S15 E5: The Truth Behind SEO in the Age of AI (with Dylan Ander, Founder + CEO of Heatmap.com)

0:00Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nick.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:34If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com slash limited supply.

0:48Dylan Ander:Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today, I've got a fun episode. So everybody's talking about GEO. It's the new SEO. You may have heard of it as AEO. Some of you call it AI search. Most people just call it trying to find something, trying to search for something. And they end up in chat or Google and they're using AI search or Gemini. A lot of people are now using Claude. We've seen Claude bot rising. So the question has become, well, how do I get my brand to rank inside these LLMs? And how do I get it to show up when I am asking to... How do I get my brand to rank when somebody is asking for the breast pregnancy supplement stack to take so your morning fog doesn't hinder your day?

1:33Dylan Ander:That's what we're going to answer on today's episode. I brought Dylan Ander. Dylan's been on before to talk about CRO, but he's actually been spending probably the last six to eight months quietly doing a lot of really transformative stuff on the GEO side, helping brands magically rank and essentially create a propaganda machine to some degree. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. He's got a couple of freebies in terms of things that you can just email him for, and he'll send over to make your own GEO journey easier. But I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It's very tactical. So get your notebooks out, and I'll see you next week.

2:13Dylan Ander:All right, Dylan. Well, welcome back to Limited Supply. You're one of the few guests who's come back. So excited to have you back at this time. We're going to be diving into something completely different. So first of all, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Appreciate your time. Thank you, sir. So, you know, as we were putting this episode together and just thinking about what it could be, I think, you know, like when I start consulting with a brand or talking to a brand, working with a brand, when I invest in a brand, and I look at where they're going to go deploy their dollars, a lot of that chunk goes toward marketing.

2:43Dylan Ander:Maybe like 30 % to 40 % goes directly to marketing between agencies, staffing, resources, media dollars, etc. And very rarely do I see the line item for SEO or brand reputation or anything in that world. And also in parallel, I would say the more I've seen SEO kind of fall off in terms of brands proactively doing it, I've also seen there's a very parallel decline with brands being cool and fun. And I don't know if maybe the tie there has something to do with content and building perception of the brand and its reputation, but there is definitely some sort of a tie there. but you've kind of been doing a lot of work with brands on AEO and GEO and SEO, which I think that triple stack, or maybe it's actually just two things in AEOG are the same thing you can explain in a second.

3:39Dylan Ander:But that kind of stack is basically what brands are excited about today and like pushing forward hard on today and investing, I think a lot more into that than they probably historically would have in the seo game is all of that like right sound yeah you try you track most of it i'll say so um so i'm gonna give a little story time on this one and you'll see how like where i've allocated my time over my like e-com career so you know actions are your words right so like what i've done where i've placed my time Hopefully it's worthwhile to you guys. So when I was like 18 on my first dropshipping stores, of course I ran ads, but I was printing money.

4:24Like you would get one money keyword for on Google, like SEO rankings, like natural. And that would be what paid my rent for the month. Not like hitting a winning ad or a new landing page. Like no one did it. And it was the freshest traffic ever. So I'd been doing that. Then I had an actual SEO agency after that. I had Geico, I had Planet Fitness, 24-Hour Fitness, like some of my biggest clients I've ever had. Like those were – I had a$2 million a year contract going on with one of them, you know, like for just SEO. Like that much work. So like SEO really, you know, had scaled previously in easy ways.

5:03So Nick, does – do meta ads make a lot of money? Of course. Okay, sweet. the same answer is of course for Google. Whoever said like SEO is dead, I always say bless their soul. They're amazing. Thank you so much to whoever said that. Like whoever thought that like it's changed and people don't know how to look at analytics and like a brand as a whole, I call it like chronic attribution anxiety. Like they're just like obsessed on the money and money out. And like I put spent a dollar, I made, you know,$1.50 back, whatever. It doesn't work that way. That's especially not how anything organic works whatsoever.

5:43So the reason why, like I, so like I've always doubled down and continue to double down on SEO. Like if you Google the word heat map right now, depending where you are, heatmap.com will be number one, like revenue, like web, web heat map, website heat map, like any of those, we get about a third of our business at hebap.com, my current SaaS, from Google SEO organic, like not even from the LLMs, not from referral, just straight Google organic. And we don't have a branded keyword either. So that's even more indicative. So where this has now gone is SEO has become like, I think it was Neil Patel that said it, just like the search everywhere optimization, where it used to be the onsite, the technicals, how Google reads everything, your blogs, how well they're interlinked.

