The State of AI in SEO (Part 3)

0:00The State of AI in SEO Part 3

0:07Well hello and welcome to the September 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel. Now this happens to be the third part in our State of AI in SEO series, an unintended series part of the Majestic SEO Panel. Now, we did our first episode essentially with these same wonderful panelists back in 2024. We did one in 2025, so I thought, wow, we haven't done one this year. So let's do something similar this year. So let's meet those four great guests that were also on the previous episode, starting with Garrett. Hello, David. Garrett Sussman. I am the Director of Marketing of iPollRank. Thanks for having me and great to be back.

0:45Thanks so much for joining us again, Garrett. we didn't scare you off too much last time and neither katerina uh thank you for joining skaterina thank you and hello everyone nice to be back well thanks for for joining as well katerina do you want to shout out where people can find you online and um yes you will find me on linkedin and and uh currently working at white press as well and doing seo consultancy so but you can find me in all the social media channels. Superb. Also with us today is Pam. Hi, I'm happy to be back. I'm Pam from Pamian Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics and soon to be a new AI powered SEO platform called Contelrate.

1:28But more on that next year. So anyway, thanks for having me back. Superb. And also with us today is Nitin. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be back here. I'm Nitin, founder and chief SEO slash AEO, GEO, whatever you call it, consultant. and they are looking forward to this conversation. Let's see how many acronyms we can get in today. Thank you for joining us, Nitin. And last but not least is Tejasvi. Great to be back for the third series. So yeah, so nice to be among all the amazing greats like Gavrit, Nitin, Pam and Katerina and yourself, David. So yeah, I'm working on some really cool, exciting AI topics on the e-commerce space.

2:08So definitely a lot of interesting insights that I'd like to share and learn from you all today. Lovely. Okay, I'll stay with you, actually, in terms of the first question, Jazwi. What would you say is the biggest change that AI has had on SEO over the past 12 months? I think the largest change has mainly been the mass adoption among all industries across all different verticals. So there's a deluge of information that might not necessarily be the best always, but so you end up getting a lot of noise. So trying to swift through the noise, trying to swift through all the latest rapid changes that are going on in the AI landscape and trying to keep abreast with the best practices is proving to be quite a challenge among the industry folks.

2:53So getting a better grip of itself, having your first-hand experience in testing and making sure that you can apply certain knowledges and validate certain hypotheses by yourself is kind of becoming ever more important. So that's pretty much where we are at at the moment. Lovely. Okay, so let's try and go in reverse order here that we had initially. So Nitin, what would you say is the biggest change that AI has introduced to SEO over the last 12 months or so? Yeah, I think if you talk about last 24, maybe 36 months, everyone was talking about AI. But I mean, when it comes to adoption of that, right, people are a bit skeptical.

3:30Still, they were talking about SEO first, right? But now, instead of talking about clicks, right, everyone is talking about will my brand be mentioned or cited, right? So they have accepted it. It has become the default KPI and not an add-on KPI anymore. So yeah, it's good to see because search behaviour has also changed and good to see that people are adopting that. They're also talking about how to rightly measure, you know, the impact of AI that you have on your marketing channels. So yeah, good to see that. And that I think is the biggest and the most positive change I've seen in the industry in the last 12 months.

4:07Lovely. So we'll dive into these topics, you know, starting off with how search behaviour has changed just in a moment there. but katrina um what's your thoughts on that initial question uh how search behavior has changed well of course when everyone starts to use more and more these ai tools you can even see when you search i don't know for travel tips yourself like you become a bit too lazy even to ask google like you go straight to your ai tool and just you don't even have time to like look for the answer in Google and search for yourself. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people are using more and more the AI tools.

4:45So I guess, yeah, I guess it's changing. Okay, so people are actually actively using AI to search now. Pam, what has been the biggest change that AI has ended up having on SEO over the last 12 months or so? So it's hard to pick one, but I didn't mention the measurement aspect. And I think that just as far as my perspective of like what I'm hearing from my clients, what their, you know, shareholders are kind of pushing them to find out is more about the measurement and the challenges around the kind of black hole that exists in a lot of these platforms. You know, we can't get impressions from ChatGPT or Claude.

5:28Thankfully, we can get a little bit of that data out of Google and Bing now, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. but meh. And so everyone's turning to these LLM citation tracking tools. But the problem with those is you have to think about every question that anyone may ever ask in every way they ever may ask it. Now, I've always had a bone to pick with keyword tracking platforms over the years of traditional SEO, because even then, you know, it's too hard to think of every keyword variation. and if you pick just a subset are you tracking a good statistically significant subset or not you don't know um so that's why you know i always liked looking at all of the queries in like search console where you see everything and you don't just pick which ones to track but now we're like back to that spot where like everyone's like trying to figure out well how do i track the only thing i can do is set up one of these trackers but then i have to think of every prompt on the plan that somebody might use about my topic.

