Are you using AI the WRONG way in SEO?

0:00Eli Schwartz: Are you using AI the wrong way in SEO? If so, what precisely are you doing wrong and how should you be using AI correctly?

0:14Eli Schwartz: Hello and welcome to the October 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel asking whether or not you're using AI the wrong way in SEO. I'm your host David Bain and joining me today are four wonderful guests. So let's meet them starting off with Rejoice.

0:29Giulia Panozzo: Hi, I'm Rejoice Ajaku. I'm a senior content business specialist at Wise at the moment. So I'm really, really excited to be on this panel with everyone else. So thanks for having me.

0:41Eli Schwartz: Thanks so much for joining us, Rejoice. Also with us today is Julia.

0:44Sante Achille: Hi, my name is Julia Panozzo. I'm the founder of Neuroscientive, which is a neuromarketing consultancy based in London. And I'm super excited to have this conversation today because it's a topic that I deeply care about.

0:54Eli Schwartz: Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining us, Julia. And also with us is Eli.

0:57David Bain: Hey, everyone. Great to be here. Thank you for having me, Dave, and thank you all, Majestic. My name is Eli Schwartz. I'm the author of Product-led SEO, and I have been in SEO for about two decades. And the last bunch of years, I've been working with companies and helping them cover and discover their SEO strategies.

1:13Eli Schwartz: Superb. Thanks for joining us, Eli. And last but not least is Santi. Thanks for joining us, Santi.

1:18Rejoice Ojiaku: Good afternoon, everybody. Hi, everybody. It's great being here. It's a great pleasure to attend this panel and to have this open discussion with everybody. I'm a search marketing specialist. My specialization is SEO. And I've been doing it for more than two decades, actually. And I'm looking forward to having a great conversation today here with you all.

1:43Eli Schwartz: I'm sure it will be given our panel today. So let's not waste any time. Let's go to Rejoice for the first question. We'll try and ask all of our guests the same first question. And that is, what do SEOs typically get wrong when it comes to their use of AI?

1:58Giulia Panozzo: I think currently a lot of the biggest things, I think a lot of SEOs are sort of getting wrong. I think it's in two folds. I think the first one is sort of treating AI as a replacement for thinking rather than a tool that supports the thinking. So a lot of people are using AI to sort of jump straight into the answer. So we will see them ask about keywords, content ideas, search intent, even like competitor gaps. and I think that then they take that output as like a full face value but AI is really good at you know giving you something that sounds confident and another mistake that they do is they focus too much on output and scale and I think it's because AI makes things a lot easier to create you know a bunch of articles at a time and suddenly the question then becomes how much do we produce using AI rather than what should we actually produce so for me right now AI and SEO is to help you analyse faster and sort of help you spot patterns.

2:57Giulia Panozzo: But we still sort of need that human judgment, real search data, audience insights. So I think we shouldn't get too focused on outsourcing the thinking to AI, but instead we should use AI to sort of, you know, support our thinking better. That would be my answer to that.

3:13Eli Schwartz: Wonderful starting point. Julia, what do SEOs typically get wrong when it comes to their use of AI?

3:17Sante Achille: Yeah, I completely agree with Rejoice. I think where I currently struggle is conveying how important it is not to outsource our critical judgment to AI. Because it is true that to a certain extent, AI has democratized knowledge. So now we can do a lot of things, you know, that are maybe that were out of our depth back a few years ago. But to rejoice points as well, AI is very confident and sometimes it's very confidently wrong. So you need your own critical judgment to challenge the outputs, because otherwise, it's just like the same thing going over again. And a lot of that output sometimes can inform not necessarily better strategies, but rather actually very factually wrong tactics, wrong ways to reach your customer.

4:10Sante Achille: And another way I think that SEOs are using AI wrong is treating it as an output rather than a mean to an output. Sorry, an outcome, not an output. So for example, I see some teams attaching KPIs to AI usage, which I find mad. And I understand like the need beyond, you know, the need behind the efficiency. Like we want to scale things, we want to make things faster, we want to be the first at doing something but sometimes that's not the right way i feel like again when you take away the human connection from not only your own use of ai and like your team's um knowledge it's dangerous for the way that you also might reach your customers because they can tell like whenever something is ai driven i think it it creates a massive divide between you and your customers.

5:09Eli Schwartz: Amazing. A couple of points there I'd love to follow up on. But first of all, before we do that, let's get Eli's opinion on the initial question.

