F*ck It, Here's My $100M SEO Strategy

Have you ever wondered how SEO actually works in 2026 when everyone says it's dead? Well, in this video, I'm going to break down the exact SEO strategy we use for 9-figure to even 10-figure— we're talking multi-billion-dollar companies. I know you're thinking, here's another SEO guy saying traffic is declining, AI is taking over, the sky is falling. And I just want to show you what's actually working right now, the specific tactics, the workflows, the stuff that's driving real results in 2026 and beyond. So let's get into it. First, you got to understand where SEO is going because most people are optimizing for a world that doesn't exist anymore. The first thing you got to understand is that SEO is no longer just about Google. It's no longer just search engine optimization. It is now search everywhere optimization. That means that you're optimizing for the LLM surfaces. That means ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok. Let's look at the other channels. YouTube, second largest search engine in the world. LinkedIn organic is very strong. LinkedIn organic results you can actually see on Google. Reddit, is very strong, not just from a Google standpoint, but it's being pulled in from LLMs as well. So the game is constantly shifting and SEO has always been a game of adaptation. And now that search is everywhere, meaning that it's across multiple platforms, you have to adapt and play it that way. The one thing I also want to say too is when you look at ChatGPT, the top 3 sources that are cited are Reddit, you have YouTube, and you have Wikipedia. Now that's going to change over time, but you have to keep that in mind. And the other piece is 90% of content from ChatGPT is usually updated content in the last 12 months. So you got to make sure that your content is updated. If your content is stale, you're basically invisible. I'm going to give you some more numbers that actually matter here. Website traffic is declining, so impressions are going up, but your traffic is going down. The interesting thing too is that sure, AI overviews are eating clicks, maybe 30 to 40% or so, and that's a study done by Ahrefs. And now the shift is when you're creating content, you are now doing maybe 50% of the time is transactional content, 50% of the time is informational content. And what I mean by that is transactional might be like buy red shoes or best marketing agency in Los Angeles. Now, an informational search might be what is digital marketing. Back in the day when you did SEO, 80% of the time you were doing top of the funnel, TOFU, informational content, and maybe 20% was BOFU, bottom of the funnel, transactional content. Now it might be 50/50. Sometimes you might even go even higher than that. You might go even up to 80% transactional, just depending on the business that you're in. Even though traffic is going down right now, I want to cite that publicly traded companies are saying that traffic is coming down, but the conversions are actually flat or even going up. And so SEO is still very valuable today. And you can say AEO, people like to say enter engine optimization, like to say generative engine optimization. It's just an evolution to me. And I just look at it as SEO altogether. It's just search everywhere optimization. Also, when you look at LLMs, they are typically looking at transactional content and listicles. And so listicles, meaning top 10 marketing agencies or top 10 paid media agencies, that is the type of content that's going to perform well or top places to eat in Tokyo. A lot of these listicles are being pulled in into a Grok, into a Perplexity, into a ChatGPT, into a Gemini. And so when you have transactional content, listicle type content versus content or alternatives like Salesforce alternatives or Salesforce versus HubSpot, that content, at least for right now, is going to show up more often than the other type of content. We also have to take brand sentiment into account because it matters more than ever. I remember Google's Eric Schmidt said this back in the day, that the internet is a cesspool of doo-doo. He didn't say it exactly that way, but That's why brands rise to the top. Brands try to be consistent over a long period of time, and that's why brands have more longevity, and that's why brands are more trusted to search engines and now answer engines. And so LLMs will look at brand sentiment across platforms. How many reviews do you have? What are people saying about you? For my podcast, Marketing School, with my co-host Neil, he publishes a ton of content. I publish a ton of content separately. He has his YouTube channel. I have my YouTube channel. We have our blogs. We're just constantly trying to be out there, and we're also speaking a lot of different conferences around the world. And so generally, you'll find that you look at the number of reviews that we have for Marketing School, I think it's approximately approaching 2,000 or so. We have a lot of good reviews for it, right? And that's not to say that we're saying that we're amazing. It's other people are saying good things about us. And hopefully we continue to be consistent so we'll have more positive brand sentiment over time. And that's why when you search for best marketing podcast on ChatGPT, usually Marketing School is going to pop up number 1 or number 2. It's because there's enough built-up brand sentiment there