6:30And that's a lot harder than every keyword on your topic. So that has been a big topic of discussion I'm hearing lately. And Gareth, what are your initial thoughts? Oh man, last is tough. Everyone said all the good stuff, but just to reiterate, first off, like 12 months doesn't exist, right? Like time is all blended together. I like how it was like, yeah, 24, 48 months, but big things are volatility. You know, volatility is the new status quo, the whole idea of any sort of deterministic top 10 rankings isn't a thing anymore. I think the whole industry has matured. As mentioned, the way we frame it, the way we think about the value of AI search, the way that we're trying to approach strategy, everyone has starting to put their plans in place.

7:13The three other big things, personalization, I think has become more significant. I think we're talking more about agents, even though that's not a thing yet. And then the final thing I would say is just the way that we approach, and this kind of speaks to what Pam was saying, is fan out queries. The idea that when someone searches, you now think about the 10, 20, 30 related searches that will influence what the output is. And I think that changes our strategy as opposed to simple keyword focus. So what hasn't changed? What has changed? We still don't have AI mode as the default in Google either.

7:48So that hasn't changed yet. So something that Nitin mentioned is about AI overviews and about traffic as well, and maybe how much organic traffic isn't actually going through to websites anymore because it's just staying on the SERP. So Garrett made a formal complaint about being last time. So Garrett, would you like to start that one off, please, sir? You're calling me out. You're calling me out. Well, I think thinking about the maturity of our industry and the way that we frame the value of traffic, I think it's really challenged. Even though a lot of it is still messy and ambiguous, kind of what Pam was saying in terms of how we track everything, tying it to business revenue and understanding that even if traffic is decreasing, people still need to discover and buy products.

8:36And so being able to tie your SEO efforts towards the ultimate bottom of the funnel value, I think, has become a more mature focus of a lot of organizations, even though the reality is a lot of us are still figuring it out. Okay, listen, I'll come to you now because you touched on that subject. So what is it about perhaps zero click results that is becoming more prevalent now? And how does an SEO deal with that? Yeah. So talking about intent, the kind of intent you see in the queries, right? So information intent is totally gone. And for all the right reasons, right? So as a user, you know, I'm very impatient, right?

9:15I'm becoming more and more impatient like everyone else as well. So if I have a query where I'm expecting some answer, right, and I get the answer, which is fast mapping my requirements, right, without clicking anywhere, I'm happy. But when it comes to transactional, right, so we're not there yet. We're getting there, of course. I mean, Google recently spoke about universal protocols as well and the genetic workflows. I think that's going to change the game altogether. But for the time being, I think it's mostly informational intent queries which are impacted. Your transactional is impacted as well.

9:50But the clicks you're getting, they are much more educated, right? So conversion is much better. So we have seen like for brands, the traffic drop by 50%, right? Information is almost zero now. But when it comes to conversion, it's much better. And how we are looking at those numbers, it's now very different, right? We look at citations. And there was a recent study by SEO Interactive as well, where they mentioned if your brand is cited more, the CTR is much better actually, right, than the normal case. So I think that was pretty good, right? I mean, we are talking about this and that there was a lot of data that they crunched to publish this report.

10:33And yeah, I think that is the reality of today. So yeah, this is where I see the current state of art there. When you talk about when you do get traffic, you probably get higher quality traffic. Do you mean that because traffic converts better, the amount of business that a brand gets at the end of the day is probably actually the same pre and post the introduction of the expanded overviews on the SERP? Yes, absolutely. Because if we talk about like what was happening maybe four years back, I was looking at multiple products in multiple tabs. I was comparing, I was checking, you know, like pros and cons all at the same time.

11:13But now I use LLM for that, right? It does a job for me. And then I'm like, okay, now I'm convinced I want this specific product. And then I go to an e-commerce, for example, I know what I'm getting, right? So I don't have to spend more time. So even my time on site has decreased, right? But that is not a bad factor in this case, because I am convinced already, I'm educated already. And then I would click and convert. So essentially, the number of clicks this brand is getting, right, for more educated users and then converting. So essentially, your final KPI, which is revenue, is looking good.

11:46Kajazu, are you seeing certain industries more impacted by this than others? I believe e-commerce industry definitely has seen major strides when it comes to the user behavior. Like Nathan rightly touched upon, the type of queries you'd get on AI search engines versus Google is massively different, right? And also the same query that a user types wouldn't necessarily be the same way another user would type into ChatGPT, for example. There's always going to be different variations. And the idea of going towards zero clicks and eventually into like share of brand mentions and share of voice along with getting cited is going to be the new metrics that you'll be looking at, which will ultimately drive your conversions.

