Search in the Agent Economy — Fireside Chat with Eli Schwartz & Sandy Diao

Julia Nimchinski:
We are transitioning to our next panel, and it’s all about the new paradigm of agents and web discovery. Sandy Zhao will lead this conversation. She’s a growth leader across Meta, Pinterest, and Descript, and she’s joined by Eli Schwartz, one of the most respected voices in modern SEO and author of product-led SEO. What a treat! How are you doing, and what’s in your agenda, go ask Eli and Cindy.

Eli Schwartz:
Great to be here, thank you for having us.

Julia Nimchinski:
Yeah, excited too. So what’s your, I don’t know, favorite tool, for SEO and AI and Agentic? Eli.

Eli Schwartz:
I really like just coming up with things on my own, and searching, seeing what shows up in Claude, in Gemini, and ChatGBT. A lot of what I see people saying should show up doesn’t actually show up, so… I’d say my favorite tool is gonna be the human mind.

Julia Nimchinski:
Switzerland. Cindy.

Sandy D:
Definitely, thanks for having us here. Really excited to dive in today. Let’s see, what is my agentic OS right now? I would say that changes quite quickly, actually, not because I’m, you know, necessarily trying to chase the tools, but because these tools are getting better and unlock new capabilities every day. Right now, as it relates to SEO, one of my favorites is using Claude Code and just accessing the database of skills out there that people have already developed. Some of these skills plug into external databases and tools, and yet others can also help to, you know, do things like audit or rewrite, some of the content and products that you already have embedded with Claude. So, it’s really integrated and, you know, fascinating to explore at this moment.

Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. What a treat to host you. Sunny, take it away, and yeah, we’ll be sharing questions from the Slack in the chat.

Sandy D:
Perfect. Well, thanks so much. We have about 30 minutes here, and Eli, it’s so great to be in this panel here with you. Just as brief background, as Julia mentioned, I’m Sandy, and for the audience that are unfamiliar with myself. Founder of Drift International, a growth advisory firm, so I work with clients like public companies spanning from Adobe to high-growth startups like Limitless, who was actually recently acquired by Meta. And coincidentally, I also spent several years in my career leading growth at companies like Meta, Pinterest, Descript, and I’m really excited to dive into organic search today, because across all of those brands that I’ve mentioned, and many of my clients, organic search continues to be one of those channels that are equal parts powerful, driving a lot of growth for these businesses, but also equally misunderstood about what good looks like. And our session today covers probably one of the most hotly debated topics in go-to-market right now, what actually happens to SEO in the age of agents. And being in growth myself, I already hear a lot of the noise and do my own best to kind of pick out and look at the data around what is truth and what is, you know, myth. So, some of the things you’ve probably all heard out there, things like AI is killing SEO, or Google is dead, or editorial content doesn’t matter anymore. So hopefully today we get to pick apart some of these, these topics here. But I’m excited to learn from Eli on this topic. Julia already gave a bit of a background on Eli, but before we dive in, Eli, anything else you want to add about your background before we jump into things?

Eli Schwartz:
No, I mean, the last, I’ve been consulting now for the last 8 years, working with some amazing companies on building their SEO go-to-market, and excited to talk about how those kinds of companies still need to do exactly the same thing they’ve done for the last few years. It’s not, you know, when I have a chance to work with companies, it’s not because a certain keyword is not rising where it is. It’s really that they’re trying to build an acquisition channel. And that has not changed nearly as much as the hype cycle says it has.

Sandy D:
That’s amazing. We’d love to dive into that a bit more as well, just around, you know, what kind of classic playbooks still apply, and then which ones are modernizing or being updated here. I’d actually love to start, you know, more broadly, you’ve been making the case that most companies are doing SEO wrong because they’re optimizing for search engines, or in this case, generative engines, when in fact they should be optimizing for end users, or users in general. And now that generative engines and AI algorithms are changing very frequently. They’re kind of scrambling everyone’s search traffic, and people are starting to panic. And I’d love to hear from your point of view, what do you think are some of the things they missed that maybe made this moment so disorienting, or where perhaps do you think people might be overreacting?

