LLM Killed the SEO Star

Webinar Transcript

Mohamed: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this session of the third Wednesday webinar. Today is a very exciting one. We’ve got our guest, CT Moore, old friend of mine and SEO specialist. We’ve worked on a lot of projects together. And yeah, I’ll hand it over to you, CT, to give us a little bit about the background about yourself and Socialed. 

CT: Okay. All right. So, I’ve been working in the SEO and content marketing space since about, oof, 2006, if I’m gonna age myself that—Wow. Transparently.Over that time, I’ve been in-house, I’ve worked for agencies, and for about the last 15 years, I’ve been running Socialed, which is a small consultancy agency that specializes specifically in SEO and content marketing. 

It started out focusing on social media, but we pivoted away from that in the first couple of years. And in that time, we’ve had the opportunity to work with brands that are both multinationals and startups. Both local and international. A lot of e-commerce companies. So we’ve pretty much learned to handle just about every SEO situation that could possibly arise, in most cases anyway. 

Mohamed: Yeah, and there’s a lot of SEO situations coming up these days. I mean, the biggest topic and the topic of today’s discussion is, social me— sorry, SEO in relation to AI, the biggest topic of the year when it comes to anything and everything to do with marketing. 

There’s a lot of acronyms being thrown out there. There’s a lot of confusion about what it means. Is the old way still staying? Are there new ways coming in and what are they? There’s AEO, uh, GEO. There is Search Everywhere Optimization, which is the same acronym as search engine optimization. What have been your experiences in the trenches when it comes to SEO these days? 

CT: Well, I think as far as the AI thing goes, the biggest frustration is no one’s really settled on a nomenclature, right? So there’s still a lot of acronyms getting thrown around. Let’s get some of those out of the way for those who don’t know them. So you got SGE, which is Search Generative Experience, I think that was coined by Google, and it really just talks about, you know, what’s also referred to as an AI overview or as you interact with, with an LLM, that it’s generating results as you talk to it. 

I’m seeing that thrown around a little bit less and less. The sexiest one lately seems to be GEO, so Generative Engine Optimization. Mm-hmm. So really it’s just SEO  for an LLM chat session. But I think AI SEO, that’s kind of fallen to the wayside. I’m not seeing that as much, but they’re all pretty much the same thing. We just haven’t figured out how to describe it yet. 

Something I see people referring it to a lot more is optimizing for visibility. So AI pulls from so many different sources, not just from websites, not just right there in the SERPs, but they’ll also be looking at social media content and stuff like that. So, I guess maybe that’s the next one we’re gonna be talking about, VEO, Visibility-  Engine Optimization. I don’t know, but I think VEO’s already a trademark term, so maybe it won’t happen. 

Mohamed: Yeah, I’d say, I mean there’s also answer engine optimization, which is another one in there. So there’s a lot of these weird names coming out. No one’s settled on anything. And funnily enough, social media has become very important for any of these acronyms and anything to do with LLMs because, what was it? Reddit seems to be the most cited source, Reddit and Quora.And it’s even beating out Wikipedia in a lot of cases. 

I’ve seen stats on that—so when we’re talking about SEO or whatever it is that we’re gonna get, whatever it is, it’s gonna be VEO or visibility or optimizing for visibility, what are some of the strategies that people are doing right now to get that visibility, to get that reach across different platforms, so that they can get mentioned in AI search? 

CT: Well, you know, I think before we talk about strategies, we have to talk about goals. And to realize what’s a realistic goal, you have to understand how the ecosystems change. 

So a couple interesting stats. One from April 2025, so only a few months old. Apparently AI overview has reduced click-through rates from the organic search results by 34.5%. So that’s a third of clicks that are not happening. Now those are overwhelmingly happening on informational keywords, so much less transactional keywords. But for a lot of marketers that use a lot of informational top-of-funnel content to get that brand exposure and to get the user onto the site for the first session and start building that relationship, that’s a lot harder to do now because a third of those clicks aren’t even leaving the SERP. 