5:16David Bain: So I think that the biggest thing that everyone's doing wrong when they're approaching AI is they're looking to find and replace the words that they used for SEO and then replacing it into AI or AEO. So they're building citations instead of links. They're building prompts instead of keywords. They're measuring visibility instead of rankings. And I think it's a fundamental paradigm shift. And it's very interesting whenever I talk to actual SEOs about how they're approaching this. And then I ask them also how they're using AI. They're using AI as consumers, as we all do. But somehow when it comes to thinking like a marketer and thinking like SEO, they think that it needs to fit into this other bucket.

5:56David Bain: So do we actually click links and citations when they're mentioned in LLMs or not? Maybe. Right. It comes down to like what your category is and who you are and what you're clicking. So I think the biggest thing that people are doing wrong and something they always do wrong with SEO is they keep their marketer hat on and their consumer hat is not tight enough on their head. So I think when it comes to any marketing, really, you want to think like a consumer and then think, how would you sell to yourself or how would you sell to your family or how is someone you know going to interact with this new technology?

6:27David Bain: and it is a fundamental shift from the way SEO worked and should have worked for the last 10 years.

6:34Eli Schwartz: Amazing. Thanks so much, Eli. Santi, what are your initial thoughts?

6:39Rejoice Ojiaku: I think there is an excessive proliferation of, let's say, tools or tooling around the entire SEO process that has now been enabled thanks to all of the AI, the AI, whichever flavor of AI you're using. And you can see this on LinkedIn. I only actually, I'm only on LinkedIn, really. So from time to time, I go in and look. And there is an amazing amount of how-to-do, how-to's around things that are all AI-enabled, sometimes with scripts, sometimes with prompting, etc. So I think this is inflating and bringing to a new level of confusion the whole, let's say, SEO process, which really hasn't, at the basics, at the fundamentals, hasn't really changed all that much, I think.

7:43Rejoice Ojiaku: for example there's a lot of fuss I think useless fuss around researching keywords or fan out queries as they are called and I think that's a lot of wasted effort spinning your wheels really for no with no return because we all know that as people move to natural language, it's basically limitless the ways that people are going to be expressing themselves. So it's really like trying to predict the lottery. And so you just need to stick to the basics, the fundamentals of things to actually move forward, but try to understand at a deeper level what you're actually doing, because now you have an enabling technology that can allow you to go deeper into the things that you really need to know rather than trying to speculate on things that you may have access to but you don't really have enough know-how around and we really don't have as most of us SEOs we don't have the you know the in-depth knowledge to actually use that data to call an accurate

9:00Eli Schwartz: judgment amazing okay well incredible opening thoughts there we rejoice saying don't use ai for final strategy julia talking about um be careful about using for critical judgments and talking about um how it was concerning that some teams were using kpis to um ai usage um eli suggesting that it's really important to think like a consumer not like a marketer and santi talking about um there being limitless expressions nowadays and stop trying to predict the the lottery when it comes to targeting maybe certain keyword phrases. So, so much to dive into there. Julia, I think I'd like to explore a little bit more about your comment with regards to teams using KPIs for AI usage.

9:46Eli Schwartz: What do you mean by that?

9:47Sante Achille: Might have come across teams where if you don't use ChargPT enough in your work, you essentially lose your access because you're not reaching the quota to obtain access. Very weird. And yeah, I think I've come across other teams as well. And I work in other teams where AI is strongly encouraged. And I feel like it's dangerous, not only for critical thinking, but because paradoxically we are chasing more efficiency and more content but we create just slop that then we have to go in and you know correct or evaluate um because i think everyone right now can relate hopefully but um essentially when you get you know like now we get a lot of stuff done which is great but sometimes i might get some reports that are like a 10 pager of Claude's lop and I got to like pick out what it is uh what is the main message what is the main finding then maybe like I use AI myself to like shorten it because I don't have much time because now we've shortened the time that it takes it takes to do something so we are expected to produce more and at that point it becomes essentially agents trading information and it's no longer my specialism communicating something to another person who has a different background and a different set of specialties so yes I think my frustration with that is that we tend to yeah we tend to how do you say like we confuse efficiency for content produced or amount of content we produce and sometimes it's just like removing the human layer which is what we're hired for as people that have been you know in seo for so long rejoice let's get your

11:48Eli Schwartz: follow-up that to that to a certain degree because um you were talking about a related subject in that you shouldn't use ai to do too much i'm not sure if you use the phrase critical thinking but you were certainly talking about um strategy um side of it as opposed to the implementation of um of items that had been agreed already um so what's what's an example of an absolute no-no when it

