Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue that most AI SEO hype is overblown. They say traditional SEO fundamentals still matter for LLMs, and that brand weight and concept ownership are what actually drive results, not AI shortcuts.
Chapters
And this is where I kind of put AI SEO as a grift, right? Then this guy actually wrote this out, but I think 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 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. 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, 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 focused 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. Yeah.
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. 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. You have this piece over here though, which is also from Search Engine Land on why every marketer needs frenemies. I'm curious what you mean by that.
Yeah, that's not from Search Engine Land. I put the link for the wrong one. That was supposed to go on the AI overviews on the 12.4%. But dude, would you agree that Tim Soulo and I are competitors even though we focus on more SMBs with our software than Ahrefs and they focus on more larger corporations?
You guys are indirect competitors in my mind because you're just focused on this. Your software leads into your agency. That's the main goal.
Yes, but we're still selling software. To the same customer.
You did take some of his market share. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. And he takes my market share as well. They're larger than us from a software perspective. They generate more revenue. Um, and even SEMrush and I don't know who Moz is owned by now, but it's owned by someone.
Constant Contact.
Is it Constant Contact? The email provider?
Yeah. Look it up.
I didn't know that.
Look it up.
I thought it was like some publishing company.
You're not even curious to look it up. Usually you look these things up.
No, I don't care anymore. Moz hasn't made tons of change, at least from what I've seen. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think they've been making tons of changes.
I haven't heard about Moz in a while.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
But when you look at even you and I, we're friends. I would say we're very close friends from my perspective and your perspective, but would you also agree we're competitors?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Eric just won a customer that we lost.
We did?
Yeah, I don't know who, but someone told me. It was over GEO and they're just like, we should update one of our neilpatel.com to include that in services so it makes it easier for us to actually show the companies we had it because the lead came in from neilpatel.com.
Oh, that's funny.
And I was like, cool. So I didn't ask him who the client was or anything like that, but the reason I think marketers need frenemies is, dude, when you ask me questions about my business and you can, you know, vocally talk about what you've asked, but you've asked everything from how I structure comp plans. Would you agree with that?
Yeah.
To how I run my sales teams.
Yep.
To how we pitch.
I'll ask, yeah, no, I'll ask straight up, what is the exact structure of that comp plan? How did you structure this deal over here?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I'll tell Eric.
Yeah.
And if he hits up someone on my team and they don't tell him, he usually calls me and I'll give him the answer.
Yeah, yeah.
I got him covered.
Hey, hit up your sales leader. I was like, oh, okay, makes sense. So I called Neil after.
Yeah, like if they don't tell him, like, I'll tell Eric. We're really good friends.
Yeah.
And if I have questions on something and I ask Eric, he tells me. Yeah. And do you think you telling me hurts your business that much?
No, because let me give you the main reason. The main reason I don't care Is, and I don't mind telling, is because there's so much business for everyone.
Yes.
And we gain a lot more from deepening the relationship than me trying to gatekeep stuff. And if there's anything that irritated me more in high school than any— that irritated me the most was people that gatekept these like rock bands and like, oh no, we can't tell you, otherwise it'd be too mainstream. So I don't try to gatekeep this stuff.
Yeah. Although I met a lot of your high school friends.
They're chill. You did. Yeah. You met some elementary school friends too.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
But I think just having frenemies is really good. Then they'll turn into friends and not even enemies because they can guide you and give you advice and help you out. And I think that is super important and it just helps you make a lot less mistakes with your marketing and helps you grow faster.
It's different perspectives too. And again, there's, you don't want to be friends with people, by the way, who gatekeep this stuff because they have a smaller view of the world. You want people who think there's abundant business for everyone, which there is. The world's so big.
That's true. And I think you break down a very important caveat in which we are going after big markets. If you're selling something and you're in a very tiny niche, one, you should think about a new market, but 2, helping out someone can just really crush your business. If you look at what Eric and I do on Marketing School, we even talk about changes to our business before we even roll them out, which means someone who's listening could just copy, but we don't really care.
And it doesn't matter because if you, by the way, this is a side note. If you keep copying someone, it's fine, but just keep in mind you're always going to be following someone. But I'll tell you what, it works for the Chinese. And so like you do copy at a certain point until you start to innovate. So like it does work.
Yeah, that was the Uber example. Travis on the All-In podcast. I think it was a conference. Was it a conference?
No, just All-In podcast.
It was a podcast? He talked about, I'm pretty sure it was the in-person event.
I'll bet you it's a podcast. I'll go with you. I'll bet you this, everything sourdough cookies.
No, you're probably right.
Yeah.
Eric doesn't typically bet unless he's gonna win.
Yeah.
If you play poker against Eric, he doesn't play poker for fun. He plays poker for winning.