And what’s scarier is AI search is expected to surpass traditional search by 2028. That’s what, you know, the data scientists say. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens sooner than that. It’s evolved so fast and the numbers have changed so quickly that I think we could expect this to be a lot more disruptive than it’s been so far, over the next year, year and a half. 

But there is some good news to that. So if you do get a click from an AI overview or from an LLM chat session, apparently those clicks are much higher quality. And that’s because the user’s already kind of gone through this process of, you know—I’ve always said the great thing about search is someone’s actively typing something into the search bar, in that step, they’re one step further down the conversion funnel. 

I guess in this sense, they’re two, because, you know, they’re not just looking for this, but they’ve already started entering a decision-making mode. I don’t know how they substantiate this, and this is from SEMRush, but they’re saying an LLM visitor, even though it’s only two thirds as many, is worth 4.4 times the average search user. They’re not very clear on how they quantify that. Mm-hmm. But… not sure what the worth is. I’m sure it’s not at transaction value, that remains to be quantified. 

So those are—that’s kind of the challenge and opportunity we’re looking at. So when you wanna talk about strategies, you gotta have to set those goals around those expectations of what you can expect to happen from the search results. So it’s not just about ranking organically, it’s not just about being in the AI overview, but it’s about being a trusted citation source for these LLMs. 

And the good news is, at least ChatGPT anyway, half of the citation links it shows point to business or service sites. So they’re actually not as much as LLMs love Quora and Reddit, half of the sources they provide are gonna be a business or a service site. So I guess, really, the strategy is to make sure that you’re definitely one of those sites. 

Mohamed: So the old, the old way of doing this was to create content across the top of the funnel, middle-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel, and have a content and editorial that appeals—that has a distribution across those. With LLMs now not necessarily pointing towards top-of-funnel content, or let’s say, using the top-of-funnel content to digest and regurgitate to people asking questions, what’s the shift there? What is it that people should be doing around their content in itself that will allow them to be cited as a credible source or a point of authority? 

CT: All right, so I’m gonna take a step back there. Okay. So I challenge anyone who’s watching this to google these words, “SEO is dead, long live SEO.” You will find tons of blog posts going back 20 years, I’m not joking, that every time there was a change in the SERPs, every time there was a change in the page search results placements, every time there was a change in the algorithm, people would scream that SEO is dead, and they’re doing the same thing now, obviously. 

And this is probably a much more disruptive and cataclysmic shift to search than we’ve ever seen before, but here’s my hypothesis, if you will: not much has changed. SEO is still SEO. It’s the interface that changed. And if you think about it and you go back to the evolution of search, what AI is flipping on its head here is that the experience is no longer algorithmic.

The entire search experience is a lot more interactive, it’s a lot more conversational, it’s a lot more social. It’s not just taking cues from what’s on the website and what links are pointing to the website and how recent the website is. It’s taking cues to how you’re talking to it. So it’s actually trying to find, it’s trying to determine relevance on a much more subjective basis. 

So that being said, you still need to establish authority. And as much as we’re losing clicks on so many informational pieces of content, the game is still pretty much the same. If you wanna rank well on transactional keywords or commercial keywords, you have to show that you’re also authoritative on informational keywords. And the idea there is that if you could help users make a better decision, make a better purchasing decision, then probably the purchasing option you’re offering them can’t be too shabby, right? 

Mm-hmm. So, as far as the tactics and the strategy goes, they’re still very much similar. You still wanna focus very much on producing quality content. Just don’t expect that content to bring in as much traffic as it used to. You want that content to be recent, you want it to cite third-party sources, you want it to be multimedia. So you want to have it in text, you wanna have images, you wanna have videos. 

This is another reason why social media comes into play, you know, taking that piece of evergreen content and cutting it into five TikTok videos or whatever to show up. And, of course, you also wanna focus on accessibility, and that’s where structured data comes in, but these are all old tactics for SEO as well, so making sure that you’re using structured data everywhere you can. What the schemas do is it contextualizes content. 