12:30Now, one of the reasons why I believe e-commerce has a significant play here is because one is the education side of getting your product aware of. So when you're looking for a Bluetooth speaker, you might prompt in certain key factors like it should have noise cancelling, it should be noise canceling. It should have a longer battery life. And these are some things that you would have to like manually scroll through different pages and try to get the right headphones. Or you could, you could have in the previous days, you could be biased into purchasing a certain product by looking at certain review sites back in the day.

13:09But now you try to get like some sort of a middle ground where you can filter out the noise. The AI gives you like a list of products based on your key factors and then you get to pick and choose which one you'd like looking at the pricing as well and the delivery time and so on so the like like nathan rightly mentioned if you have all the attributes clearly checked out and surf isn't exposed to ai agents the likelihood of your conversions doing better is significantly higher than any other e-commerce site that might not have the attributes exposed to AI agents. So I think the definitive industry that is seeing a major impact positively to a greater extent, as well as negatively, if you're not necessarily playing the game right, is in the e-commerce space, because it has a direct impact on your revenue cycle.

14:02The second industry I can think of is obviously the news side of things. So if you're getting news articles, for example, from AI agents in order to monetize through subscriptions, there's definitely going to be an impact in terms of getting visibility for the right intent for the right audience on the informational space, because it's just a very competitive market. So trying to find some sort of a middle ground there where you have to balance your subscription model versus gate locking your content versus what kind of content you'd want to expose to users having a direct impact in terms of your visibility on AI search engines as well.

14:40So I think these two industries have like a lot on their plate to essentially try to solve as you go into this cycle even more deeper. Brilliant. Okay, thank you. Katerina, shall we maybe move on slightly? So obviously, we've been talking about the industries impacted by what AI has done on the SERP, the expanded overviews, the effect that this has on clicks. But there's another opportunity, of course, to optimize your presence within AI search, within AI answers. So for answer engine optimization, is this a genuinely new discipline that we have to learn? Is there something different that we have to do here?

15:21Or are many of the skills that we have for SEO just optimizing our existing pages sufficient for this? Well, I would say, well, you still need to do SEO and like good SEO because LLMs, they are also like when they are doing real time searches, they are going into the SERPs and finding pages and finding information. So if you are ranking there, it's better chance that you will also be mentioned in the AI. it's kind of the same but then if we go into like the tactics there are maybe specific tactics that help you get your brand into the LLMs as an answer then like yeah if you are doing on-page SEO maybe you get your articles like as a source in the LLMs but if you are focusing more on building your brand on third-party sites and like being in listicles being outside of your own website then it's higher likely that you that that ai will pick your brand as an answer and is there one optimization tip that you'd like to give with regards to um getting into these um ai answer engines?

16:45Well, what I've worked with a lot this spring is the off-page side of things. So working into, yeah, getting into articles and listicles and these and taking one query at a time and just build your off-page authority. It really helps. Pam, how different is answer engine optimization and what do SEOs need to learn for that discipline? Well, I think Katerina just spelled it out kind of perfectly if the off page part of things i mean brand is the new backlink you have to build a brand a whole brand way more way beyond just getting other reputable and relevant websites to link to yours that still very much matters as she pointed out the llm's just searching google and ping for you for the most part so all the traditional seo stuff still matters.

17:37It's just kind of been re-weighted, I guess I would say. Content structure, you know, proper H tag structure and stuff has gone from, you know, it used to matter to, oh, it was a thing in the past to now it matters again because the machines, you know, machine readability, machine digestibility certainly helps. So anything that's good for ADA compliance is good for LLM compliance, or compliance, but LLM optimization. And so it's just the efforts to build the brand as a whole, get people talking about the brand. These LLMs are engineered to trace information back to an original source. And they like human original sources.

18:20And everyone complains about how much Reddit gets exposure in these things. But I mean, think about it. It's humans talking about brands and actual experiences that new E that we have experience that they had with the brand. And so getting that talking going on, yes, getting other publications to mention you, of course, but really, truly getting brand strength growing, getting actual people talking about your brand is online is so, so crucial now. So I don't think that anything has dramatically changed per se, but like things got re-weighted. And I guess from a client's perspective, I guess they feel like a lot has changed because they have to look at building the brand more holistically than ever before for SEO slash AEO purposes, not just for branding purposes.

19:14They've kind of merged. All that to say, if you already do have a strong brand, you're probably positioned pretty well, especially in a strong e-commerce brand. All the things that we were just talking about before, about the research that goes into the product of chatting with the LLM and the kind of pre-research does increase the conversion rate. But also like one very well-established household name brand client that we have, they are experiencing now, I guess what I'll call zero click conversions because they launched Shopify's UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, that allows LLMs like Chachi to just place an order for a client.