Eli Schwartz:
Yeah, so about 4 years ago, I published a book called Product-Led SEO, and my hypothesis in the book is really that when you do SEO effectively, you’re building around a user, you’re creating a product, you’re creating an asset. So if you think about what Amazon has created, when you Google for something, you’re looking for the e-com product landing page, or the category page, you’re not looking for a blog post about the thing you’re supposed to buy. That’s the product. If you’re looking for an address because you want to purchase the home, you’re not looking for a blog post about it, you’re looking for the Zillow landing page. And there’s many, many great examples of websites that have done product-led SEO, but there’s far more examples of companies that have not. And they begin their SEO with, what is the keyword that I think Google might want to rank me for, and then they lean in fully on that without really thinking, do I deserve that visibility? What happens if I gather that visibility, and if someone clicks through, am I going to satisfy that search? So companies that did all of that have found that their SEO traffic has been completely destroyed by the… the addition of AI into search results. And that’s really where traffic has changed. There… we can argue about how many people are using ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, or even Gemini as their default search. But when it comes to AI overviews, which is the mixing of AI within search, that’s where you’re going to destroy traffic when there’s no value. So if you look at companies like Capterra and G2, which I had an opportunity to consult for G2 a few years ago, and I’ve spoken to the Capterra and the software advice teams, they are watching their traffic be completely obliterated, because if you want to know what the best CRM is, you Google it. And you don’t have to go to those sites, you now get it in AI Overview, and that’s why it obliterates the traffic. Now, if you were focused on a ranking for CRM, you’ve lost traffic. If you’re focused on the deep experience that comes with why you want to pick Salesforce over HubSpot, that’s not something an AI overview can take away from you. And if you move that over to the travel space, TripAdvisor has lost a ton of traffic, but there’s still a lot of value in what TripAdvisor has that cannot be summarized in just an AI overview. So, the amount of traffic that you might have ranked on, I don’t know, best hotel in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s an AI overview. The amount of traffic you’re going to get about how lumpy are the beds in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, that’s probably something that’s still gonna go to TripAdvisor. So when you think about SEO from what do I deserve, what do I add to a user, rather than what can I rank number one? there… a lot of that traffic has been taken away, but the traffic that still exists, that experience that still exists, will be going to websites. And then one more point on that is, a lot of… there was a lot of social media noise about ChatGBT integrating shopping within ChatGBT, and the entire e-commerce experience is dead. And that’s not working out so well, because there is a certain amount of people that are going to say, oh, what’s the best vacuum cleaner? I’ll just buy that. But a lot of people really want to click through. They want to read the reviews, they want to look at the videos, and an AI overview or a ChatGPT response does not satisfy that. Now, if you just wanted the list. You’re gonna get that from AI. So, the people that want the list are now getting from AI. That traffic is gone. It’s what remains, still should remain, and will likely always remain.

Sandy D:
That journey you described of somebody making that search through a generative engine or traditional search, and then ending up with that product, you know, experience. Does that apply to human-led searches, but also how agents search as well? We’d actually love to better understand your viewpoints on how agents will affect search, and maybe it would be helpful here if you could maybe perhaps walk us through a hypothetical example. So maybe take something like, you know, a chief financial officer, and the chief financial officer’s agent is searching for the best expense management software to use for his company. What does that search look like? Could you kind of help us understand if it’s an agent doing the searching? What are some considerations here, and what does a company have to do to show up in that case?