Mohamed: Yeah. We’ve had a lot of success with shifting the way we build our websites to include a lot more structured data and more nuanced structured data. So the way we build our websites these days has a lot more richer, schematic information and a diversity in it so that we make sure that everything is pretty much tagged in a way that makes it work—makes it more machine-readable.

To come back to something that you said earlier: keywords. With LLMs, given that the conversation is something that is fluid and not necessarily a one-and-done type of thing, is if people are talking about SEO and how it’s evolving, are keywords still relevant? 

CT: Absolutely. And I think if anything, they’re more of keywords now than they were before. You know, to go back to what I was saying about the traditional SEO being a lot more algorithmic rather than interactive, have you ever noticed how you search? That’s not how you speak, right? Mm-hmm. 

The algorithm trained us how to use it. Now, it’s quite different. You’re having more of a conversational and a semantic interaction with the LLMs, but that’s why the keywords are just as important ’cause those are gonna be the keywords that contextualize this conversation you’re having back and forth with the LLM. And especially for anything transactional. We’re seeing a lot in the data of people searching, like, you know, best running shoes, or best this, best that. Those keywords are still important.

Mohamed: Just a message for everybody that’s watching, if you have any questions, please pop them in the chat over here. We’re gonna be answering questions towards the end. And yeah. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of conversations happening about the relevancy of keywords. 

I’ve seen a lot of people shifting their stance on the efficacy just because of the nature of conversations, but I can see how they become relevant. Okay, so we’ve been conditioned for the longest time to create more content. Content is king. We’ve heard that a lot. Ceate more blog posts, more social content and all of that. But what is it that we’re gonna be changing now given that, let’s say, SEO hasn’t—at its core is still the same, but the interface has changed? What is it that we’re going to be doing to make sure that we get visibility within this new interface? 

CT: I think there’s gonna be a lot more, what’s the word I’m looking for? Well, you’re gonna be still producing content on a regular basis, new content but I think there’s gonna be a lot more of a need to update existing content. It’s been an SEO hack for years. You know, you have an evergreen piece of content, it usually ranks well for 12-to-24 months, and then it starts to stave off, so you go back in, you update it, you flesh it out, you do some more interlinking, and it starts ranking again. I think we’re gonna be having to do that a lot more often. Instead of looking at 12-to-24 months, we’re gonna be looking at 6-to–12 months. 

Because you shared some data with me yesterday, the LLMs seem to like to cite sources that are the most recent. Mm-hmm. So, you know, having dates right in the titles of things, the best running shoes of 2025, make sure come January you update to 2026, and you do another pass over the content and make sure it’s up to date. 

So there’s gonna be a lot of, I don’t know, gardening, content gardening? Can we call it that? Where you’re constantly pruning and improving, fertilizing, whatever. I’m—I don’t have good metaphors today. But this is gonna be on top of having to produce new content on an ongoing basis. And we’re talking different types of content. Blog posts, guides, FAQs will be big. And then repurposing that content into multimedia, like social media content and that kind of thing. 

Mohamed: I accidentally threw a—All right, so we’ve got a question here from Michelle recommending we put a lot more energy into publishing content in Reddit and Quora. And I was actually gonna ask that question, that’s why I threw it up over here. 

Social media is the top… Well, at least Reddit and Quora, the top cited sources on at least ChatGPT. But LinkedIn’s making inroads in there. I think, what do you call it? Instagram made some algorithmic changes to prioritize posts that have longer form content. Is social going to be the place to really expand that reach? 

Obviously these are platforms with higher authority because let’s say if you’re a new website and you have zero domain authority. How is it that you’re going to get credibility without—while competing with websites that have longer longevity, have built that equity over time where instead of going to social media and piggybacking off those larger platforms that have the domain authority and can surface up your content much better? 

CT: You know, that’s a great question because we’re still unclear of how the AI search algorithms are weighting authority. Like, we know it likes recency, but we also know they were trained heavily on Reddit and Quora. That’s why those seem to factor in so much now. My guess is that’s gonna change over the next year or two. 

