Eli Schwartz

I had an awesome chat with @lennysan on his podcast, and here’s my #1 tip for diving into SEO today: Put yourself in your users' shoes! 👟 At @SurveyMonkey , we all had to run our own surveys to truly understand what the user experience was like for our customers. That’s the secret—know your users inside and out, and your SEO will benefit. 💡 Pro Tip: Stop thinking like a marketer; start thinking like a user! Catch the full convo with Lenny for more insights! 🎧👇 YouTube: youtu.be/Z71yGshPTwk

@Raadmobrem They are definitely scroll stopping

Do you guys like this? Creating some new ads

Don't go all in on one AEO citation source. A few months ago, the SEO world discovered that LinkedIn was frequently cited by LLMs, so predictably, AEO citation agencies started selling this "service". In Semrush Enterprise's visibility dashboard,  LinkedIn's visibility on ChatGPT and Google's LLM features is now declining, which means that if you invested in this as an AEO tactic, the rug has been pulled out from under you. The best thing about LLMs is that they improve very fast, so if spammers chase a platform, they will quickly train the model to correct the gap. The same is true of any AEO tactic (except probably Youtube but that's for another post.) In partnership with @semrush

This

Just my two cents… SEOs and AI search folks attending conferences and meetups this year need to read the fine print about which talks / panelists / speakers are SPONSORED. This will explain a lot about the recommendations stemming from those talks.

The great GEO debate w/ @lilyraynyc 02:11 – Self-promotional listicles: pros and cons 12:38 – Authentic authority vs. paid influence 27:23 – Using AI day-to-day 30:46 – The GEO technical checklist 36:27 – Predicting the next 12 months

"SEO should function as a product manager, creating a tangible product for user acquisition." - @5le "From a career standpoint you want to be able to say -- this is what I've created. This is what I've owned. These are the users I've built for it."" "This is all the money I've made, and this is the money I continue to make, and none of it existed before I ideated and implemented and continued to iterate on this entire thing."

And to add to Lily's very important point: just because an AEO tool tells you that you're being recommended doesn't mean that human beings in your ICP actually see it

Technical SEO article: How to optimize the Accessibility Tree for AI agents. This covers semantic HTML, visualizing hierarchy, spying on competitors + more:

Some background on our latest (and quite controversial) @Lemonade_Inc ad campaign. It started with a hypothesis I've wanted to test for years: our brains have learned to tune out anything shaped like an ad. Researchers call this "banner blindness." Our subconscious identifies ads by their shape and style, and hides them from our conscious mind before they even register. To bypass this blindness challenge, I wanted to try a different way to communicate with potential customers, one that doesn't look like advertising: "non-ads ads". The graffiti campaign concept was inspired by the voice of our loyal customers, who sometimes sound more like members of a movement: people fed up with "old insurance" who can't go back once they've tried Lemonade. Obviously, no one cares enough about insurance to go out and spray paint their thoughts. That's exactly the absurd part that makes this funny. We're not pretending it's real. The joke is that it obviously isn't. But what often looks simple rarely is. Creating the ads required the team to get back to design basics. We wanted it to feel like real graffiti - so no screens, or apps, or AI. Sloppy on purpose, real spray paint driven by visceral, raw work. Tag placement on billboards had to be realistic, only where a graffiti artist could actually reach - so we had to adjust the art to each billboard specifically. Areas that are too high or too far for someone to reach would stay blank. Also, for non-ads ads to work, the brand name can't be prominent. It needs to be implied, discovered slowly, never obvious at first sight. Too early to say if it works. But people are posting pictures of insurance ads and arguing about them online. Voluntarily. >>

@searchmartin @HammerToe 😂 that's next

@5le Once you get it fixed, you can start optimizing it like @HammerToe 🤣🤣🤣x.com/HammerToe/stat…

This is probably the craziest assist I ever got from AI. My fan suddenly stopped working. I don't even think an electrician would have found this unless they had direct experience with this exact fan. I refuse to believe that Gemini could be right.