No, I play poker.
And it's very calculated.
But I'll tell you what, so he said he had a floor of people and I think in the Uber SF office and it was all of, all Chinese people and the way they work, they work like animals. Right.
And in China, Eric means that in a very respectful way. Yeah.
And I'm Chinese, guys. So like, I mean that in a respectful way. So I, but in China, he was just saying like Didi and all these other companies, the moment they launched something, a week later, they had the same thing, right?
Yeah.
But it did get to a point where they just like, you just can't copy anymore. So you have to innovate. So it can work, but it's just not what we do. And I don't look down on it. It's just whatever works for you.
Yeah.
But by the way, going back to SEO real quick. So Vercel actually put out this post on how they are Adapting in the world of LLM SEO. So because we're talking about SEO so much, let me just read their final thoughts over here, then we can react to it. So they have this blog post over here, says there's no shortcut to LLM SEO. Concept ownership isn't built in a week. It's a strategic moat that takes discipline and a new mindset to build. We're moving on from search ranking to answer shaping. You're not just optimizing for humans, right? So they're just saying at the very end, Don't optimize in isolation, don't chase hype, call it LLM SEO, language engine optimization, whatever. But you want to make sure that you own a concept clearly, consistently, and with the right structure. So models understand it well. So I think what it's trying to say, you know, you know how like Brian Dean came up with the skyscraper technique, like that is a concept. I think the more concepts you can own, inbound marketing, conversational marketing, things like that, you can own more brand share because a lot of the stuff right now, they are favoring brands.
Yes, they are favoring brands. Yeah. That's why we push so hard on the search everywhere optimization.
Yeah. And I just copy it.
Yeah, it works.
Yeah, it's great.
We tested on our homepage on NP Digital.
I saw it.
It drives more leads.
Really?
Yeah.
What's the increase in conversion rate?
It wasn't much around like 16, 17%.
But still, that's a lot.
We don't know the quality yet. There's one issue with it though. What? People then look at us and we're starting to see the leads from it because we've been, we've been running this test for a bit. They think we're purely an SEO shop.
Oh, that's not good.
It's not good. So then when we look at the leads that are coming in, we're getting more leads, but the leads are willing to spend less money with us than they were traditionally because before we showcased how we were Performance Marketing Agency of the Year, we showcased creative examples, we showcased paid examples, SEO examples in a carousel. The conversions were lower, but people are looking for a full funnel. And so on our end, we're actually going back to a carousel and we're revamping our story. The search Everywhere optimization, we think is really good for the software tools like Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic to get them in. Like, hey, we'll help you optimize for all the platforms. But we think for the ad agency doing the full-service global agency of the year, like it just works. It works and it creates bigger RFPs. But dude, the moment I made that change from then to now in the United States, we were getting Roughly 4 RFPs a month and it just could be coincidence, but I'm at zero.
Wow.
Since the change.
Well, also we're going into summer, which slows down for agencies. Yes. Yes.
And that's why I said it could be the time or it could be something else.
There's always a lot of variables. There's a lot of variables.
Yeah. But also when we look at the leads that we're getting, the Search Everywhere optimization tends to be more SMB focused. Well, when I looked at the previous NP Digital leads, They tended to be larger companies.
Yeah.
So less leads, but they're more qualified.
Yeah. By the way, does your, do your software sales slow down in the summer?
Self-service sales? Uh, not too much. Exactly.
Yeah.
But enterprise does.
Enterprise slows down.
Enterprise software sales slows down for us.
That's your Scout?
Uh-huh.
Yeah. How much does it slow down?
A lot. Our business comes, it doesn't come to screen, what region?
That's for USA.
I don't know the exact percentage. I know Europe more, but if I had to guess, like Europe declined 70-ish plus percent during the summer, like 70 plus. US, if I had to guess, 40 to 50% decline. I'm just spitballing here, but I know it's significant. I know US is not as bad as Europe from a decline, but it's somewhere around 40, 50% if I had to guess.
Wow. That's crazy. Well, I hope it doesn't work out that way for ABM software, but things haven't slowed down that much for us yet. It's starting to slow down for you guys now?
I think it comes with, I don't mean this in a bad way, scale. Your software's so new and it's a hot commodity that—
I'm talking more agency side right now.
Oh, agency side. Yeah.
I can start to, I think I'm sensing the slowdown coming, but has it happened to you yet is my question?
Oh, it's already happened to us.
Okay.
But majority of our, agency revenues enterprise. Our SMB division, if I had to guess on slowdown, 15 to 30%, I'm guessing. Yeah, somewhere in that range.
That seems about right.
It's not too high. It is a high percentage, but it's nowhere near as enterprise.
Yeah. All right, guys. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