19:55And I was shocked at how much it's already being used by users, they're purchasing products through LLMs, like zero click to the website. Obviously it's a small fraction of their entire conversions, but I was really like shocked, like, wow, this many people are purchasing products by saying, hey, ChatGPT purchased that product for me, done. Zero click conversion. So anyway, I was kind of all over the place there, but there's some thoughts on all of that. All over the place is good sometimes as well, but maybe we can get Garrett to maybe define something a little bit more. Or what I was thinking, Garrett, is obviously there are lots of different LLMs.

20:35You've got GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you've got loads of different opportunities to optimize for. are you seeing any different requirements for different LLMs or do we just simply have to have the right things in place for all of them? Yeah so I would say they all have nuances to them they all have like the the big considerations which is what is and and and Pam and everyone kind of was touching on this it's like what is the index they're pulling from so you know we want to know, are they going to Google as their source of index in terms of being recommended rankings that's not just purely based on the training data?

21:16That's the biggest distinction for me is we still have a lot of queries or searches that doesn't necessarily go out to the internet and just makes a decision based on what the LLM has been trained on. The next level of that is called retrieval augmented generation, which is when it does go out and goes to Google's index or Bing's index or supposedly, allegedly, OpenAI is building their own index, which at some point could throw a whole other wrench in our gears. How those are feeded into the output, I think matters. There's nuance there. I think in terms of personalization, memory matters. So the way that Gemini takes your history, your search history, any information that you fed it and incorporates that into the answers is going to be slightly different than the way that ChatGPT does it.

22:10And then ultimately, when it does go directly to your site, there's always been a lot of conversations about JavaScript rendering, the extent to which it understands the actual content on your website. And so there are nuances there. When it comes to e-commerce, the different feeds that it pulls in, there's been a lot of talk about OpenAI's feed that came out, I guess it's like six months ago, maybe longer times a flat circle, but like the idea of where it's getting its product source information is going to be different. So to answer your question, there are a lot of fundamentals that are similar, but there's definitely nuances platform to platform and depending on your industry and your business, that might influence your strategy a little bit or significantly platform to platform.

22:54Listen, back in the earlier days of SEO, there were many sources of traffic in terms of search engines. Then it all seemed to funnel into Google. At one stage, depending on where in the world you were, perhaps up to 96 % or so of traffic just came from Google. Now it seems to be diversifying again. How much traffic is actually obtainable from these AI search engines? Have you got thoughts on percentages or figures of traffic that certain industries are actually receiving from AI at the moment? Well, I don't have any percentages, right, because it varies a lot from industry to industry. And even within the industry, if you talk about different LLMs, right, you would see huge variance when it comes to a certain type of industry versus, you know, the other one.

23:45So I think what's important is, one, you cannot just look at one LLM, right? So if you look at all these AI visibility trackers like Peak, the one that we're using right now, so you would also see that they're also giving you options to check for Gemini, ChartGPT, Perplexity, and all of that. And when you see the numbers there, they vary completely as if it's a different ballgame altogether for different LLMs. So personalization definitely plays a huge role, but there are so many other factors which influence the kind of results you're getting, and they're changing at a very fast pace. So you cannot just look at one LLM, right?

24:22You have to look at all of them. So I think talk about KPIs like, you know, share of model, right? And share of, you know, the weather, how much traffic you're getting from search engines versus LLM. So you have to look at all of that. And you have to keep an eye on those numbers. You cannot just ignore some of that because the industry is changing. The way people are adopting these tools, it's changing a lot. I've seen like a lot of AI experts. So today they would say, hey, you know, Cloud, for example, launched Fable. I'm never going back to any other LLM. Tomorrow they would say, hey, you know, OpenAI launched a new model.

24:57I'm not going back to Cloud anymore, right? So it's changing a lot the way people are using, the users are using these tools and how they are using for different use cases. So I use four different LLMs, four different use cases, right? For my personal, I have a different one. For professional, I use Cloud. for cloud, go work for almost everything, right? So I have different use cases and they work great for those use cases. But for others, right, it's not standard. For others, might be the mix would look a bit different, but they would also have different LLM footprint use cases. So I think you need to keep an eye on all of those trackers and it's very important to understand the kind of traffic you're generating.

25:39So understanding that attribution is very, very important. So that's AI in relation to appearing in search. Pam, I believe you touched on expertise. So shall we maybe talk a little bit about EAT and perhaps the abundance of content that can be created from AI and how to differentiate what you do based upon EAT and other means? Oh, I can talk more than a little bit about this, but I'll try to keep it to a little. So the EAT acronym that we've been told by Google is a guideline for the content we should create for a long time is expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. around the time of, I think it was, I don't remember exactly.

26:29It was about the same time that ChatGPT came out that Google announced their new quality rater guidelines. It was a very close point in time. And the new quality rater guidelines, well, first of all, when they announced them, they explained that, you know, what they added was this new E, which is experience. So So they even gave an example of like, when you're reading content, like, is this person talking about an experience that they had with a product, with a service, with a place that they went to? And then I tried counting, but I lost count of how many different references to experience they added to the quality reader guidelines.