6:34All that stuff still matters. Don't get me wrong there. But what you're doing off the website is what I'm finding to be the 80-20 nowadays. Are you making content on, you know, if you make an X article, that's a DR, like domain rating. So I'll say DR a lot throughout the episode. DR is your domain rating. google.com is 100 and a brand new website will be a zero so anything in the dr of 80 plus is like a legendary link like linkedin is 98 you know x is 99 like you know that kind of thing so

7:08Dylan Ander:to be able to get it's actually like an seo hack to post articles on x on x on uh linkedin if you're on B2B on Quora Pulse, like Quora's like articles function, blogger.com, medium. If you write one blog post, so let's say you write a blog post for your website, which is still effective and I'll kind of get into why and how later, but you have that one blog post, that one piece of content that you write and you now are putting it like on your blog, it needs to go on blogger.com. It needs to go on LinkedIn. It needs to go on Twitter. It needs to go on medium. It needs to go on all of these platforms to get more surface area.

7:52It's like content repurposing, but just for text only. You already did it. Just have a VA go in and spend an extra 20 minutes and put it up on all of those. Now you get to interlink all those together. They all go back to your website. It's more, you know, granted it's UGC. It's not like true do follow backlinks, if you know what I mean. Not like the backlink backlink, but it's tons of signal posting on Reddit. it. And now once you get into LLMs, if you want me to cross the chasm per se, or if you have any other SEO questions, because they're one, one other hack that I'll give. Well, I guess before we,

8:26Dylan Ander:yeah, sure. Well, I was just going to say like, what, before we move to LLM stuff, I'd love to know like, what, what should brands be focused on when it comes to SEO, whether they have the budget to go hire an agency and do that, or whether they just have the ability to do some stuff internally. Totally. So number one, I have not really seen site speed make much of a difference. Everyone thinks that that makes a huge difference. It doesn't for Google, at least nowadays. You can go and make articles. You can use AI, but be very careful. I have some AI articles that have destroyed websites I've worked on, and I have AI articles that rank beautifully.

9:11Depends how they're executed. Same as if it's a human writer. you know so um go and get some articles um to be honest go spend like five to ten hours on youtube like spend like you know an hour a day the rest of the next week you know and just like learn the basics because what i call it it's i like i find i call it almost like back-end marketing right where like you have your brand you have your ads you have all this stuff but then you have like the technical guts of marketing. That's kind of what SEO boils down to, right? So if you remember that when you have a YouTube short to put a link back to a certain maybe category page that you're trying to rank or like, you know, it's like you can always be doing exactly the work that you're doing, but put a certain link back to, you know, like different websites and like interlink things the right way.

10:01So it's like all the marketing that I do, especially for SaaS, and you guys have to think about it this way is just, okay, I'm doing this. How do I tweak it just a little bit to give it more SEO value and more ultimately just like a juice value? And ultimately, I have some tinfoil hat theories about LLMs later and training sets, but all of this helps. It's every bit of digital real estate that you can cover, do it. And then the other thing is semantic mentions. So backlinks are what people are used to, meaning like a hyperlink from one website back to your website and like most people know backlinks are but now it's called semantic mentions so if like you know sharma brands for example like if like if i just type something out on like a page and it meant and it just says sharma brands did blah blah blah and whatever previously in google like the you needed the sharma brands to be hyperlinked back to your website but now the fact that it's just on the page whatsoever, it works.

11:04AI picks it up. Google picks it up, which is actually AI and LLMs because yada, Allah, Allah, you know, Gemini. So, um, that's kind of the way in which it works. So it's like, how much digital real estate can you cover? And the website is still important. Don't get me wrong, but it's, uh, what you're doing offsite is a lot, a lot, a lot.

11:26Dylan Ander:so um that's so interesting how how does like like there's two nick sharmas there's a chef and there's me right how does google know um so it depends around so just the straight up nick sharma it is going to be service area but there's also things like age fortunately you can't make yourself older like how long you've been around for so if that nick sharma was doing online stuff before you that nick sharma will always have an advantage over you nothing to really do about that right so um age is a very big one also for llm so it's also a very big one um how many like you know brand mentions there are his website how many mentions there are of him outside the website as well um and also depending on relevancy right like he's a chef so So if like you look up Nick Sharma recipe, even if you make a recipe page in your website, good luck ranking against his, you know.

12:28So and also I know that you're nick.co, unfortunately not nicksharma.com. That exact match domain does really help. Really, really helps.

12:38Dylan Ander:That's a third guy. Yeah. No way. So it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like from an SEO standpoint, like if I'm, for example, a supplement brand. I should actually try to invest in building out pretty almost like sub, almost like reason pages. Like, you know, if I have, let's say, you know, a calming supplement, like I should have calming as an athlete, calming as a parent, calming as a student, calming as a, you know, working professional and try to increase my surface area of what my brand is associated with. so that as it gets mentioned elsewhere, there's a greater chance of that being picked up as sort of like, what was it called?