Eli Schwartz:
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest failures of the hype cycle today with AI is the fact that we’ve changed the glossary. So there’s all these words that people hear, and all of a sudden they think, I’m stupid. I don’t know what that word is. I don’t know what an agent is. But if you step… take two steps back and think about what an agent is, an agent is essentially a digital EA. So, if we lived in a world where everyone was super rich and everyone had their own personal EA, we wouldn’t suddenly talk about SEO being dead, we’d just say, well, let’s do SEO for the EA. That’s what an agent is. So in this hypothetical example. This is something that a very busy person a few years ago, before AI, might have outsourced to Tineae. Say, find me an expense management platform, give me a report about what I should be looking for. Now we have agents, so you don’t need an EA anymore. EAs are being disrupted by this. So that digital EA is going to do those searches. So now where agents impact SEO is agents are much more effective at doing searches. I’ve been doing SEO now almost 20 years, and some people are really, really good at searching. Actually, most people are really bad at searching, but there’s some that are really good at it. And they can figure out exactly what it is. What happens with AI is you don’t need to write your exact thing, you can just say. I’m tired of my, my, my expense team yelling at me about not doing my receipts, and then… the AI will say, oh, you want an expense management platform. An agent will do the same thing. So you don’t… you have… you can describe it, and then it’s going to take all those queries as an expert searcher, and gather it all together. Now, if you are an expense management platform. and you did really good SEO, you’re going to be found by that agent, because that’s what the agent distills that whole. I’m tired of my finance team yelling at me, and I need payables to just be happy. It distills it all into some really good searches that finds you. Now, if you are not an expense management platform, let’s say you are a video game mobile app. And you just figured out how to do SEO for expense management, because that was very effective. Now, in the past, maybe you’re… and there are many, many examples of this. I’m sure everyone listening has examples of, like, I’m looking to book, you know, a trip, why am I on this video game page? They’ve done effective SEO, they gamed the system. Now, what we’ll have is, we have these smarter LLMs, we have smarter agents, and the agents will say, oh, this is not a video game platform, this is expense management. they did bad SEO, but I still have read the page, and I’m deciding how to fix their SEO on the fly, and now I’ll present it to my end user. So that’s what an agent is. So, in order to be shown as effectively as possible, you do good SEO, because the agents represent the person. If you don’t do great SEO, you’ll probably still show up. And that’s the important thing to remember, and that’s what I think has been improved by AI. There was an advantage to any website in the past that did SEO. That advantage has been somewhat neutralized, because AI can both fix the search on the searcher side, and it can fix the website on the website side. So if you have not done a good SEO, and the searcher has no idea what they’re doing, you’re still going to be found. What gets left behind is brand. So now, if you’re an expense management platform, but you absolutely suck, and everyone churns after one month. your brand, you’ve littered the internet with bad brand signals, and the AI will pick that up, and say, you’ve done great SEO, your title tags, expense management software, you’ve even got pictures of the best CFOs in the world, you have the best investors in the world, but I’ve just read the reviews, and we’re not going to recommend it. So that’s where It’s a holistic experience. If you can figure out how to get every EA in the world to recommend you, and you’ve done the right job of showing up, that’s SEO for agents, in a nutshell.

Sandy D:
That’s very helpful, Eli, and I want to actually tie this back to what we were discussing at the top of the conversation. What SEO practices still remain as being valuable to companies? You just said that agents are smarter, better searchers, more precise than, you know, than humans, potentially. And that they’re looking for the same things that humans are looking for, because they’re doing work on behalf of us. They’re these agents, essentially. These virtual assistants. So if that’s true, then what are some of the classic organic growth strategies that still hold? Even with agents doing the searching.

