Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host and Cookeville SEO specialist. I’m here with Jason Berkowitz, who’s going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an expert.
Jason Berkowitz: Thank you, Jeremy. Trust me as an expert? I’m an SEO. I don’t know if I can be trusted. You know, those shady SEO folks.
But yeah, I’m Jason. I’ve been doing SEO since 2010. I’m the founder and SEO director of the SEO agency Break the Web. We work with in-house marketing teams of DTC and B2B brands to make SEO more measurable, accessible, and really, especially nowadays, just a little bit less annoying — in the hopes of making the world and the internet just more trustworthy at the same time.
So it’s definitely a journey that we’re in right now. A lot of noise out there, but yeah, Break the Web is our agency.
Making SEO More Visible Despite Google’s Obfuscation
Jeremy Rivera: How do you make it more visible when we’re seeing actions from Google that continue to obfuscate the available metrics and data?
Jason Berkowitz: Yeah, Google is always trying to kick SEOs in the face when it comes to attribution to any sort of marketing activities.
The biggest wins that we’ve been seeing, especially as of late, is just pivoting — putting more effort into middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type of URLs and pages. Instead of going super top of the funnel and informational, which already had significantly less conversion value anyways.
So at the end of the day, brands need to make money. That’s the whole goal and we try as much as possible to calculate ROI.
But that’s where, you know, AI overviews — as you’ve probably seen as well — yeah, they’re just destroying clicks. Primarily though, from super informational queries where people weren’t looking to spend money anyways. They’re kind of just, “Hey, I have a question. Here’s an answer I need.” And people weren’t going to convert anyways.
It’s kind of like, have you seen the HubSpot one from a few months back where everyone’s like, “HubSpot lost all of their traffic,” but they just did a nice pruning exercise of deleting all the pages that just didn’t help them draw revenue.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I saw Mike King’s presentation had two slides back to back. One was the drop off, but the other was their profit — their revenue as a business continued to go up and to the right. So yeah, I mean, that’s a solid story.
Of course, it is not true of — I think I saw the article today on LinkedIn of “Google didn’t kill SEO” — stabbing publishing in the back. Because when you think about the biggest type of site that’s being impacted when they’re coming around, really ironically when you think about it, because they were saying when HCU initially came out, “We’re attacking sites that are just trying to make money.”
And now they’ve turned that around and said, “Well, your content has to be part of a business to be worthwhile.” And it’s like, which is it? Do you not like sites that make money, or do you just want to steal all of the content that you can and not have to pay for it while killing the golden goose?
The Uncertainty of Google’s Direction
Jason Berkowitz: I don’t even think they know, honestly. They probably don’t have a clear answer to that. And yeah, it’s been a hard one for publishers that rely on advertising for monetization. Now with AI mode, Google Discover getting changed every other day now — it’s been a hard one.
I think it’s all just still like nobody really knows what’s happening, what’s gonna happen. And I think all these platforms are still also in that mix. Like they don’t know what’s gonna happen. They don’t know what direction they’re heading, but they’re all just trying to actively remain competitive. And it’s just making the internet worse at the same time.
Jeremy Rivera: It is. Yeah, I think it was AJ Cohn. He came out with an article like a year ago where he said, these results are “good enough.” You know, like it’s kind of relevant-ish. You know, it’s like a set of SERP results that doesn’t really address what you want and so you gotta search again and then search again.
So if their goal is to keep people on their platform and frustrated and without answers, good job guys, because that’s the majority.
The Problem with AI-Generated Answers
Jeremy Rivera: To add to that, the now universal skepticism of — okay, now I’m being shown a result on your platform, but you just said that somebody that I know is 70 years old is a two year old. Or, you know, there are these known incorrect facts.
So it used to be, “We want to present the world’s organization” or “organize the world’s information.” And now they want to be the world’s information, it seems, but are doing it in a way that doesn’t solve what we know is problematic about LLMs and doesn’t — you know, they’ve shown they’re just as prone to hallucination as ChatGPT.
And it’s even more egregious because they are putting it out there in a form of authority of “this is an answer” and they’re giving answers about ketchup soup and macaroni and cheese recipes, including glue, because the LLMs don’t understand sarcasm.