12:13Giulia Panozzo: comes to um utilizing ai for um so i think um based on what julia sort of said when it comes to like the kpis i think for me it would be the kpi aspects of things um nowadays i think ai is really useful in helping us understand kpis but i just wouldn't let it i think now people are trying to let AI decide what success looks like for them and their business. And the danger we kind of get into is that AI, you know, we can give AI this goal, like, oh, you know, improve SEO performance, for example. And it will give you a list of reasonable metrics, like traffic rankings, impressions, and so on. But it doesn't necessarily understand which of these, those metrics absolutely matter to the business, because your business will be measured by different business goals.

12:57Giulia Panozzo: So as Julia said, it still requires judgment. So my huge no-no is when we are looking at data, we can't let AI determine what data is important for us. And I think a useful way to utilize AI, especially when it comes to data, especially when it comes to setting the standards for KPI, is that the KPIs that really matter has to be agreed beforehand, agreed with the team, agreed with based on the business goals and so on. And then we can use AI to kind of look at how we manage large amounts of data, because an AI can at least help us spot patterns or maybe flag unusual changes. And then we can then see and try to connect those different data points.

13:39Giulia Panozzo: So AI can do that for us because it could take a lot of time manually for us to do that. So instead of just telling me that organic traffic has dropped by 20 percent, what AI could help us do is investigate where that drop may have come from. So it quickens that process for us, but we still need to be able to measure that against our business benchmarks and measure that against business goals. So I do think that AI can be useful, but it's such a massive no-no to allow AI to determine what success looks like for us within the data sets that we are feeding it. So I think that would be my understanding around it.

14:16Eli Schwartz: Thanks so much. And Eli, I'd love to dig deeper into your piece of advice and thinking like a consumer. So what's the difference between thinking like a marketer and thinking like a consumer? And I guess, how can AI help with that? Yeah, go for it.

14:33David Bain: So I don't know if the group and everyone watching and listening has tried any of the AI assistants. So someone invited me to Instinct, the personal assistants. Someone invited me to Instinct a couple of weeks ago, and I'm absolutely hooked. So it's in my WhatsApp. I send it messages. I'm not even going to an LLM. So I think if you go to any SEO conference, there's all these presentations about how to do AEO or GEO or whatever it's called for ChatGPT. But how many of us are actually using ChatGPT versus speaking into Gemini or speaking into just Google search or typing into Google search or using Google Lens?

15:09David Bain: So that's what I mean, to really think like, how is someone in my industry going to be doing something like this? In my newsletter I'm publishing, tomorrow I talk about how important SEO is for what happens in personal assistants. And I think SEO is more important than ever. So the example I use in my newsletter, and this is something that I've been doing a lot of with my personal assistant instinct, where I take a picture of something and I just say, find me someone that will solve this problem for me. I'm looking for a vendor. I want to know how to get home. I want to know how to commute. What's the best time to leave my house?

15:45Eli Schwartz: You've muted yourself, I believe there. Have you?

15:48David Bain: It auto muted me because my microphone got messed up. So everything around what these personal assistants find is coming from websites and it's the way it finds these websites is SEO. So SEO becomes more important than ever to make sure that all these personal assistants are going to get this information. Now that's what I mean thinking like a consumer. So if you, whatever you're selling, if you're a plumber, that's the example I used in my newsletter, or if you have a SaaS software, or if you are selling consulting, which a few of us here do, how is it that people are going to find you? What is the medium they're going to use?

16:25David Bain: Like I know for myself, my SEO and my own personal consulting website is absolutely atrocious, but the way people are finding me is through word of mouth and through LinkedIn. So if I want to promote my own consulting, it's not about how do I jam keywords into my website or how do I get citations for AEO. It's really how do I double down on the things that are already driving things to me. The other thing that I might do around SEO is get people to read my book. Now, I'm not going to get people to read my book just because they Google for product-led SEO. They need to hear that from somewhere.