Eli Schwartz:
Essentially, everything you do in the past is still something you do today. There’s just one added layer that AI and the LLMs crawl slightly differently, and that’s it. But anything you do, you want to create content. And again, there were people that were rewarded for doing bad SEO, so they continue to do bad SEO. Their rewards have been taken away. So now, if you are, for example, I consulted with LinkedIn. LinkedIn was looking for more people to come to their platform. Now, what should they do? Should they… they take every person’s profile and jam it full of new keywords that the user didn’t actually jam it… those keywords in? No, that’s not something they should do. They should make their website more crawlable. What changes for a website like LinkedIn in an AI age? Not much, right? They’re still… they’re still the best network business network of humans. So they’re going to want to make sure that LLMs understand it, LLMs extract information as well as possible, and that’s it. So most of those best practices are going to stand. And most of the businesses that I’ve consulted with in the last 7 years The best practices are essentially the same. So, you want to make sure that your content is tied to users. You want to make sure that a human that lands on your content understands what it is that you should do. I’ve, you know, there have been businesses that have reached out to me about consulting for them, businesses that have been funded with many millions of dollars, and they’ve offered me free access to their app. and then I’ll download their app, and I’m like, I really… I don’t understand. I don’t understand why anybody would pay them. Now, if I don’t understand why anybody would pay them, an LLM is not going to understand it, and certainly a search engine did not understand it. So their problems with SEO visibility did not begin with a lack of keywords, it began with I don’t know, product market fit that only fit in the founder’s head. So, that’s the challenge. You want to basically figure out your product market fit, or as I call it for SEO, search market fit. What is a searcher going to be looking for? And the definition of a searcher has expanded to someone doing LLM prompts. How are they going to prompt for it? Why am I the best result for this instance? And make sure you integrate those best practices of showing why you’re the best result into your page, product page, your pricing, whatever it is that you have.

Sandy D:
it sounds like a lot of the search fundamentals that companies understand are unchanged, in that the way that we’re feeding that data, that information, to generative engines the same way that we fed to search engines is, you know, relatively unchanged and or updated slightly here. I think that one… interesting, new strategy that companies are starting to really think about, and even traditional SEO teams are starting to invest in. They’re kind of carving out this body of generative engine optimization, or GEO, is kind of a new thing, if you will, almost building it independently of search in a lot of cases. And I love your point of view on that. You know, what’s interesting is that that generative engine optimization type of work starts to look more like brand marketing, it’s reputation management on community forums, it’s how the brand shows up in videos, it’s the reviews, like you mentioned, and it’s this broader brand footprint. And I’d love to understand, Eli, in your view, what is most important about building a standalone GEO strategy, and is it important to build at all?

Eli Schwartz:
I might say not. I’m gonna push back on everyone that really thinks you need a separate strategy for this. So, the same way, and I don’t know how long you’ve been at Meta, or you were at Meta, but, like, Meta had to switch their entire strategy to mobile. And everything they did went from desktop to mobile, SEO is not like that. So when users search on mobile, you don’t need a mobile SEO strategy, it’s just SEO. And we’re going to be in an age where there’s going to be more wearables. So you’re not going to say, I need a wearable SEO specialist to make sure I show up in watches, glasses, and, you know, anything else someone’s going to wear. It’s an adaptation. So breaking off… anything, whether you call it GEO or AEO or AIO, is ignoring the fact that SEO itself needs to adapt. SEO needs to adapt to people using spoken search within their cars, which is happening and will continue to happen. It will expand to the fact that there’s going to be more search interfaces. For the first time ever, we now have all those devices that Google sold, they’re useful because they have Gemini in them. It’s not just, like, you know, set a timer or play me a song. They have Gemini, they’re thinking devices, and that’s… you need to do SEO for that, too. So breaking off a separate function and calling it something else, it neglects the entire premise that you want to do SEO best practices for that. Now, I wouldn’t say that SEO is unchanged. There are still some aspects and best practices you want to make sure you adapt. So. they, most of the value that I think that comes into being visible in AI is actually brand marketing. So you… if you are a good brand, you want to make sure that your brand is visible and you’ll be recommended, and then what actually happens is dark SEO. And I know that there’s a lot of tools out there that claim they want to help you promote this, and if they’re too expensive. that becomes a challenge, because it’s hard to justify that expense. Now, because all of the downstream is, again, dark SEO, someone’s gonna find you mentioned, let’s go back to our expense management example, they’re gonna find you mentioned in an AI response, and then they’re gonna go directly to your website. You won’t know that you got any benefit from that. So, how do you get recommended? Brand marketing. There’s no SEO best practice to have you show up. Now, you can game it a little bit, and you can show up, but if the AI is working as effectively as it should. then there’s no reason for anybody to click through. And to add one more thing to this, I’ve been working with Anthropic on SEO for the last year… last month or so. And their focus is SEO, so they know that the future of acquisition is all about acquiring users from searches. the AI and LLM aspect to this is sort of the gravy on top. You’re very unlikely to find an example of a website that does not do well in general searches. Now, it’s hard to know the exact general searches, because the AI is changing the queries. and you will have agents that change the query, but if you have very low SEO visibility and use any popular SEO tool, like SEMrush or Ahrefs, if you have very low SEO visibility, you’re unlikely to have high LLM visibility. If you have very high SEO visibility, you could still have very low LLM visibility if you’re not a fit, because you can game SEO, but it’s very hard to game LLMs.