For now it’s important, but I would say definitely make sure your own house is in order first. Make sure you have your staple and evergreen content, make sure you’re producing regular content on your site, and then share that content where it makes sense or repurpose it for other platforms where it makes sense. If you’re doing a lot of FAQ content, go out on Quora and start answering questions or even start asking them and then answer them yourself if you want to be a little skeevy about it. 

Reddit can be a hard one. That being said, if you are contributing to the conversations in a valuable way, you will be rewarded. So, I think what you need to be thinking of is starting to make sure your own house is in order, and make sure you got your content bases covered there, and then take a close look at that and being like, “Of this content, what is a good candidate for being repurposed? What’s a good candidate for being repurposed for which platform?” 

Apparently half the reference links that ChatGPT includes goes to business and service sites. That’s half of them. So, the Reddit and Quora thing is gonna be a lot more important on informational stuff, you definitely wanna make sure anything you’re sharing on those platforms is being reappropriated from content you already have on your own site. 

Mohamed: Now, we talked a lot about repurposing, and that seems to be the word of the day really. Is using AI to repurpose your content a good idea? 

CT: If you do it properly. Here’s a rock and a hard place. Google’s official stance is, don’t use AI to make content. We will penalize you. And then Google Gemini says, “Hey, you should use Google Gemini to make content for your website.” Um, it’s, Google loves to gaslight. They’ve been doing it for years. 

Yeah, I think what you’ve got to do is you can’t just hand a piece of content over to AI and say, “Repurpose this for me.” I think you’ve got to be using these LLMs the same way an online shopper or some other user would, in a conversational way, and work through the content. 

I think the solution is to really, you know, almost have a brainstorm work session with the LLM, go section by section, and I think if you’re repurposing that way and you can tell what’s good content and bad content. So, if the LLM is spitting out something that isn’t quite good, you still gotta put in some effort. These LLMs haven’t replaced content production. They’ve saved us some time, but I still find the process to be very collaborative with the LLM, as well as intensive if you want a good result. 

Mohamed: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of success creating custom GPTs or custom gems where we’ve trained them on brand voice and dos and don’ts and narrative structure and writing frameworks to be able to kinda get what we want out of it.  

So, the way we look at it is if you were to train an intern on what exactly you want, you would hand them a branding document, you would hand them, you know, guidelines, you’d hand them over dos and don’ts and there would be checks and balances, and at the end of the day, you become the editors, right? 

So, you give it an idea and a direction to go, but based on solid frameworks of what your brand is about, and then it can get you 80% of the way. The final 20%, like any editor would do, would be just kinda cleaning up things, adding citations, making sure things really make sense and flow and all of that. 

Chris: I think that’s the perfect analogy, especially the intern thing because you do gotta train these gems or these GPTs. The most successful ones I’ve trained have been when we’ve been doing content for a client for three, five or seven years. So, we already have a body of content that was written by a human and has the brand voice bang on, and that thing starts spitting out content almost identical to how I write right away. 

If you’re starting from scratch though, you’re still gonna have to do the human work and develop your brand guidelines, you know, develop your style guide. You do gotta spend that time with your language models. 

Audience Q&A

Mohamed: Okay. We’ve only got a few minutes left and I wanted to take some questions from the audience over here. We got a question from Sanjay. “Which SEO investments today will compound most in 2026, plus which will fade?” This is a great question, Sanjay. 

CT: I think content that you are strategically repurposing is gonna compound the best. So, when you’re making a content decision, ask yourself, can this piece of content be repurposed? And if it can, how is it gonna be repurposed? That’s where you’re probably gonna get the best bang from your buck. 

Which will fade the most? I’m gonna guess link building. Links, like I said, it was Google’s first attempt at trying to attach authority to things and I think the int—with their other 199 search ranking factors and the LLMs on top of that, not to say that, you know, it won’t be important to have some links, but the days of having a content-light site and just ranking number one with a bunch of links, it’s less and less feasible. 