16:58David Bain: So these are all the things I mean when I think like consumer. like best practices. And I've been pitched by many people on how to do better SEO for my book. Yes, there are best practices to do. But in reality, and David, you've published a number of books, so you know this more than anyone. And I'm honored to participate in those books. The reality is the way people discover books is not because they Google for like, hey, I'd really love to read a book about SEO in 2027. Let me find what David Bain has written with Majestic. They are hearing it from somewhere else. So when you think like a marketer or think like a user how is it that people discover these books how do people discover these things and again think like how you would do it and then you can think about those inputs is there as much data

17:39Eli Schwartz: available when it comes to thinking like a consumer because you can imagine that thinking like a marketer is um is is data led and to a certain degree thinking like a consumer is a little bit more feeling and conversation orientated you have to find the right data so we're here with

17:54David Bain: Majestic. So I want to say you should be using Majestic. So there are things that you can do that will give you ideas about what people are searching for, but then you need to go and search them yourself and see what's there. So I wouldn't just build an SEO plan off a bunch of keywords. That's data that might not support what the customers are doing. You want to have those feelings and then use those feelings to validate the data. And if there is no data to validate what you think is happening, it doesn't mean it's wrong. I would say use data to validate, not data to build your strategy.

18:26Eli Schwartz: Santi, Eli mentioned keywords there. I'd love to get a few more thoughts on your limitless expressions that you were talking about earlier on. Again, from a data perspective, is it possible? Is it worthwhile mining limitless expressions or keywords just not what they used to be and you just need to write from a topic perspective?

18:49Rejoice Ojiaku: Well, I'd like to continue on this discussion around AIO and the flavors, let's say, of what is now the new standard that we find at what was the position zero and how to get there. and fundamentally things have not really changed all that much because if you go back to just, well, you stick to the principles of creating a page that addresses generic needs, like I have been recently doing work more around products, so I'm doing work in particular around Shopify, websites and I really haven't fussed at all chasing any of the trends around a AIO, GEO and whatever other several hundred flavors of that you can find in LinkedIn and elsewhere on the web.

20:04Rejoice Ojiaku: I've been following the basic principles of natural language processing, setting up a framework around a piece of content, and then sort of like engineering it in a way that it reflects a certain, let's say, a certain structure, and then addresses what people actually need to know or are curious to know around a certain product or a family of products. So let's say sticking to the your question, getting back to your question better, I really tend to take as an order of magnitude what's coming from my Google Search Console and really elaborating any kind of strategy around what I find there, which is really, let's say, grounding my performance to the work that has actually been done.

21:10Rejoice Ojiaku: And that's where, let's say, some AI can come in and help look at a set of 5 ,000 terms and then give a picture as Julia rightfully pointed out, you know, you need that 33 ,000 foot view on your data. That's where the power of AI can actually come in. And then I think I have a kind of particular view on these things because of my background, of my engineering background. So So this is all a modeling. You know, marketers and whoever is not technical doesn't really know much about the nuts and bolts that are under beneath all of this. So starting from natural language programming and moving on and as it evolved into neural networks, et cetera.

22:06Rejoice Ojiaku: that kind of let's see perspective and having the the background of somebody who actually needs to or had needed to predict the outcome of certain type in an engineering way so really designing things sheds a completely different light on all of this so I have a sort of like a very puzzled and worried look on a data set because I put some inputs in on one side and they come out on the other side. And the first question I ask myself is, how reliable is all of this? At most of what you get when you're talking about keywords is useless. You're chasing things that are completely ungrounded many times, not because of hallucinations or these kind of things.

22:59Rejoice Ojiaku: I think the recent models of the big LLMs are rather stable. So they don't really take you out on a ride if you ground them properly, if you provide a very stable, robust context for the algorithm to work with. So I think there's a lot of groundwork that maybe SEOs and in general people working with AI don't really provide because they're trying to use it as a tool to get back to what Rejoice was saying as a replacement for thinking. They want a quick answer. I think this is a big problem with society in general. You know, we want everything now. It has to be fast. And unfortunately, things don't work like that.

23:51Eli Schwartz: I guess we may, though, sometimes experience taking over a project when someone has been looking for the fast solution and we have to fix a lot of things or perhaps even backtrack a lot of things has anyone experienced working on a project like that where perhaps someone perhaps less experienced in the use of AI and SEO has started to create or implement a strategy that's just not beneficial at all and they've had to rein that in or change it entirely?

24:25David Bain: I've worked on a number of projects like that as a consultant. It's very difficult to come into something and be able to not scream out loud about how terrible the internal employees are doing things. So you need to come in and earn political capital and slowly say, hey, maybe it's not great that you have 10 ,000 pieces of AI content, or maybe share a link to something that Google said about AI content. I think that most companies I meet look at AI as some sort of magical silver bullet that gives them exactly what they want to get. So they feed all their data and then they get confirmation bias that their data says exactly what they want it to say.