Sandy D:
Something you said there, Eli, you mentioned that Anthropic, but actually many businesses and a lot of clients I work with today are finding that LLMs and generative engines are actually bringing in really high-quality sources of traffic, and it’s kind of a culmination of everything you just said there. A more precise searcher, and the results being summarized across an aggregation of different types of sources, the result that is brought to the user ends up becoming much more pinpointed towards what the searcher’s intent is. And you can imagine that conversion would be higher as a result, so that’s also something that I’m seeing. But more broadly, I think one of the challenges in this space right now is that there is conflicting data, really from a variety of different types of both credible as well as non-credible sources. I think one of the, you know, semi-credible-ish sources that I saw, Exploding Topics, owned by SEMrush, suggested that in 2025, generative engines, I think, drove 0.5% of all, 15 billion global daily searches, and yet drive 12% of signups. Does this insight directionally align with some of the data that you’re seeing? If so, or if not, you know, what are some of the sources of data that you rely on, and any other insights that would be worth considering?

Eli Schwartz:
I think it’s very hard to get actual data here. I think SimilarWeb probably gets the closest to actual data, because the way they collect data is with browser plugins, so they see more of it. But I think the best way of viewing AI responses is they have now become the blog posts. They have become the source of content. So in the past, where you might have read, you know, actually many, many media companies have gone headfirst into affiliate marketing. So maybe CNN might have had an article about the best CRM tools to use in 2026. So now, instead of going there and calling that referral traffic, the LLMs have taken over that referral traffic. So it makes a lot of sense that your next click would be, oh, I read about the top CRMs, I’m gonna go directly to HubSpot sign up a trial. Or even a social media post, where you’ve gone on LinkedIn and someone wrote about their experience with a tool. You now no longer need that, because you just search the tool, and you get an AI response that tells you all the pros and cons, and your next step is you go and sign up. AI has become the content. It has not replaced the search. So for the deeper searcher that wants to go find the content, specifically wants to read it, wants to learn more, wants to know the pros and cons, wants to find the articles and not have it fed to them. That, of course, still exists.

Sandy D:
Yeah, that makes sense, and, you know, I share in that observation, too. Probably no definitive sources of data, but maybe, you know, to your suggestion, SimilarWeb is a sort of, like, good proxy and place to start. And Eli, we’re getting a lot of questions from the audience here, so maybe we could rapid-fire through a few of them. One of the questions from the audience is that, they hear all the time that SEO is dead, and wanted to understand, Eli, how you, clean up that brand reputation.

