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Build standout content instead of chasing links. AI search tools now reward fresh citations, clean structure, and regular updates. Brands that do the hard work competitors skip will rank forever.
Build standout content instead of chasing links. AI search tools now reward fresh citations, clean structure, and regular updates. Brands that do the hard work competitors skip will rank forever.
When you think about how to rank highly on SEO forever, what are the things that you're supposed to do? Okay, you build content that stands out from what everyone else is doing. So maybe instead of publishing 20 pieces of crap, you publish one thing that's really good and one thing that stands out. And then the brand mentions too, not just the backlinks anymore. So you think about the brand mentions. Okay, we get a lot of reachouts and I'm sure you do too. A lot of people are looking for Reddit now. A lot of people are looking for YouTube now because they're looking for citations, they're looking for brand sentiment overall. They want to be able to control the narrative. They also know that if you're trying to rank on AI overviews, you're trying to rank on AI mode, guess what? Google is going to favor their own properties, YouTube, right? Reddit is number one when you think about what the LLMs are citing. So that's the game that you're trying to play. You're not just trying to game anything anymore. You're trying to understand that if you're trying to rank on Perplexity, which you did a video on, Perplexity loves fresh citations, right? ChatGPT cares more about clean structure. They all care about how much you update your content. So SEO, I think 15, 20 years ago when you and I first started doing SEO, it was a lot more gameable. But now if you take a more long-tail or a long-term approach to it and do the things that are hard to do but most people aren't willing to do, that's how you're going to rank on SEO forever. It doesn't matter how much this stuff shifts because Quality is what moves to the top at the end of the day. And the quote that Neil, you've liked to use quite a bit in the past is that the Eric Schmidt quote, right? How brands will rise to the top because the internet is just a cesspool of crap, right? And brands, usually the reason they're a brand is because they try to approach things from a quality standpoint.