Mohamed: Got another question here from Clarence. “With product recommendations being prominent in AI overviews, how do you recommend prioritizing page types, PDPs versus blog pages for SEO LLM optimizations?” 

CT: Yeah. So this is interesting. So ChatGPT’s shopping search; now you can do transactions right in ChatGPT. The first thing you wanna do is focus on the PDPs (Product Detail Pages). You should be doing a bunch of things to make sure that ChatGPT is going to feature your products. 

It includes adding a whole bunch of structured data to the site, maintaining a high-quality product XML feed, making sure that you’re not blocking chatbots from your site. You’re gonna want to write product copy that’s gonna match prompts, so make sure that description’s unique. 

The blog pages are gonna be there to establish your informational authority so you’re relevant on the related transactional keywords. But for PDPs, there’s gonna be a lot of optimization that are pretty standard SEO best practices, like structured data and XML feeds, so that the LLMs can actually access your product inventory. 

Mohamed: Last question here from Annika. “Where do you see PR supporting in this?” Oh, that’s a good question. 

CT: I’m not quite sure. I guess it really depends on the type of PR we’re talking about. At the end of the day, the LLMs like content that they can scrape. So, they do like to look for multimedia content. They do like to look for social media content. Make sure that they’re—you’re getting text content assets alongside of those. So if there is a podcast appearance interview, make sure that transcript is there. 

And I think what’s great about the PR approach is there’s a big thing right now around content being recent for them to show up in AI search results, and nothing’s more recent than stuff from the news cycle and a PR push. 

Mohamed: We got one last one here from Kelsey. She’s throwing up, “Tools like brand.ai will now let you watch prompts relevant to your brand and have metrics on which competitors are cited for which prompts. Do you see value in following 50-to-100 prompts in the way and working towards being cited for those specific prompts? Is this ‘who’s being cited’ data really accurate?” 

CT: Well, I don’t know if it’s accurate because I’ve never used brand.ai. But anything you can do to experiment with prompt language at this stage of the game, you should be doing. So, any tools you can use to dig up prompt data will definitely be useful. I think there is some value in using those tools. The keywords are still there but they’re contextualizing a prompt.  The search bar now extends to the chat window and the keywords now extend to the prompt. So, as far as keyword research is important, anything you can do to research prompts would be equally impactful, I would say. 

Wrap-up

Mohamed: All right. Just before we wrap up, you have a free SEO clinic. Tell us a little bit about that before we wrap up, and yeah. 

CT: So a lot of times, I talk to leads and stuff like that and they’re not sure if SEO is the right move for them. So I created this resource. If you’re looking at SEO and you’re trying to figure it out, you can fill out the form on the SEO clinic. 

We’ll take a high-level cursory look at your site. We’ll have some actionable insights for you to take.  You can decide whether you wanna work with us or do it yourself. But we’ll be able to take a high cursory look at the site, kind of like a doctor’s checkup. It’s a clinic.  We’ll kind of identify some key competitive gaps you should be looking at. Some key competitive opportunities, and some other key SEO metrics like how’s your site doing in terms of indexation, backlinks, that kind of thing. 

Mohamed: Amazing. Well, that is us for today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Chris. Thanks, it’s been a pleasure. This has been super insightful. Thank you everybody for engaging in your amazing questions. 

I’m gonna wrap these questions into the follow-up email, and I’m gonna put that mybrand.ai link in the follow-up email. I’ve seen other tools like it. HubSpot has an AI grader that looks across all LLMs and each one has their own way of doing things. SEMRush has one built in as well. 

Yeah. That seems to be the darling at the ball right now. Yeah. So, there’s a lot of these and again, this is all very early stages and we’ll figure out which one’s the one that works the best. 

Thank you everybody for joining us today and looking forward to seeing you in the next one. 

CT: Thank you all for coming. Thanks for having me, Mo. Cheers. 

Mohamed: Mm-hmm. Yep. Bye-bye.