13:23Dylan Ander:I forget what you called it, a semantic? A semantic mention. So what you just discovered in a way is called programmatic SEO, which is have a base template and have AI make a thousand variations of it. Joint relief for runners, joint relief for moms, joint relief for dads, joint relief for men over 40, joint relief for men, joint relief for women, joint relief for kids, joint relief for tennis players, joint relief for basketball players. And you can take that template, change it up a little bit. So Ramp was very infamous in the SEO community for doing this, that they did like credit cards for.

14:05Yeah, the credit card. So Ramp, like credit cards for blank. Insert any freaking business name you could think of. Business type for plumbers, credit cards for electricians, credit cards for marketing agencies, credit cards for whatever. And like they had like a thousand pages in one little subfolder, just credit cards for blank. Wow. And that's programmatic SEO. Usually you wind up getting clapped at some point, like Google knows, like Google doesn't want programmatic SEO all over as part of the AI slop kind of thing that people aren't wanting nowadays, but it is pretty huge. Like, oh, and by the way, for example, under Dylan Ander, if you put heatmap.com under this episode, it's going on Spotify.

14:48It's going on Apple, you know, podcasts, it's going on all of these. That's now being SEO minded that every time I jump on a podcast, I'm like, Hey, by the way, can you make sure you put dylanander.com and heatmap.com in the description? yeah that's being the seo minded marketer right always ask for those so but programmatic seo is huge so a lot of people call it p seo then the other p seo is parasite seo this is personally one of my favorites so you hear about reddit a lot what's cool so i i have a team member who does it as well um and you can literally start ranking for a keyword within 10 minutes on reddit like I'll show you later tonight or something, maybe not live in this episode right now.

15:33I mean, I could theoretically, but go in and post something on Reddit for a really long-tail keyword in a good subreddit. And it'll be showing up on Google in the first result within 20 minutes.

15:45Dylan Ander:And what's a long-tail keyword? Let's say you have that, a long-tail keyword, meaning like digital marketing for plumbers in New York. That's a long-tail keyword. Like long tail means it's a lot of words, usually five plus words, like single words are the most valuable with the most volume. Once you get to five plus, it's kind of like long tail keywords that there'll definitely be some people on the internet that go to click to those. Lower volume, but crazy high intent. Yeah. Very cool. So those work really well. And how are brands now like starting to position themselves? So it sounds like, for example, like Reddit is one of these big sources.

16:31Dylan Ander:I know, I remember seeing Sam Altman was talking about YouTube was also another big source of information. Like there's, okay, so there's ChatGPT, there's Gemini, there's Perplexity, there's Claude, there's Manus, there's, you know, there's basically all these different models. How do you think, like, do they all pull from the same few sources? Are they pulling from different sources? Is there a way, is there like a central way to see how it shows up? Like, for example, there's that one software, I'm forgetting the name of it, where you can see how your Klaviyo email shows up across, oh, it's called Litmus, across like 46 different devices and browsers.

17:11Dylan Ander:You know, is there one of those for AEO? Is that how brands are doing it? Like, give us the one-on-one. Yeah, totally. So first off, the name, right? It's AI, so like trying to manipulate what is recommended in LLMs, whether Claw, Gemini, chat, whatever. So a lot of people call it GEO, AEO, AI SEO, AI search. It's all the same thing. So generative engine optimization or AEO is answer engine optimization. So like each of them have a name. I just call it GEO. I feel like it just rolls off the tongue easiest. So I'll say GEO for all intents and purposes for the rest of this episode, or AI, SEO, I say sometimes as well, just depending on who you're speaking to.

17:59So the art of getting your brand recommended on LLMs over other brands and your competitors. So that is what GEO is. That's just the TLDR. It's a big black box because people don't necessarily know what it is. But what I will say, the 80 % of this is ranking in the top 10 of Google. If you don't rank it somewhere near the top, it's not like one-to-one. So to answer your question about what these LLMs look for, we all know there's Bing as well. Bing actually has a good amount of search traffic as well. How come Bing doesn't have the same one-to-ten rankings as Google? Because they look for different things.

18:43They value different things. DuckDuckGo is another one that like in Asia is highly adopted. DuckDuckGo doesn't really share much in common with the top 10 on Bing, the top 10 on Google, because they have different things that they look for and value. So some of them may value, like I know one thing on Google that's huge is if you click from Google to a page or a website and you go back, that destroys your rankings. It means you didn't find what you wanted. Some people, you know, some search engines care how long they stay on the website. They scroll all the way down. They have tracking pixels, you know, like they know what's going on.

19:22So each of them look at something different. But that's search engines, meaning like you type in and you get static answers back. Now we're in the age of LLMs. In LLMs, there's two ways that you can get answers. Number one is from the training data set. But before most people knew about chat 3.0, I think was the first one that actually had an interface. I was using it with GPT-2, where it was only through API. So ever since there's been a UI front-end set, they just scraped all the internet and put together as much as they humanly could. And they update it every 12 to 18 months. So right now, chat, a lot of the times, if you notice, it thinks that it's the end of 2024 or early 2025 because that was the last time the training data set was updated.