27:05I stopped at like 40 something. I was like, all right, I made my point. It's all over the place in there. They really want you talking about your real world, firsthand human experiences that led to you getting your EA, your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So where were you? Like back in the past, how did you start? Where did you learn? What case studies, decision points that you came to in a project or in a career, just anything that you can use to ground what you're saying in your own reality is really what they want you to be doing. and honestly like i said before it's how llms work anyway they um so so garrett mentions you know some of the the technical terms like pulling from memory or using rag when when they use rag to go out to the web and pull like more recent information than their memory that's also called grounding so they're trying to ground what they're saying you know they're like well i kind of know this from my memory but let me let me go get the latest and greatest you know proof of it and ground what I'm saying.

28:13We need to ground everything we say. Now, it is all too easy for the internet to just get firehosed with bland, generic AI slop regurgitations of other AI slop articles all day, every day. That is just the majority of what's going to be hitting the internet. But the way you're going to stand out, again, reference Reddit, people get annoyed how much Reddit gets ranked and cited, but it's humans talking about their E, their experiences. So you can even, you can use AI to outline the bones of an article and make sure you cover the topic comprehensively, but make sure you're putting, I'm calling it that vitamin E on there.

28:54Sprinkle that vitamin E in there. Talk about how you personally or your team, it's trickier with a brand, but still your team, your brand how you as a person whatever how where when what what did you learn and how where did you get it from what experiences did you get it from so we need to ground everything we say in that we'll have a further discussion about eat and how you can demonstrate um that within your content to hopefully better surface your content within llms but i'd also like to touch on technical SEO for AI. So, Tijazwi and Katrina, I'll give you both the options of which of those topics to major on next.

29:44So, Tijazwi, would you like to talk about technical SEO for AI or expand further on EAT for your content for AI? I'm happy to take whatever Katrina offers me. So, go ahead. Anything works for me as well. so you can start all right so then i'll choose technical seo because that's that's something that i love uh doing so yeah so i i think if you're talking about ai in the context of technical seo um the biggest foundational aspect of it is still how you do your your basic seo right so you don't have to do anything special other than what you already do on your foundational seo The biggest example is having the content exposed for AI agents.

30:28AI agents obviously don't render JavaScript. So having, for example, a markdown file available for the content that you have present would significantly help you get your content indexed, surfaced, and available to be sited on AI search engines. That would be a very foundational thing. The second is obviously internal linking. Again, this is very basic to what we've been doing in SEO for like decades, and nothing really changes on that front. And internal linkings at the end of the day helps build relationships between one page entity to another page entity and helps drive the value of that relationship.

31:06This is especially useful when it comes to the e-commerce side of things because you have a lot of products that complement each other when you purchase something, right? So if you talk about like a gaming computer, for example, you have keyboards, you have gaming mouse, you have headsets, and you have all these complementary products, which make sense to purchase as a package as a whole. And this is where AI engines are super, super helpful in helping you choose those complementary products. And all of this boils down to, again, the foundational SEO, wherein you have good internal linking, your content is easily available to be indexed, and all of the entity relationships are easily available to be discovered by AI agents.

31:53So at the end of the day, when we want our websites, our applications to be fully aware for AI engines, you don't have to do anything special or anything different than what you've already been doing for the last couple of years. Everything still holds true, even going forward as well, purely from a technical SEO perspective. Right. Thank you so much. So we're going to go to Katrina in just a second there. Garrett, just to give you the heads up, just after Katrina, can you have a little think about any AI tools that you recommend? And also maybe where they fall short and where humans need to jump in and you can't necessarily just rely on AI tools.

32:37Thank you. But in the meantime, Katrina, what are your further thoughts on how to use EAT within your content to try to ensure that you get featured instead of someone else? Yes. So what I have been doing lately quite a lot is I love YouTube videos. I love making them and adding them to your content. And for example, when I'm optimizing my own website, often I just go and sit in front of the camera and like do the YouTube video first and like just speak what I want to speak. and then I kind of get the like unique things there as well. And then I take the YouTube video, I take the transcript and like then I use AI to like create an article about this.

33:26So this way I kind of get maybe more uniqueness to it. And then of course I published a video also on YouTube and on social media and just like connected everything together. And yeah, it's my face, it's me talking and like And I guess AI can copy that, but it's a bit more EEAT in that sense as well. And you're obviously creating the YouTube video from scratch and not using AI to do that, yes? No, I use myself. I'm not using AI. Yeah, I think that's the way to do it. I think a lot of people start with video or audio and have a great, high-quality discussion. And then I think it's more legitimate.

