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Eric Siu argues that most AI SEO hype is overblown. He walks through how content strategy has evolved from keyword stuffing to human-first writing, and why traditional SEO fundamentals still matter more than AI-specific tactics.
Eric Siu argues that most AI SEO hype is overblown. He walks through how content strategy has evolved from keyword stuffing to human-first writing, and why traditional SEO fundamentals still matter more than AI-specific tactics.
AI SEO is a grift. The topic itself. Oh yeah, we're going to do LLMO for you, AIO for you, GEO for you. And what we've been discussing is like, look, all this stuff is still very much the same traditional SEO. It hasn't changed that much yet.
I agree with Eric on this. I do think there's nuances and Eric knows this as well. We're not saying it's 100% exact, but there's slight nuances. I'll give you an example from Steve from My Wife Quit Her Job, although I could have got the domain name wrong. He told me today that he sells wedding handkerchiefs.
Yeah.
And on his e-com site, he changed one of his headlines or taglines or something like that, and he included they've served over 120,000 weddings, all right, which is a big number. So now when you ask the LLMs, what's the best handkerchief company for weddings? He comes up and a lot of them say they have done over 120,000 weddings because they're pulling from a website.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the reason I point this as an example, and this is an example of a nuance, and traditional SEO was kind of like this in the early days, in which if I create articles on like the best SEO agency all around the web and I include my own agency, I'm much more likely to show up in ChatGPT and being recommended. But just like how Google's algorithm has adapted over time, I believe ChatGPT's algorithm is going to adapt over time and they're going to start putting weight on like a New York Times more than neilpatel.com, unless it's talking about something marketing specific because that's the vertical I'm in. But generally speaking, New York Times should have more authority than me. Much bigger company, they spend much more time, they do more research. Hopefully all their data and information is accurate. But I believe they're going to start having different weights. And that's going to start adjusting how people show up in the results.
Yeah. I mean, look, we'll see what happens over time, but I, the reason I call AI SEO a grift right now is just because SEOs back in the day, they used to make it seem like this black magic thing.
And it's really not. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.
And so I think the people saying, oh, we'll get you number 1 on all LLMs, that's why I call it a grift because you're selling, you're overselling yourself and that makes the entire industry look bad. And so guys, you heard it from us here first or maybe second or third, but it hasn't changed that much right now. Like, look, I get it. 95% of ChatGPT results are updates or they've been refreshed in the last 12 months or so. And I get it. For AIO rankings, you need to have good, you know, H1s. That's still traditional SEO. And I just want to make sure I repeat that so you guys understand whenever, whenever someone's trying to sell you AI SEO and they're trying to make it something this, like this complex thing, they're probably grifting you.
Yeah, so I have 2 more points on this. The first one is, is my co-founder Mike's in London right now meeting with all our European divisions and specifically the sales division. So they're talking about sales strategies and stuff like that. And they're talking about how we pitch SEO to companies for LLM platforms because they want to hear about it. And you know this better than anyone else, a lot of it's repackaging. Companies get really excited, like, oh cool, how are you going to do this?
Mm-hmm.
And then we break down all the traditional SEO tactics as well as the nuances, right? The slight differences because there's different weights on some of the factors to really get them results. And they're like, oh, this is boring. They're like, you don't have a quick way just to get us mentioned in every single prompt? And they're like, no, it's not that simple. And they get really disappointed. But the example I like giving with AI and how SEO has really evolved, because it all revolves around content, and I'm curious to get your thoughts.
Yeah.
20 years ago, would you agree that when you create content, a lot of it was keyword stuffing? You would create content for robots. You put in the keywords. Spinners, all that stuff.
Yes.
Okay. And then 10 years ago, we started really creating—
Skyscraper content.
Yes. And content for humans. And we focus on humans more than anything else. Readability, flow, storytelling, super in-depth. You agree with that, right? And then would you agree in today's world, We create content for humans, but we wrap it for AI in which it has to be usable for humans, but it has to be wrapped in a format that's easy for AI to digest and just take out the nuggets and give people the answers right away.
Which is, I mean, look, the whole, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and then now what you're saying is we've been optimizing for these engines.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, but ideally, These things get smart enough where you just optimize for humans.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, guys. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