Eli Schwartz:
So it’s not an SEO motion. Cleaning up a brand reputation is if you’ve done right by your customers, you want to make sure your customers talk about you. And when it comes to AI, and this is the best thing, the best way of viewing AI is it’s a really, really smart human. So what does this really smart human accept as brand signals? Like, how would a human who never went to a shoe store before, but has heard all about shoes, how do they know that Nike is a good shoe, and that knockoff brand on the bottom of the shelf is not. Well, they’ve incorporated many brand signals. They subconsciously will see that the knockoff shoe’s on the bottom. they’ll subconsciously notice that the paint on the Nike shoebox is better. They’ll notice the feel, right? Those are the things. So what does AI learn to understand reputation? Well, the people that are trying to sell snake oil within this new thing they’ve created called Geo are saying, well, AI leans in on Reddit, so let’s go spam Reddit. Well, Reddit is just one of those signals. What are the signals the AI uses? Well, it’s trying to replicate the human mind, so it’s gonna pull in things like. Well, here’s a Reddit post, and here’s this person who the founder spoke at a reputable conference. They spoke at HSC, so we know we can trust them. So, these are the things that a human would incorporate. So. the AI is going to do the same thing. So if you have a good brand, clean up your brand everywhere. Make sure your brand is presented as well as possible. If you don’t have a good brand, well, solve that problem. Going and posting a bunch of things on Reddit for a brand that doesn’t deserve it isn’t going to save you.

Sandy D:
Well, actually, I love your quick reaction to that, because one of the growth channels that I help my clients oversee is influencer marketing. And I will say that there is this increasing practice of working with influencers and, you know, sort of paying them behind the scenes to provide this positive testimony on forums like Reddit. And it’s not that it’s coming from a, you know, sort of slimy place, if you will, they actually do try to get the That creator or that influencer to use the product, provide, you know, real feedback, and, you know, post sort of a more holistic reaction on forms like Reddit? Just, you know, generally speaking, what might be your take on that as it relates to SEO and its impact there?

Eli Schwartz:
Yeah, so I think it’s a broader question. I think influencer marketing is absolutely the future, because when you have fake influencers, and you have fake videos and fake content, the only thing that helps brands, and I think B2B brands specifically, rise above that. are people that are recognized. Not people that are invented, but people that are recognized. So someone… I’ve done a lot of influencer marketing where people pay me to understand their product, and they talk about their product, and I’ll say, this is something that I was shown, and I’m being paid to talk about it, and the people that have been following for many years will now have some sort of curiosity about it. Now, the brand could go and invent a bunch of stuff on Reddit, but that’s not the same. So, I’d say if anyone is doing that on Reddit, they want to use real people with real profiles that already have trust from the community, not, you know, fakebrand123 says, this is something I really trust, check out my affiliate link.

Sandy D:
Very helpful. I generally agree with that as well, you know, influencer marketing is most certainly gonna change and shape how discovery works, not just in search, but in a lot of the other marketing channels as well. And then, Eli, another question from the audience here. The questioner wants to know whether or not you believe that the integration of AI and more personalized browser data around who that user is, whether it’s their job title, previous chats, general browser behavior, actually personalizes search results, you know, making it more interesting on how a brand will think about targeting individuals through search.

Eli Schwartz:
Yeah, I love that question, and this is something I wrote about in my newsletter last September, when Google started testing this. So, I think this is the end of all AEOGEO practices. It can’t exist anymore with personalization. So, for anybody that has not tried this yet, go to Google, go to Gemini, and go to AI mode, and you can turn on personalization. And I actually find some of it annoying, because it’s too ineffective. So, if I ask, like, what’s the best credit card for me to sign up for? AI will… the AI mode specifically will say, oh, people that work in SEO should… I’m like, this is not a relevant question. Like, that’s not something I want brought in. But it will improve. So, the reason that I think this is the end of GEO and AEO is because now you’re going to ask these questions, like that credit card example, and it’s gonna personalize the result. So, it’s already being brought into AI mode, and I think within, you know, in the next couple months, in May, at Google I.O, Google’s probably going to make AI mode the default search experience. So when that happens, all of the queries about best credit card for me are now going to go directly to AI mode. which is personalized. So everything changes. So if you’re tracking prompts, your prompts… so best CRM is probably going to be reflective of who has the best brand, and if Salesforce isn’t there, then the AI is not working. But best credit card is now going to be subjective. Best place to go on vacation, subjective. Best beach, subjective. So everything changes, so anything you’re tracking, it’s only going to be for your specific ICPs. So instead of tracking prompts, track your ICP. Build the best brand for your ICP.