Jason Berkowitz: Yeah, I think you nailed it, Jeremy. It’s like, I don’t know if people are talking about what you just said, because I think it is very crucial. Everyone’s talking about it in our techosphere bubble that we’re in, and we see things on LinkedIn and Twitter, like, “Oh, SEO is dead, and marketing is changing forever.” It’s like…
What happens to the everyday consumer who first is not even aware of AI, different AI platforms? They might know ChatGPT because of memes. They might know Gemini because of commercials. They know AI overviews because it’s thrown in their face. But what happens with the potential change in consumer behavior when they don’t get the information they’re looking for? The quality of results is bad.
Does that leave a bad sour taste in their mouth that they just want to avoid all things AI because it’s not a good experience? And do they revert back to their previous habits of making searches? I mean, I think that’s going to be an interesting case study because the quality — yeah, I asked ChatGPT, “Why are you gaslighting me?” And it went to continue gaslighting me after that.
The “Yes Man” Problem with LLMs
Jeremy Rivera: No, it’s true. I created an article, very complicated, in depth, and I asked it to include this section. And I said, “OK, done.” And I looked at it like, “You didn’t add the section. Can you add it now?” “Yeah, OK, it’s done.” I’m like, “OK.”
I gave it a fresh — like, “OK, this is the text I want you to add, do it and then confirm and analyze if you did it.” It both didn’t add it, checked if it was there, said it was and it wasn’t. I said, “Why are you lying?” Like, “I don’t know.” Like, I had to start a whole new chat session just to get that integrated. It’s really insane sometimes.
Jason Berkowitz: And this is the threat to SEO, right? This is the threat to the entire marketing user behavior search landscape. I mean, beyond just Google and traditional SEO — SEO is changing the world so much. That’s our threat. Yes, man. And gaslighting.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, yes, man, that’s what I wanted to address or bring up — there’s an inherent bias to be a yes man built into LLMs that is extremely problematic when you — the nature of copyright, copy editing, good copy editing is aggressive no.
And you’re like as an editor is almost like the inverse of — you hate long content, fluffy content, you want it to be condensed, you want to cut out, you want to remove and the answer is by default no or probably not. But LLMs seem to be calibrated in such a way that they want to please us. That’s the problem.
The Real State of AI’s Impact on SEO
Jason Berkowitz: It’s actually really refreshing to have this conversation with you because I’ve been on a lot of podcasts the last two weeks talking about AI and SEO and it’s all about, “Tell us what’s really going on with AI and what’s really going on with SEO.” I’m like, “Yeah, things are changing, but the foundations are still the same. There’s no threat.”
Like, yeah, just kind of like what you said. AI is not in any position at this point. LLMs are not in a position at this point to really cause much disruption or damage to everyone. And I mean, you’re requiring big user adoption from people outside of that techosphere bubble, because nobody knows what Claude or Anthropic is, like the everyday people.
It’s everyone’s fear marketing and they got something to sell and then you got GEO or AI or whatever you want to call it optimization, which is a farce, you know, because it’s all just good SEO because you can’t do anything. Nobody has a proven framework of success on doing something. You can audit, but yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I think the closest that I’ve seen is the BISCUIT framework that Mike Buckby came up with for No Atoa, which it’s kind of like, you know, check if there’s a brand sentiment analysis that exists across multiple LLMs, check your crawl links, you know, are you blocking yourself? Are you accessible?
You know, it basically breaks down to just kind of treating each LLM as an additional search console. Are you indexed? Are you there? And if you ask it, where do you appear in citations? Which is what we look for in Google Search Console, right?
The “SEO is Dead” Narrative
Jeremy Rivera: I don’t understand what the obsession is constantly about wanting to kill SEO from the beginning. It’s just a trope. All of us just sigh every time. “Is SEO dead now?” Since 2007, no. The articles I learned on in 2007, Aaron Wall’s SEO book referenced, “Is SEO dead?”
There were — I think the earliest “SEO is dead” article was like in 1999. Like before SEO was even understood to even be a thing.
Jason Berkowitz: Back with search engines for ABC… AltaVista, SGVs, Dogpile, yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: What it is, honestly, is there’s a generation of SEOs who grew up in a golden age where SEO wasn’t SEO. We were reverse Google engineers. There was no Bing. There was no other playground. There was nothing else to do. You were not going to get organic traffic. You were not going to get a paycheck for what you did.
The backlinks that you were building were for Google. The content you were creating was for Google. You over-optimized, you know, and created too many anchor texts on too many other sites for Google. And then they slapped it down, so then you removed and changed the amount of specific anchor texts that you made for Google.