34:10It would be interesting to hear everyone's perspective on that. But my opinion is it's more legitimate then to go ahead and use AI to create further content from there. Because the original piece is original thought leadership and having not used AI. I think I'm looking for nods. I think Nitin's nodding away gently. Do you agree with that, Nitin? Oh, yes, 100%. I think, yeah, AI is an enabler, right? It supports and it basically is your efficiency weapon. But I think, yeah, you know, like owning the real data set to, you know, like get the right outcome that helps your user and not only to fool search engines.

34:51You cannot do that anymore. Right. And yeah, so I think it's basically about owning it. And when you're thinking about writing anything on a website or serving any experience, you're always thinking about user first. Right. And that was always important. But now it's important than ever before. Brilliant. Garrett, let's get your thoughts on AI tools and where it's necessary for a human to jump in and not necessarily just rely on an AI tool. Yeah. So I think the theme of this entire conversation is around context and thinking about when we're talking AI tools, there's so many out there. Are we talking AI tools in the context of tracking performance in AI platforms?

35:29Are we talking about using AI tools to produce content? Are we using AI tools throughout our different workflows? And so I feel that AI tools are super valuable in the sense of, I think it is, I'm going to get some backlash for this, but I think if you are an SEO, if you are a marketer, it is irresponsible at this point in time to reject AI completely. I think you need to leverage AI in some capacity in your job, whether it's finding efficiencies through your workflows, doing automated tasks that manually might take you a really long time that doesn't require human thought or insight. It is data entry.

36:15It is mechanical. It does not need to have a person wasting their time doing it. When it comes to the different tools, I think Nitin called it out as well. I think different tools are useful for different use cases. I know on a personal level, I am much more dependent on chat GPT for writing and creating quality content. And that's not something I would have Claude do at this point. But I love Claude's interface for Harness for tying together different MCPs and working with data and being able to talk to my data more effectively in a Claude ecosystem. them. When it comes to prompt tracking, prompt tracking, I can't even talk today, prompt tracking, there we go.

37:01I think the person using the tool matters more than the tool itself, because a lot of these do have overlap in terms of the strategy of what you're tracking. I think there needs to be an expectation, whether you're talking about Profound or Peak or Scrunch or Otterly, any of these tools of it's not necessarily accurate and precise in the sense of because it's probabilistic, you're not getting the definitive rankings and rankings are out the door anyway. So you need to approach those tools from a mentality of am I trending in the right direction? As I experiment, am I going up and to the right as best I can?

37:44Because the other big thing, which I think has been a theme throughout this conversation is you can't put all your eggs in one basket. You can't only depend on your website. You can't only depend on Reddit. You can't only depend on LinkedIn. You can't only depend on third-party listicles because everything's volatile and changing. Six months ago, LinkedIn pulse was all in. Even a week ago, Reddit was everywhere and now it's declining in certain circumstances. But there's still value in being on Reddit because it's still in the training data. So I don't know if this answers your question, David, because I think which AI tools is a very big question right now.

38:25But I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve, experimenting and making, investing the time to make the different AI tools work for you for that specific use case. I was interested in your recommendation of ChatGPT over Claude for writing? Why is that? I don't know if it's definitively because of how I set it up, but I would say, A, I personally have invested more time in building out my personalization of Claude so that when I give it feedback and the type of writing that I want, it gets much closer to my expectations. Whereas Claude, even if I have a certain markdown file with like, this is how I talk or this is how my brand talks or this is how I wanted to talk like this.

39:17I feel like Claude and a lot of times in a price conscious model, because it's like, I'm not going to go and use Fable for writing a blog post. At the sonnet level or the opus level, I think the quality of the writing just doesn't match my expectations. Whereas with ChatGPT on the paid, you know, pro or plus, excuse me, has been a lot closer to what my expectations are. And one thing I want to call out from earlier real quick is just with models, we have to consider, you know, the cost, the free version versus the paid version with all of these results. I know this is back to early part of the conversation, but everything we're talking about with SEO really depends not only on the different platforms, but the chosen models within the platforms.

40:09Anyway, I'll shut up. David, you got to get us all to like stop talking because we'll keep going, man. That's okay. That's okay. I can tell you to.

40:20The rest of the panel, or maybe I'll get someone to jump in here. Does anyone actually agree with what Garrett was saying with regards to ChatGPT over Claude for written content? I would definitely resonate with that statement purely because with what I'm building with my team personally, when we want to like build up brand tonality as well as build up like a persona and you want that voice to reflect it, ChatGPD seems to do a pretty good job. But when it comes to actually building certain complex solutions or tackling complex topics, Claude is far more superior than ChatGPD can even get close to.

41:00So I think there's that level of differentiation as to like how you choose a specific model for a specific reason. I think when it comes to like educational content, Gemini also does a much better job than it did like a couple of months ago. So, yeah, I tend to agree with what Garrett said. I think on the writing level, ChatGPD definitely resonates quite well with the way you'd speak. And it kind of like reflects your persona over time as it learns more about you and your traits and so on. So, yeah. Just before we have a final question, I'd like to, again, throw this next question out to the panel as a whole, just to see who it's most relevant to.