and it matters more than ever. You got to keep in mind too, this also means that because LLMs are pulling from Reddit right now, they're looking at— I mentioned reviews they're looking at, they're looking at your video content, they're looking at other citations that you might have. That's why more and more people are coming to us for Reddit As an example, people typically come to us for SEO. Now they're like, oh, we want search engine optimization. Now we want Reddit help as well. So the more signals you have, the more authority you're going to have. And you can't just optimize purely for keywords anymore. So I'll give you an example. I did an interview recently with Seth Godin, maybe about a year ago on my YouTube channel, and I believe that interview has a good amount of views for what it is, 100,000 long-form views. I consider that really good because typically you're going to have marketers looking for that. It's a smaller TAM, so total addressable market. And the reason that video did well is because Seth Godin is a very well-known marketer. And when you have a long-form interview and the packaging is really good, That's why that video is going to pop off. So that video is a really good example of brand sentiment. When you look at that YouTube video, when you look at Seth Godin's brand, that video didn't do that well initially. The algorithm was struggling to figure out what to do with that video. But once it started to realize, oh, Seth Godin is actually a very well-known name when it comes to marketing, and a lot of people on YouTube are searching for lessons on marketing, this is the guy to have pop off. And that's why that video popped off. When people don't adapt, they get in trouble. And so for our ad agency Single Grain, we see it when clients struggle. A lot of them come to us and they love spending money on paid media because they're getting the quick dopamine hits and they're seeing good results from paid media. Now, what tends to happen is they might start to venture into SEO and then they tend to do SEO the old way, which means they just try to spam the internet, they try to create a bunch of pages and they don't look at how search has evolved. And so what ends up happening is they spam, spam, spam, they don't build enough signals for their website in terms of having, you know, people say good things about their brand, them having good reviews, citations, them having enough links to their website as well. And that's why their websites end up getting subpar results when it comes to SEO, or even worse, their websites get crushed and they get filtered by Google because they didn't follow Google's guidelines. All right, so here's what we're actually doing. These are the 3 things that are driving good results right now. Tactic number 1 is content consolidation and deletion. Now, when you look at search engines, when you look at LLMs, they prefer comprehensive consolidated content. That means that instead of you having 20 different pages on what is SEO, you want to combine it into one ultimate resource. And when you have a website, when you have a million pages or something like that, chances are you probably have a lot of redundancies and you want to consolidate content because that makes it easy for LLMs and search engines to crawl your website and therefore cite you in the results. Deletion is a big piece too. For example, over time, let's say you have a garden, you plant a lot of plants. What happens is you have to maintain this garden over time because it keeps getting bigger and bigger, but you're going to have to delete. Sometimes you have plants that die. Maybe you have weeds that are growing too. You're going to have to delete, delete, delete. That way it makes it easier. And so you want to make things very easy for them to crawl. From a deletion standpoint, that also makes it easier for them to find the things that are relevant so they can surface it to their audience. Now, the other piece too is you want to make sure that you're updating content. When you're updating content, what I mentioned earlier is that 95% of ChatGPT results are updated content over the last 12 months or so. Ultimately, that's what this all is. You're tending to your garden. Garden, you're consolidating your plants where it makes sense, you're organizing things together. You want to make it very easy for the garden gnomes or the garden goddess to tend to your garden and then reward you for how well that you've organized your garden. Okay, horrible example, but it works. Okay, but the question is, how do you actually tend to your garden? Okay, what, what is the process for tending to your garden here? So first, what you want to do is you want to audit traffic for rankings, conversions, traffic. You want to consolidate similar topics into comprehensive pieces. And what I mentioned earlier, you want to delete thin, outdated pages. And there's a handful of different things you can do here when it comes to auditing your content for traffic. So look at your Google Analytics, look at your Google Search Console. You can use different tools out there such as Ahrefs and look for trending keywords that are happening that are related to current keywords that you're already ranking for. And you want to sort by— again, you can look at all the pages that are doing well for you and then sort them by conversions. Now look, I'll give you a bonus here too. So