20:20So the past 12 months and what's ranking number one today, if chat does not do any live search or Claude does not do any live search, what was ranking number one about a year ago is actually what's going to be coming up. Then the second option is the live search, where if you say, what are the current top earplug brands? Current or new or what is type stuff, that means shop, the LLM is going to go do a live search. And then there's something called the query fanouts, which like you might have heard of before, which is like what chat does is you can literally see it in the UI. I'm sure you've seen it used before where it'll take these really long questions, go Google them or go to Bing, right?

21:11Their Microsoft connection. That's how Bing matters. And you put them together, those super long tail ones, and then it'll give its answers based on that. So there's a mix of how do I get into the training data set? because that's like rent-free memory for the rest of forever. We don't know what UI is going to look like, whether it's wearables like a watch, whether there's something in your eyes. If Elon figures out how to make us like, you know, make Jarvis in our brains like sick. We don't know what UI, the future of UI is going to be. But all I know is that the training data set is going to be there for LLMs for forever.

21:47So all I think about is tying it back to the digital real estate of how brands should think about it. how do I get myself everywhere, literally touching everywhere and name a mention of something in as many places as humanly freaking possible? Because all these LLMs look for different things, which I'll go into in a bit more specific. But that's the reason why for these LLMs, you want to kind of be everywhere. Because if they see you in enough places, they're like content clusters. So like the way I say it is SEO used to be like two dimensional, Like there's backlinks and there's your website and backlinks to other websites.

22:24But now they're like content clusters, which is what I call GEO. It's like you have a YouTube video that's embedded on your website. Your website links to this, you know, third party resource. That third party resource is going to something else. You have a Medium article going to your blog. You have the Medium article that's going to your blog on Reddit as a link. Like they're kind of like these like clusters of associated content and it goes across websites. And that's how AI doesn't care what your domain is, just wants the best information. And that's how each of them look different. Like Wikipedia is one of the biggest sources for chat.

23:05If I make you a Wikipedia page, it's hard. You need good press first. You'll instantly start coming up in chat. It's crazy. Reddit, you'll start instantly coming up in Gemini and chat as well. For Claude, if you have.gov or.edu links, because they're very engineering focused, you'll go straight to the top. It's all like each of them are looking for something a little different. Obviously, chat has like tenfold the most volume. Gemini is coming up pretty quickly, though, actually. It's about like 40-ish percent of chat's volume, I believe, at the moment. So it's not nothing. Shopify brands, this is the one.

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24:10Dylan Ander:so in this case like your entire goal is to basically figure out where these platforms are constantly pulling their training sets or where they're looking by default and then and those might be also changing or evolving as time goes on and then trying to figure out how to place things in there so that when somebody goes for that long tail keyword it goes and ideally finds what you had placed in there. Precisely. And then the other cool part about it in that long tail is the reason parasite SEO, meaning like you make a LinkedIn article and then you send a bunch of backlinks to that LinkedIn article, or you push a couple of your assets to that LinkedIn article, that LinkedIn article can rank number one.

24:53Your website can be number three. Some random person's number two. You can also be number four with a Reddit post. So it's like you can actually dominate a lot of the SERP or the keyword, the search engine ranking. And if you dominate a lot of what's on the page, the LLM doesn't care who it's pulling from. It's really like three of those top four is your content talking about your brand. So the LLM is like, you just want to smother as many of the top 10. It used to be SEO used to be about clicks, bring in the money. Now it's like cover as much of the real estate on Google as you humanly can. And then you'll get into the LLMs.

25:36Dylan Ander:Yeah, that's very cool. So how, I guess like what, what do, what can like tactically, what can brands actually do right now to, to stay ahead of that? Because it sounds like one of them is just being pretty omnipresent as much as possible across YouTube, Reddit, blog content, you know maybe even like partnership opportunities uh have you ever recommended for example like a brand to go do a partnership with a government agency for that reason um i've never recommended it for that reason but if they're doing it it is a huge upside like tremendous upside so one thing i highly recommend um that anyone could do whether you're b2b or e-com brand right or or an agency to be honest.

26:25Actually, it works well for all of them. Go do like a really just bang and slamming piece of content that is research. Come up with like things that haven't been like connected before. Like AI won't be able to do it, right? It has to be kind of human. Like you've observed, like, you know, like let's say you do a poll of a thousand people. Like Nick, you have a pretty large Twitter following. Let's say you go on Twitter and you ask everyone like, what are you focused on in digital marketing right now? And you get 2000 answers, go make an entire article about that. You now get to say, here's some trends of the digital marketing industry in 2026.