41:38Because I just want to talk about, I just want to touch upon recruitment. So recruiting SEOs and the skills that you're looking for and maybe how AI has changed perhaps the level of SEO you're looking for or the skill set that you're looking for. So how has recruiting an SEO executive, an SEO manager changed in terms of the skill set that you're looking for nowadays versus perhaps four years ago? I'm totally looking for Nitin's thoughts on this because he's been on a massive recruiting drive. Yeah, I can definitely share my thoughts. So I was always from day zero when I started WordPress. So I was always looking for problem solvers first and then other skills.

42:19Right. And I think that has not changed. I was always looking for people who can recognize patterns, think about efficiency, think about solving not just for one case, but solving once and for all. Right. So for me, I think nothing major has changed. Right. And I'm also open, you know, when someone is, you know, like they prefer using any LLM while even answering the questions I'm asking. Right. I'm totally OK with that, because for me, what's important is how they're trying to solve the problem. right how thinking about efficiency how they're thinking about you know like solving it once and for all that's that's very important for me and it's not recent it's always the case so i think nothing majorly changed for me and we also want to jump into that one yeah i'll jump in i i think i agree with nint for the most part the one thing is i think you need to explicitly test their ai comfort levels, depending on your brand.

43:13For me, at iPollRank, we are moving towards 100 % a native AI agency. So you need to be a critical problem solver. You need to be skeptical that the tools that you're using are definitively giving you the right answer. You need to fairly second guess AI, but you also need to be completely comfortable in an AI environment. And that plays into our recruiting. I don't think you can BS it in the sense of if you are a basic AI user where you're just letting the tools think for you, that's really problematic. So a lot of the way that we test is, do you have the agency to build with AI? Because AI should augment your intelligence.

43:59It should make you a better thinker, a better worker, more curious. But a lot of people don't have that. I think they look at AI as an easy button. And so you really need to drill into that in recruiting, but it's a critical skill set. So we started this discussion by asking our panelists, what's the major thing that has impacted SEO, the major AI thing that's impacted SEO over the last 12 months or so? I'd like to close up by asking the question, what will be the biggest change that AI will have on SEO over the coming 12 months? And then just get each panelist to remind the viewer, the listener, who they are and where they can find them.

44:41So let's start off with Nisun. Nisun, what's the biggest change we're likely to see from AI on SEO over the coming 12 months? And please just remind the viewer where they can find you. Well, I mentioned like in last 12, 24, 36 months, people are now more concerned about will AI cite me or mention me? In the next 24 months, probably I am looking at a pattern where we would start asking, will AI choose me? Right. So right now you would see probably five different options. Hey, you're looking for headphones. These are five different options you have. But then I think the pattern is changing where you're giving more and more specifics and you're looking for just one answer.

45:19Right. So I think this is where the trend is going. And that is the biggest change I'm anticipating in the next 12, 24 months. And yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'm more active on LinkedIn. So that would be the right platform. And you can just search for my name or yeah, it's slash NITMAN. So yeah, that's me. And thank you so much, David, for having me once again. Thanks so much for joining. And to Jaswui, what is your thoughts on what additional changes we're going to see as a result of AI on the SEO landscape over the coming 12 months or so? And where can people find you? I think the age in traffic on the Internet is going to grow exponentially over the next 12 to 24 months.

46:03And that's just going to be quite rapid. and we as web folks would have to just accommodate that idea that an AI agent would visit a website, would make the right calls. If you have like an MCP server, for example, and you have all the tool functions available for an AI agent, you should definitely expect AI agents to be making a lot more actions, triggering a lot more functions. And the second thing is, I think two industries would definitely be impacted the most. One would be e-commerce and the second would be the news publishing side. And on the e-commerce side, for all the merchants that are on Shopify, on WooCommerce, on many other different platforms, making sure that your products, your catalog is fully indexed, discoverable by AI agents is going to be foundational and key for driving your revenue and discoverability over time.

46:58And then when it comes to the news cycle side of things, it's like how fast can your index, can your news sites articles get picked up how rapidly can you spin out articles for AI agents to consume and present that topics is going to be super key to how things evolve. And the final thing is the transactability. So you will have AI agents, like Pam mentioned, make money transactions on the internet in a couple of seconds across different sites. So making sure that your website and your application, if is indeed selling something that's of physical nature or of virtual service, making sure that it's fully accessible by an AI agent, can transact using USDC or any of the protocols like 402 that is being supported by Cloudflare, Google, and so on.