internally we developed a product called ClickFlow and that saves our SEO team about 90 hours a month or so. And we're building even more agentic workflows into it. And the whole process of doing that is to help with things such as deleting, consolidating, updating content, or helping with internal links and things like that. That then makes it easier not only for search engines, but for answer engines as well. Take it for what it is. There are a lot of different tools out there. I mentioned a few earlier. You can use ClickFlow, doesn't matter. It is up to you. All right. So tactic number 2 is AI overview optimization. So just again, AI overviews is when you search on Google, it's the AI answer that you get at the top. And that's what's eating a lot of website clicks right now. Here's what works right now. And you got to look at this as kind of like a whack-a-mole type of thing, right? Like this is going to change over time. And so the strategy right now is take a look at the page that are ranking number 1 with AI overviews. And there's a handful of different tools that you can use for this. I like using Ahrefs. And then you can look at what the overview pulls. And so what is this overview actually saying? And what do these actually look like? So when you use like an Ahrefs Brand Radar as an example, they will show you what a lot of these answer engines are showing. And you can also look at your competitors as well. And so then what you would do is you would look at the 3 bullet points at the top summarizing key answers. After you've taken a look at what the AI overviews typically pull for the results that you want to rank for, look at the pages that you want to have AI overviews on, add 3 bullet points, to the top of those pages summarizing the page. And that's how you can have a drastic increase in mentions within days. So a good example of this is when you look at CNBC's key points at the top of their articles. And so if you look at it, they have the bullet points up there and that gives you more shots on goal to rank well for the AI overviews. And tactic number 3 is multi-platform repurposing. When you look at a long-form video that you're creating, so let's say I'm doing a podcast. Yesterday I recorded a podcast for Marketing School. We did about 80 minutes or so. That's our pillar piece of content. And that pillar piece of content will give us 5 to 10 derivative pieces, meaning that we can have mid-form pieces where these are 5-minute to 10-minute clips from that long-form podcast. We can have short-form. These are 60 seconds and 90 seconds or so that we'll publish to TikTok, to Snap, to Instagram, to a bunch of these different channels, right? Publish to LinkedIn, we'll publish to X as well. The whole point of us doing this is we are trying to get the most bang for our buck. And you got to think about posting natively to these platforms because ultimately what's going to happen is you're going to get a lot more reach. And so an example of this would be For Instagram, I remember that I was talking about how Shake Shack had a discount on the Marketing School Podcast. That video got 8 million views, but we made sure that we were formatting it exactly for that platform. So we had the right captions in it, the pacing was good, and it was, it was 60 seconds or so. Now, if you're publishing to LinkedIn, it's got to be more business focused. You can't just write 2 sentences. Usually for LinkedIn, people are writing maybe a couple hundred words. Maybe for X, people are writing 240 characters or so, or maybe they're writing threads. So you got to make sure that you're talking in a voice that is suitable for every single platform. And that's how you're going to get more reach ultimately. And the beautiful piece is that you might be asking, okay, how does this apply to SEO or AEO? Well, here's the thing. The search results on Google, they pull from YouTube, they pull from Instagram, they pull from these different channels. And ultimately the name of the game is you just want more organic reach. If you're going to spend 80 minutes making a piece of content, why would you not maximize it? And why would you not go the extra mile just to get more reach? Because I wouldn't have gotten that extra 8 million views or so. Recently we did a video where we're talking about how ChatGPT is coming out with ads. That video, it did decently on Instagram, maybe 80,000 views or so. But guess what? Who got on our email list from that? The founder and CEO of T-Mobile, Afrojack the DJ, and then Hassan Whiteside, who's an NBA player, ended up following from that. And so are those going to lead to direct conversions immediately? No. But the point is you're reaching the right people and they might tell other people around you. And that's how serendipity happens. And that's how you ultimately get more leads and more business for whatever it is that you're doing. So ultimately, when I talk about this, this whole native thing, it's like, yeah, YouTube has this whole packaging game, the thumbnail, the title, first 30-second retention. Every channel, when I say post natively, I'm talking about the meta. And the meta means the most optimized way of playing the game for every single channel. The more time you spend on it, the better you're going to do for those channels. 