and Direct Conversions
“Copying someone else's version of programmatic doesn't do anything and generally doing programmatic for the sake of programmatic. So just to have content wouldn't do anything unless that programmatic fed you into exactly what your product did.”
Schwartz: Google Evaluates AI-Generated Content on Usefulness Rather Than Provenance
“And in their documentation, they say that AI itself is not the problem. It's the helpfulness, the usefulness of the content that would be a problem.”
Schwartz: CNET’s AI Content Strategy Would Have Succeeded Without Public Disclosure
“I think it was CNET that said they were using AI to create content. And I think they got in trouble because they said they're using AI to create content, but if they had not said they're using AI to create content, I think their entire model would have been ve…”
Schwartz: Google Penalizes Sites Partially to Curb Surging AI Crawling Costs
“And this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is enormous and it's growing exponentially. And Google's trying to crawl everything. They now have more content to crawl, which becomes more expensive for Google. And which is why …”
Schwartz: Traditional Link Building Via Paid Guest Posts Is an SEO Myth
“This is the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and link building is, is the secret source and the secret sauce to like growing your SEO footprint. And that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest post…”
Schwartz: LLMs Let Unlinked Brand Mentions Act Like Traditional HTML Backlinks
“Because the way a link before LLMs and the link, you know, 10 years ago was actually an HTML link. And now Google can read content so they can say, well, you've been mentioned here. That's pretty good. So now we acknowledge that this might be the brand and thi…”
Schwartz: SurveyMonkey Scaled Only 100 Viable Programmatic SEO Pages, Not 10,000
“So again, SurveyMonkey was one where we had a fat head of templates we could make, but it wasn't a long tail. So we could make, you know, a hundred templates, but we couldn't make 10,000.”
Schwartz: DOJ Antitrust Ruling Confirms Google Holds 98% Mobile Search Share
“And in the verdict, it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches.”
Schwartz: AI Startups Cannot Unseat Google Purely on Search Product Quality
“I don't think there's a chance, and this is the biggest takeaway, I don't think there's a chance that ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or any of these other LLM startups, because they're startups now, even, even OpenAI as a startup with Bing's part, with Micros…”
Schwartz: Apple Refused Microsoft’s Offer to Replace Google with Bing for Free
“One is that Bing tried to give itself to Apple for free, and Apple said there was absolutely no price that they would take to use Bing search within Apple.”
Schwartz: SEO Will Survive Because Users Consistently Demand Multi-Option Choice
“I think the most important thing to leave people with is that SEO is not dying.
There will always be a world where users are requesting their own information.”
Schwartz: Voice Assistants Failed Because They Provided Single Answers Without Choice
“One of the reasons I think these home assistants, whether it's from Google or Apple or Amazon have never taken off is because you don't have choice.
You talk to your Google and it gives you only one answer.
You talk to Amazon and it gives you only one answer.”
Schwartz: Link Building Is Fundamentally Brand Building, Not Raw HTML Acquisition
“Link building is brand building. So it's thinking about how you're going to build a brand and have people mentioned to you. And you're, when you're doing link building, you're creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the …”
Schwartz: 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok for search
“So in the Google verdict, I think Google's said this before, 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search.”
Schwartz: Technical SEO Is a Waste of Time for Small SaaS Websites
“If you have a hundred page website that sells a SaaS tool, technical SEO is probably going to be less important. So spending money In time and technical SEO would be a waste of time.”
Schwartz: Top-Down TAM Modeling Yields Better SEO Forecasts Than Bottom-Up Keywords
“So when you do this top down, it's a TAM forecast essentially. When you do a top down, you're closer to the truth. Now you probably aren't gonna get to the truth. I've never seen a product plan get to the truth of what it could do, but it will help you make a …”
Schwartz: Google Is Legally Prohibited From Providing Exact Ad Search Volumes
“So even Google for, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out.”
Schwartz: Keyword Research Tools Often Misfire on Actual Search Volumes by 10x
“When I've worked with big companies where there were keywords that I could look at Google search console. Some of them The tools were overestimating by 10 times. Sometimes they're underestimating by 10 times. So I'm not saying they didn't get the exact monthly…”