47:46All this would be super key in making sure that you are in the forefront of being discovered and fully engaged with AI traffic as it grows exponentially. Superb. And where can people find you, Jasmine? You can find me on Twitter. I'm pushing Twitter mainly because I have a premium subscription and there's barely any engagement there. So that would be my gametag, which is Wolf Nuker. So look me up. Or on LinkedIn, it's just PSEO, like programmatic SEO. So it's just PSEO. So you can find me there as well. Superb. Katrina, what are your thoughts on the final question? Where can people find you? Yeah.

48:21Yeah, good answers so far. I agree with those. It's a very difficult question. But one thing I want to highlight is both when clients and SEO people start using more and more AI tools and AI agents, I think it will become more important from the client side to have like a good SEO person. they can actually ask for their opinion and think together with them on decisions and like actually have a real person to to discuss with uh in all this like ai agent era kind of so i think that's gonna be important and you can find me on linkedin and facebook and instagram super thanks so much for joining and let's move on to pam pam uh what are your thoughts on um further impact that ai is going to have an seo over the 12 months and where can people find you well to jaz we stole my answer so i'll just uh append to his response yeah or we'll use ai to get to change his voice and just deliver it as you yeah there we go no so agentic for sure agree 100 000 um Like I said before, the zero-click conversion.

49:42I know the agentic versus generative gets confusing to people. So think of it as the zero-click conversion. We are getting towards a zero-click world here, and we're going to get towards a zero-website world, I think, eventually. But what should be top of mind for brands is MCP and UCP. If you're e-commerce, get UCP set up now. I can't believe how much is being used already. how many people are purchasing products by saying, hey, ChatGPT or whoever, but mostly ChatGPT, purchase it for me. They did the research and they tell them to do the purchase. It's happening already. So you're already late.

50:17So hurry up. And on the B2B slash, you know, services side of things, MCP, make your website interactive. And you're going to have to get a little creative here. It's not as straightforward as like feeding your products and your cart capability to an LLM. it's going to be more creative about how to help people interact with your brand by giving the LLM direct access to the data about your brand and your service without the e-commerce aspect. But I did have, I can't remember which one, I had one of the LLMs ask me the other day about a service, the local service company I was asking about. They're like, would you like me to fill out their contact form for you?

51:01It probably wouldn't have worked if they don't have an actual MCP. But even if you're B2B slash services, you should have an MCP on your website by this time next year. You probably have a little more time than the e-commerce industry has, but by this time next year, definitely. Lastly, I'll say that for the news industry, our editorial clients have been hit the hardest by all of this. Sadly, they are having to get creative. These specific clients aren't really like the paywall type. They really just made a lot of revenue off of traditional banner ads and manually direct sold ads. They're having to get creative.

51:38They're making money in new ways. They're selling merchandise. They're signing up for affiliate marketing links that they can earn a little commission on when they talk about a product and send it elsewhere. They're doing subscription content beyond the traditional paywall. So unfortunately for the editorial world, well, for all of them, you're going to have to get creative for all of them, But for that one, especially think hard about maybe what other ways you might be able to make money if you're in the editorial space other than traditional advertising. Everything is changing. So all that said, if you want to hear more from me, you can find me on all the socials except X for the reason that I gave up on that one.

52:21All the rest of them, you can find me at either Pam Monks Cronin or Payman Marketing. Superb. Thanks so much, Pam. And last but not least, we've got Garrett. Oh, you want me to say something? Right, right. Okay. No, I'll go a different route. Going more humanistic, I think hyper-personalization will continue to be really critical. And I'll come at that from a couple of angles. One is, historically, we all got taught keyword ease. We just used one to two keywords to get what we found. Well, natural language has been the thing for 10 to 15 years. And people are getting much more comfortable just talking in questions and talking like a human and adding much more context to their searches.

52:56When Sunar Bacchaya at Google said, you know, AI is additive, I think that's absolutely the case. And the way that people are understanding, they can ask so many more things. So all that is going to result in a much more personalized answer because people are giving more explicit context in what they're searching for. The other side of it is the implicit context. We're going to continue to see much more of your personal data included in the output. You know, Google personal intelligence includes Gmail, includes calendar, includes your photos. We know that ChatGPT pulls from all that. When Apple has its partnership with Google to give steroids to Siri, and that'll have access to all your personal messages and everything, everything is going to become so much more hyper-personalized in a search capacity.

53:44And I think that should significantly impact your strategy, but it will also become something that we as consumers are going to become that much more comfortable with using and you know you think about you know in the 90s when people started to get comfortable putting their credit card information online and that was different ai is having that sort of renaissance right now and it's just hot you know so much faster so find me on linkedin i do the linkedin thing i do linkedin that's where you can find me i'm on expert yeah what's a wonderful panel what a lot to think about hopefully we can get them on again in 2027 for part four versus space i've been your host david bayon and you've been listening to the majestic seo panel if you want to join us live next time sign up at majestic.com webinars and of course check out seoin2026.com bye for now