25:08David Bain: Or they use AI to fire their entire content team and produce it all with AI. So I think most people that I meet have completely jumped the shark on doing everything the wrong way with AI. So to answer your question, David, is everyone. But as a consultant, it is very difficult to not prep all over everyone and say you're doing it wrong.

25:34Eli Schwartz: It sounds like an SEO's use of AI, to use another analogy, is what some people describe as the effect that money has. So money is a magnifier. If you're doing things wrongly, then you're probably going to do things more wrongly if you're doing things correctly. And then hopefully it can actually have a positive impact in your life. And it sounds like AI is like that. And in your example, Eli, 10 ,000s of pieces of AI content. Do you just get rid of it? Do you attempt to try and improve it and still see some value there to some degree?

26:10David Bain: Yeah, so I think that question is what's the value of the content? the um then we had this issue exist with programmatic seo before ai when i started my seo career and sante you've been doing this longer than me so you probably remember um the verb spun content where that was like the earlier version of ai where you just kind of found and replaced like different words and then you called it new and google thought it was new and article wizard here we go that's that yeah uh and then you posted your you stole content and then you spun it and then you posted it back on websites like eZine articles then you got backlinks like so that was just earlier version of manual AI and and now we have actual AI that content didn't serve any purpose it was completely useless so this new version doesn't serve any purpose it's completely useless now if you found something that serves a purpose like if you created uh if you are an e-commerce site and you had no product descriptions and used AI content to create product descriptions, that's not a bad use of AI.

27:12David Bain: But if you are, let's say, a review website and you used AI to create reviews of stuff you don't sell and things that you don't have any business talking about, probably a good idea to get rid of it. It doesn't serve any purpose and it'll likely get a site penalty. That's the thing I've seen more and more of. I see a lot of sites actually getting penalized. I think Glenn Gabe was one who coined the term Mount AI, where you see this rapid rise in traffic and then a rapid descent. So a lot of sites are having that. While they're having the rapid rise, they think they're very smart. They've created all this content and drives a lot of traffic.

27:48David Bain: And then that becomes the problem for them. So most of the time, yes, delete it. But if it is serving a purpose and the user actually would benefit from some of this AI content, then a decision has to be made.

28:00Eli Schwartz: Obviously, the AI that SEOs tend to use maybe center around ChatGPT, cloud gemini big llms um is there anything unique regarding those individual tools or maybe another tool that you'd like to mention that seos get particularly wrong i've got another use case but

28:20Sante Achille: it might not be related to one of the tools that you've mentioned but um so it wasn't really an essay to play what i was uh asked to weigh in on but i was asked what my thoughts were about scaling fake influencers with AI too. And the main goal that the, you know, the webmaster wanted to obtain was to obtain more authority. And I was like, yeah, no, that's the wrong way to go about it. People come to you because, or like people look for review because they want a shred of human, you know, perspective and authenticity in a sea of slop. So if you feed them with something that's fake, not only don't serve their purpose, but it's also like you actively erode the trust they can have in you.

29:08Sante Achille: And that's a misconception. I think that is quite popular in SEO that the only danger is the manual penalty, but there is the danger that we don't even see, which is erosion of trust. Like people will start to think that we're not legit. Therefore, they won't even look for us anymore. And that's something that is hard to prove because there's not much data that we can see other than like loss mainly in searches impression and so on but it's definitely a danger that's there so that's my like the the closest I've been to witnessing something that could have gone wrong for AI.

29:44Eli Schwartz: I'm just going to ask a few questions rather than directing them so please just jump in whenever you you feel that you'd like to add something. Another thought is in relation to automated publishing is is there ever is it ever a good idea to automatically publish either content or code from ai that that hasn't been reviewed by a human being and i think that's

30:10Giulia Panozzo: a yeah that's a huge risk to do um because i think with automation publishing like an agent to sort of give access to an agent that can change internal links can change you know of calls metadata, that one mistake might seem small. But if the agent is making hundreds of changes because you're doing automation publishing or it's just pushing out content, so that just tells me that there is no review within that workflow. There is no review to actually see if it's true to what you're trying to put out there. In terms of like automating or, you know, publishing content, sort of me working in content marketing within SEO, there has to be a brief.