Sandy D:
Hmm. That makes a lot of sense, and you’re right, there are already some early experiences where you can dog food or beta test that experience, and you know, you’re right, there’s… I think we’re kind of at an early stage where these LLMs and models need to figure out what context is actually relevant to the searcher in that moment. You know, to your point, your SEO persona doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to credit cards, but you’re right, you know, I also believe that that personalization is going to change and improve over time. And I know that we’re nearing the end of our 30 minutes here, maybe just as a sort of final wrap-up, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about best practices, things that still apply, things to do, and I’d love to actually perhaps hear from you, what is one of the worst pieces of advice you’re hearing about SEO and AI right now? What is something that you want to tell companies to stop doing that you’re seeing, you know, be rather prevalent in the space?

Eli Schwartz:
You know, it’s been happening the last 3 years. Companies are stopping to invest in SEO. So it’s actually… it’s two-pronged. One is, they’re either giving up completely, and they’re stopping to invest in SEO because they believe something in Reddit on social media about SEO being dead, and they’re going all-in on AI. Now, the problem with going all-in on AI is they’re going all-in on a tactic. So let’s say they spend all their money on Reddit, but then Reddit goes away because Reddit’s no longer a tactic anymore. For example, Reddit’s been talking about using Face ID to stop their own spam on Reddit. So if you’ve invested all of your budget into that, well, that budget is now on fire. The second thing I’d say is many companies have seen their SEO traffic decline. Which, as we discussed earlier, is because it’s not necessarily a fit. In this AI world, where you now get the responses from an LLM. So what they’re doing is they’re spending all their SEO budgets on quote-unquote recovering. I’ve been many companies reach out to try to recover their traffic. This isn’t recovery, like, that is gone. Like, the LLMs are now serving that user better, so you can’t… recover what is not going to be yours anymore. So those are the two biggest mistakes I see companies making, which is trying to bring back 2019, or getting rid of it and saying SEO’s dead because we’ve lost so much traffic, let’s go all in on AI.

Sandy D:
That’s very helpful, Eli. I also share in that observation. You know, a lot of teams I chat with, they have given up on SEO entirely. You know, it’s like, oh, the world is going to change with AI, let’s not invest in a thing of the past and, you know, it’ll be a waste of effort or resources. But, you know, I definitely see, and a lot of the, you know, directional data suggests that search engines and generative search continues to drive a really meaningful volume of signups and growth for products and businesses, so… Definitely agree with you. We have to continue to build and adapt how we’re thinking about SEO as a channel. Thank you so much, Eli, that was super helpful, and I’m actually really glad that that was a crash course for myself to take to some of these go-to-market strategies for my own clients here. But I think that’s all the time that we have today, so Julia, we’ll pass it back over to you.

Julia Nimchinski:
Phenomenal insight. Thank you so much, Eli and Sandy. Before you go, what’s the best way to support you? Where should our people go?

Eli Schwartz:
San Diego first.

Sandy D:
Thanks! The best way to support me, I write about growth strategy overall on Substack, sandydiao.substack.com, and if you have any anecdotes about how you’re using agents to transform some of your go-to-market channels, definitely reach out, as I have an upcoming piece on that.

Julia Nimchinski:
July?

Eli Schwartz:
I’m at productledseo.com, so that’s my substack. I referenced a couple of the recent posts I had on Reddit, so check out that one, that was last week. And obviously find me on LinkedIn. And thank you for having me, Julia.