Ugh

Is AI replacing SEO? Not so fast. In a new episode of The Search Session, @gfiorelli1 talks with @5le about AI search, agent-led search, brand signals, and why traditional SEO still matters. Listen now 👇 buff.ly/iavXxRg

Everyone suddenly wants to do Reddit marketing because they think it moves the needle on AEO. We need to talk about why that logic fails. If a brand already has activity on Reddit that they don't control, and the sentiment in those threads is negative, seeding a few positive posts does nothing and is dangerous for the brand. The negative conversations are already there, forming the answer that LLMs pull when someone asks, "Is this company or product any good?" The astroturfed conversations don't change the answers. A brand with 200 organic complaints about a broken feature does not fix its AI visibility by adding 20 paid comments saying it's great. The real negative threads will win, because they're older, more detailed, and REAL. Reddit users will bump the real complaints back to the top of the astroturfed comments or threads. What actually works in this case is fixing the thing customers are mad about. Not hiding from the negative, but addressing it head-on. Engaging with the customers. The agencies who understand this, who go in and actually diagnose why a brand has a negative footprint on Reddit before touching a single comment, are rare. I've met only a handful of agencies of this type in this entire industry, while the rest treat Reddit like a content calendar. They post positive things, hit a cadence, bill the client, and never look back. At best, this is wasted spend, but it's risky. At worst, it's actively harmful, because now you've bumped the thread and poked the hornet's nest. Astroturf comments remind real customers the conversation exists with a fresh place to reply with their actual experience. Reddit compounds the problems, and they will become worse. If you're a brand thinking Reddit is a silver bullet for AI visibility, it isn't.

Way to go @jpmorgan SEO team building an SEO page for a product you don't offer

The AEO panic is the best thing to happen to SEO budgets in years. Every CMO right now is trying to figure out who owns AEO. Good. Let them fight about it. For years, SEO got stuck reporting to marketing, treated like a finishing department on an assembly line. That structure never made sense because real SEO lives inside the product. Product shapes what gets built, how pages render, what a user actually does once they land, and none of that is a marketing decision. This is a roadmap effort, not a tick list of SEO best practices. Then AEO showed up and turned the argument on its head. AEO is not SEO 2.0. It's PR and brand authority. AEO is the accumulated weight of those who talk about you, link to you, and trust you enough to mention your brand. The C-Suite is suddenly interested in the search channel and asking where to place it and who should own it. This interest might be the best thing that's happened to search in years. I have spent years arguing that SEO should be in product; maybe the sudden interest in the channel will be what adjusts the reporting hierarchy across more companies. Even better, maybe SEO will finally get more budget. SEO budget conversations that used to get the scraps at the end of paid marketing spend planning meetings are now showing up in board decks. Worried executives fund things, and FOMO is great for SEO. Where does your AEO function actually report today, and where do you think it should go?

NEW: My first research report into how companies are deploying AI to grow ✨ I've wanted to write this for a long time, and went through hundreds of notes to put this first edition together. I'm calling the series "Deployed", and would love to make it a regular thing if there's interest. The aim was to share enough examples that no matter what kind of business you're in, you'll be inspired by at least a few of them. Inside you'll find insights from the great reporting of others (with links for further reading), as well as stats and quotes I uncovered which seemed to go under the radar. I'm still as obsessed with SEO (and now, AI search) as ever, but also excited about the possibilities AI has opened up for all aspects of growing businesses online. I really hope you find it valuable, and would sincerely appreciate any feedback on whether you would like to see a v2. Link in the graphic and first reply. Thank you!

While some still debate what AI search optimization should be called (GEO, AEO, LLMO…), companies have already answered the question that actually matters: who does the work 👇 I did a poll asking who's in charge of AI Search Optimization in the company you work at/with and after 1,212+ votes, the debate is settled: * 86% The SEO team * 9% An AI Search team *with* SEOs * 1% An AI Search team *without* SEOs * 2% Another digital marketing team That's 95% of companies where SEOs are leading or directly involved in AI search efforts. Only 1% have handed it to a team without SEOs. Yes, my audience skews SEO but even with that bias, a 95 to 1 ratio is hard to argue with! The reality is that AI search optimization is being executed by the people who already understand *search* as a discovery/marketing channel... the pillars have been expanded, not replaced. So rather than debating the name, the real questions to focus on are: ⭐️ Are SEO teams being resourced and enabled to take on this expanded scope? ⭐️ Are they being included in the AI conversations happening at the exec level? ⭐️ Are they measuring beyond traffic to show AI search business impact? Remember: Just buying an AI search optimization tool isn't a real strategy! Ownership without enablement is accountability without support. ✅ If you're an SEO who's been handed AI search: congratulations, and also, negotiate: Expanded scope should come with expanded support. ✅ If you're a leader who's assigned it to your SEO team: make sure they have a seat at the table where AI strategy decisions are made, not just the ticket queue. It's time to focus on what actually matters: AI search growth 🙌

This is one of the worst title rewrites by Google I have ever seen