30:54Giulia Panozzo: So if you're automating, you know, if the agent is automatically just sending things through, I question what data, what brief have you sort of given it? I think automation for repetitive, low risk work is fine. But for higher, the potential impact of change, I think the stronger the approval needs to be. So I would happily let an AI identify opportunities. I think that's fine. I think AI can, you know, recommend those changes or even prepare those changes. But for any significant live site changes, I would always say a human needs to say yes, that this makes sense. And then it can sort of go off.

31:30Giulia Panozzo: because what it's very hard to start recalling content back or having to go in and you know quickly make that change that automation should remove unnecessary work it shouldn't sort of remove the accountability we have when we are pushing out that that sort of content.

31:45Eli Schwartz: Rajoyce what's an example of a low risk activity where you wouldn't mind automating?

31:52Giulia Panozzo: So I wouldn't mind for example like if I had a particular page that needed I don't know different metadata meta title meta description I wouldn't mind necessarily feeding the agent a the guidelines around it and maybe feeding it the keywords I'm trying to sort of generate that for and for it to kind of automate and give me like a thread of descriptions that I can read through and then kind of review because the actual work of writing the actual work of you know thinking about different ways to sort of word it especially a lot of SEOs we're not necessarily copywriters at heart so we might you know need a bit more boost I'll automate things like that I'll automate minor changes that is very sort of low risk whether it is a case of looking at you know spotting different canonical tags that are not self-referencing those tiny things but anything that I think needs to be published live on the site which shouldn't be automated for the agent to push it through without it sort of having that final approval from a human so I think I think automate the process automate the actual lead up to it but never actually automate work that needs to sort of go live and because then it just shows a bit more you know that we're callous and we're not thinking about the user in mind if we're just constantly you know trying to publish so many articles and the agent is sort of doing it on you know on this wheel we're not thinking about the consumer at all.

33:18Giulia Panozzo: We're just trying to push content for pushing content sake.

33:21Eli Schwartz: Has anyone seen an increase in Greer hat SEO powered by AI? So the creation of fake digital footprints, reviews, offsite citations, something intended to trick LLMs?

33:33Sante Achille: I think so. Yeah, I think you can tell that now everyone tries to leverage that because no one wants to be left behind, even though like we know that necessary is not the best way to act. And to be honest, like, if so, for example, I know, like Eli, my site is atrocious for myself, being an SEO and all that, like, I, you know, like, I've always been wanting to change it and to refresh it. And yesterday, I was trying to get Claude to redo my site. And I couldn't like, I couldn't connect with it, because it just looks like everyone else's. And I know that we're trying to, you know, make sure that we, we leverage AI to, you know, to feed the information about us, but sometimes it just flattens the experience.

34:27It flat like it makes us just more equal to everyone else.

34:31Sante Achille: And we spent as marketers years trying to stand out in a sea of other choices. And now we just settle for mediocrity because it's more efficient, because we see everyone else as well, like producing more and, you know, maybe like their site is more sleek. At the end of the day, though, I think, yes, we've seen a rise in that. But I also think that we are slowly seeing not a rejection, but people are being more careful now because they know that you can tell when a site is done with cloud, you can tell when something goes wrong, because not necessarily all of the SEO guidelines are put in place.

35:12Sante Achille: Sometimes the site breaks. Where does it come from? People don't know. So yeah, but I'm interested in knowing what the other panelists have seen.

35:21David Bain: I think that's an interesting point, Julia. I actually think that there's no problem with having cloud sites because what AI does is it raises the baseline. So everyone has to have something. So the same way LinkedIn raised the baseline that you don't need like the most well-designed resume, let's call it, or most well-designed personal brand online, everyone had LinkedIn. and then you just put in whatever you want and it may be a little content, it's baseline. So I think having a Claude site, and you and I are probably guilty of this if we have bad sites, that would be the baseline. If you are a business or a consultant or whatever you are, you need to have a web presence under your name and you need to have a site and Claude would be the baseline.

36:01David Bain: You can over-design it or make it better designed and that's good. And I think the same applies for content. If you have a service website, you have to have reasonable content. There are so many examples of terrible websites with terrible content. And I think the future is you can't have terrible content. It's fine for it to be AI. Again, we're not talking SEO. We're talking just to communicate with your readers and your users what you do. It's fine to be AI. You can go above and beyond and put a voice in it. And I think Claude or Chattrubut or Gemini is going to give that baseline. And I think from a content standpoint, I mean, I use Substack for my newsletter.