100% of the time you're going to suck in the beginning. And the key thing is that you continue to repeat over and over. So SEO, that's a game that can take multiple years to get going. YouTube can take multiple years to get going. X takes multiple months to get going. All these things take time. And if I were to give you a whole premise around this video is that yes, it's search everywhere optimization, but the game has always been about adaptation and the game has always been to play at the highest level. And so I'm going to give you a couple of tools here that you can use to help you play this game multichannel. So one tool that I like is Stanley. Stanley is a great tool that can be used for LinkedIn, and it does a great job of finding trending posts on LinkedIn, and it will then recommend posts that you should write based on topics that you have covered, but also related to trending topic formats. And that's how the posts end up doing well. And one more tool that you can use is Metricool. Metricool does a great job of tracking your analytics across different platforms, which you need to be doing if you're gonna be playing the search everywhere optimization game. So Metricool is a great one, and it also allows you to cross-post at the same time. Ultimately, what I'm saying here is the more citations you have, sometimes it's not just a review, but it just means the more posts you have, the more times you're being called out across the internet. The stronger brand signals that you're going to have. And look, I'll give you an example too on this organic game that I'm talking about. About a year ago on LinkedIn, we launched one of our LinkedIn account-based marketing software products, Carrot. What we did was we threw up a post saying, hey, here's a feature that we launched that LinkedIn doesn't have right now until today. That post ended up driving about 800 leads and about 100 of those leads were enterprise qualified. So we're talking publicly traded companies. We're talking companies that are doing multiple billions of dollars a year. And this is a perfect example of playing the game at an optimized level. So the meta for LinkedIn, that's a perfect example of organic reach working as well. Because that post I think got 200,000 views or so. Real quick, if you are looking for a new gig and you're into marketing, we are hiring more AI-forward people at Single Grain. So we're looking to hire AI-forward paid media people, AI-forward SEO people, AI-forward salespeople. If you're looking to join a tech-enabled services business, which means a combination of technology, so SaaS and agency, then Single Grain is the company for you. So all you need to do is go to singlegrain.com/careers. You can refer your friends as well. I guarantee you this is going to be the best place for people to grow who want to be AI-forward and who want to be cutting edge when it comes to marketing. So again, singlegrain.com/careers. All right, now moving on. Everyone says that programmatic SEO is dead. They're wrong. Here's why it still works. When you look at websites like TripAdvisor or Expedia, they're still crushing it. They might not have all the traffic they had back in the day, but TripAdvisor at its height was getting— I think it ranked for 100 million plus keywords and was getting hundreds of millions of visits from organic every single month. The reason for that is because they have a lot of listicles. So top 10 things to do in Japan, best things to eat in Tokyo. Programmatic SEO is just creating templated pages. Airbnb does this as well, and there's a lot of B2B companies that do do this as well. Canva is a good example of this. They have a lot of these templates that you can download, and they've done very well from organic traffic standpoint. And a lot of people end up signing for Canva because of that. So the key thing here is if you're going to pump out these templated pages, you're going to make sure you have a good designer, you're going to create a template for these, you got to make sure that you have a human in the loop here. So meaning that maybe 80% of this is generated by machine, but you want to make sure that in this case, if you're going to produce like 1,000 pages, you're probably not going to have a human review all the pages, but maybe they're going to review 50 random pages just to make sure everything looks And if things don't look good across the board, you're going to have to redo the code that you put together for the programmatic process that you created, right? And so you want to make sure to keep refining this to the point where if an editor can review 50 pages randomly and it looks good, then you know that it's probably going to look good across the board. And you want to make sure over time that ideally this is a little advanced, that hopefully you have an agentic workflow that's keeping these things updated. They're adding FAQs to these pages too. That's how you keep these pages looking nice and fresh over time. Because we talked about tending to your garden a little earlier. This is what it is. So that's the strategy we use for nine-figure and ten-figure brands. Same tactics, same workflows. But here's what I didn't tell you: everything I just showed you is completely useless if you're not tracking it properly and connecting it to actual business outcomes. So if you want to see how we tie SEO into revenue and prove ROI to stakeholders, click this video where I break down the full attribution setup we use in Single Grain. So I'll see you there.