36:36David Bain: I there are many like if I wanted to make my life hellish I could put my newsletter on MailChimp and create my own HTML template and do all that but Substack again gives that that template where it's very easy to manage all of it all I have to do is write and send there isn't a lot of customization I could do when it comes to images and styling but it's the same so I think customization is is uh going above and beyond but that's the probably the best thing that'll come of out of AI AI is you can do a lot of these basic things very easily with very little effort.

37:06Sante Achille: I'm interested in knowing now if you've seen or and that goes for the entire panel, but for example, I'm a very worthy person. And whenever I write content, it doesn't necessarily come out the way that a customer would, you know, like would pick the main headlines and appreciate it. So I've, you know, I've heard from other people. Well, just use AI to like, you know, make it more consistent. And sometimes I do, and then the output just doesn't sound right in my voice, but it surely gets better, right? But I'm interested in knowing if anybody has done tests where they have put AI content and fully human content to the test.

37:46Sante Achille: So AI assistant versus human and seeing the results, not only on citations, were mentioned and so on, but in actual traffic.

37:56David Bain: I may have a different example. maybe someone else has experienced this, but a client was delaying paying me. And I sent the appropriate emails and they ghosted me. So what I did was I wrote a really nasty email in Gmail about what I thought about their delaying paying me and how long it was taking them and why they were ghosting me. And then I told Gemini in Gmail to fix it, be appropriate and passive aggressive. And then end with like, and I told you so like, this is what's going to happen if you don't pay me. And they paid the next day. So my wordy email would have ended up in a Twitter thread or something like that.

38:32David Bain: But here, it accomplished what I wanted. I obviously edited with Gmail output. So I think that's the thing is you can take this content. It is better. It's so much better than anything we come up with on our own, unless we're Shakespeare and we're amazing writers. So you take your terrible content, you put into AI, it reframes your thoughts or reorders things. You can agree or disagree, but you're no longer starting with a blank comments or just emotion.

38:58Eli Schwartz: That's a great point there. I'd love to just ask one quick follow-up point in relation to what Julia and Eli was saying there. And you're talking about clod sites. Julia, you were saying they're easily identifiable. What aspect about these sites are easily identifiable? And are you talking about any type of sites um for instance you can use clod to create a wordpress theme or something else what aspect about it makes it so easily identifiable and what is negative about

39:26Sante Achille: this yeah i mean to be honest there's nothing wrong again i'm not the mona is a clod because most likely what i'll need to do before my next uh conference you know like i want to have a nice site which is not the one that i put on in 2023 so i might do it myself but i think what makes me identify a cloud site is just the fonts look the same. Even when I try to prompt it differently, it just looks like everything else I've seen normally. And there's always the, like, the tiny dots to start the sessions. And again, you can prompt it differently, right? So it's not a matter of like, yeah, don't use cloud because you can't have your personality shine.

40:06Sante Achille: Fine. It depends on prompting um I think where it sounds wrong to me for my own like purposes is that I don't want to be like again I want my personality my work to come out and maybe that's the way to have it done uh nicely and fast for sure because we don't have like a lot of the time we spend on clients as consultants so we don't really have the time to go and you know fix all of the tiny things in our SEO. But yeah, I feel for me is more matter of perception. So if I look, and if I sound like everyone else, why should anyone decide to go with me instead of some other consultants? So that's my challenge.

40:53Sante Achille: Again, that's something that I've noticed in how I approach websites. But I think, to your point, if it's something that's only visual, and then there's the experience and the background and the content to back up on the experience and the value that you can provide then i i think you know it might be a tiny friction for somebody that feels strongly about ai but in the end uh it can still serve the purpose let's um finish off by asking all our

41:22Eli Schwartz: panelists a closing question and get them to confirm who they are and where you can find them So we'll start off with Rejoice. Rejoice, what's one positive thing that SEOs need to start using AI for right now?

41:36Giulia Panozzo: Sorry, I was muted.

41:40Oh, I don't know.

41:41Giulia Panozzo: I think it kind of varies. I would say for me, the main one positive thing would be to use it for pattern spotting across large amounts of data. I think that would be very, very helpful. So, for example, you know, you could give AI a lot of like your search console exports, keyword data, content performance or core data and just ask it to help identify patterns that would most likely take a longer time to do or spot manually. I think, you know, it can actually help answer things like which pages, which page types are losing visibility or which topics are growing. so I think that is where AI is really really useful because as SEOs we do deal with a lot of data and sometimes it can be quite difficult and you know time consuming to spot those patterns so using AI to do that would be yeah would be really really good I think use AI to find the signal faster and not to make this decision for you so that would be my one positive take but you can find me on like LinkedIn with Josie Jaku I'm always happy to connect with other marketers and sort of speak about AI and any new ideas and new concepts that are sort of going around in that industry.

42:51Giulia Panozzo: So that's where you can find me.

42:53Eli Schwartz: Superb. Thank you, Rajoy. So, Julia, what's one positive thing that SEOs need to start using AI for right now?

42:58Sante Achille: I think automating the tasks that we do and they take a lot of time otherwise on the regular. So, for example, I use Cloud to replicate an Netlify site that does causal impact analysis, which is something that I do very well, but it also takes a lot of time. So anytime there's a project shipping, then it feeds into the causal impact analysis and it has an archive of where the most impact was generated. So I think that's a great use of AI. Again, my challenge with that is that I had to prompt it correctly and I had to keep spotting errors but that's because i was outsourcing my knowledge and um you know like maybe there were spots where claude was getting wrong but if you do master a process and it takes a long time to do on the regular just use ai to automate that lovely julian where people get a hold of you sorry uh linkedin uh and then neuroscientist.com which by tomorrow might look different thanks to claude who knows thanks so much uh eli um what's one positive thing that

44:00Eli Schwartz: as you need to start using for AI?

44:03David Bain: I think that AI is very, very helpful with pattern matching. So upload a bunch of your data and find a pattern. So find out if there's a city like that most of your users are coming from or more of your users are coming from, if there's a keyword, a landing page. So I know all of us have done this where we sit and stare at Google Search Console or stare at analytics and try to like discern a pattern, but quickly drop all of that into any AI platform and find patterns. and then you'll go down different rabbit holes and find other patterns and upload more data. So that would speak to what I mentioned earlier about understanding your users.

44:37David Bain: So find those patterns. You'll have more dimensions on who your users are. You can find me on LinkedIn, of course, and subscribe to my newsletter at product.seo.com.

44:45Eli Schwartz: Lovely, thanks Eli. And also with the studio, Santi. Santi, what's one positive thing that SEOs need to start using AI for right now?

44:53Rejoice Ojiaku: So my call is a little bit more technical based on my experience that I've been having and I have developed over the past couple of years at least, I find that it can be a very powerful tool to actually increase productivity and efficiency of the entire, let's say, SEO process by creating bespoke procedures that clients can actually use internally so that they do the heavy lifting internally and I as a consultant from the outside can look at the more high-level strategic stuff. And this sort of like blends into a trend that I was able to talk about and people agreed with me in a meeting I had just a few days ago in Rome with IT companies that develop software.

45:53Rejoice Ojiaku: And there was a consensus with the people that I actually spoke to who agreed on the fact that there is a market that is probably emerging where middlemen who know the company, who know the processes, who know the behaviors, who know the people within an organization, can actually create what I call procedures. and these procedures then can be industrialized once they have been consolidated by iterating with the company and then they can be handed to companies who develop software to create a product out of that. This is now possible within SEO and I can give you a concrete example as my last consideration.

46:43Rejoice Ojiaku: For example, Shopify, if you have a huge catalog, well, huge, a big catalog, tens of thousands of products. With the help of AI and obviously some background knowledge in coding and the technical ins and outs of the platform, I was able to automate the full SEO of all of the products. and I did that based on the people that work internally within the organization. So it was really bespoke based on the person that was physically doing it, based on their level of knowledge and their capability to interact with the tool that I created, let's call it that way. And now I have a full procedure that goes from automating the images all the way to the creation of the product.

47:39Rejoice Ojiaku: description and the collection description that can be ultimately created into a product per se that is bespoke to that particular also organization so SEO can have a completely different look and feel right now where you go from a hot let's say a an industrialized approach to the products that we now have on the market to a very micromanaged level where people like us who do consulting can deploy very, very specific kinds of procedures that are a perfect match, let's say, for each organization. And so for anybody interested in talking about this and anything else around AI related to SEO, I'm Santi Aquile.

48:30Rejoice Ojiaku: Probably the best way is to catch me on LinkedIn or metricdrivenmarketing.io.

48:38Eli Schwartz: Superb. Thank you so much, Santi. I've been host David Bain and you've been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com slash webinars. And of course, check out SEO in 2026.com too. Bye-bye for now. Thank you.

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54:26Eli Schwartz: Thank you.