All of the things that we did were for Google. And that’s what’s changing. SEO isn’t dead, but Google-only optimization is leaving because the value proposition can no longer support itself.
The New SEO Landscape
Jeremy Rivera: There are fewer — you have to, as an agency, as a freelancer, it’s becoming harder and harder and the error is less there and the ROI is harder and the timeline, the predictability is decreasing.
There are fewer — unless you’re at this end of opportunity where this is the amount of work and this is the amount of pay you get for it. Specialized technical SEO for huge brands, major money there. But you have to win that position against incredible levels of talent and be prepared to make technical SEO decisions that can kill a business.
Because that’s the level of gameplay that Gus Pelogia of Indeed is playing around with. Those are the decisions that the top level S-tier speakers at conferences are being approached with — sites that have millions of pages at the baseline.
So if you’re not in the ballpark of being able to handle — skill-wise, talent-wise, understanding-wise — what the technical ramifications are of canonicalization, multilingual, you know, hreflang, you know, crawling decisions on fractal menus, JavaScript, SPA, crawling and analysis — then the sandwich where you used to eat when it was just SEO, there’s a lot less meat on that bone and there’s a lot more people trying to eat the meat on that bone.
Google’s Parasitic Evolution
Jeremy Rivera: But those heady days are continuing to be — each bite at the apple that Google has kicked us with of, well, featured snippets. “We’re going to take part of your content and display it right in there.” You know, that was the start of it. And that was when the first real move, I think, where Google industry-wide started to claw back from SEOs.
Now you can look way back to 2008 and look at an industry. Google took over credit cards first. Then they took over the travel niche. And then they took over the booking niche. And recently they just took over emojis. You know, like you can literally — yeah, you can now, you don’t have to go to the emoji dictionary or emoji-pedia.
You can just click on a button and copy the command for an emoji. But they’ve been conquering. Like if you look at the horizontal spread of these useful SERP features, Google has always been parasitic. And now it’s just gotten to the point where maybe we start thinking about the fact that Google is a search engine. That doesn’t mean that it’s search engine optimization. It’s not the only search engine.
Tracking AI Citations and Brand Mentions
Jason Berkowitz: Yeah, I think you bring up a great point. 2009 was awesome for SEO because things would happen very quick and you could spam. 2010 was horrible for SEO because Pandas were coming out and stuff.
But also, I’d love to get your thoughts, Jeremy. What do you think? So we built an internal tracker with all the API platforms — Anthropic, Claude, OpenAI, Gemini — to start tracking our clients’ mentions and citations for visibility. Because that’s really the only thing you could do right now is just start tracking.
Thankfully, we’re getting a lot of mentions from our clients. And what happens when somebody stresses about a problem to one of these platforms and OpenAI or ChatGPT gives their result of solutions and one of them includes a brand but doesn’t include a link to that brand? What is that person going to do next? Are they going to ask for a link or are they going to take that brand and go to Google and search for that brand?
So it’s like, what is somebody going to do if there is no easy access link as well? What do you think?
The Attribution Problem Across Platforms
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, so I think it’s similar to — it’s funny because it appears it’s not just an SEO thing because when you think about it, the same attribution problem has happened in social media.
You know, going back to 2008, 2009 ages, you have Facebook pages that were pulling down organic traffic from within Facebook like bananas, like crazy awesome. Like you could invest, you know, have somebody on there engaging, talking to people, sharing content.
And then 2009, 2010 they locked it down and now it’s 100% pay to play. They changed the algorithm, you can’t get diddly squat from engagement from anything aside from very obviously not American people who are just trying to DM you.
There are no real customers available that you can gain by posting to your Facebook pages. You have to pay. And that echoed over to Instagram, it echoed over to TikTok. TikTok is almost clickless when it comes to getting off of their platform to a thing.
So, you know, there’s a lot of influencers who are getting paid to name drop because they know that in order to find that thing, they’re going to have to go and Google it. Of course that leads to complicated scenarios.
It was mentioned at SMX Advanced that I went to where they paid to promote these pink pants that they had, but they didn’t check with the SEO guy and they actually ran out of pants after the first day of the influencers and so it went out of stock — their page, their URL dropped off and their competitors sold a bunch of pink pants because they didn’t have the — they didn’t plan beforehand.
And so that’s the crossover of the influencer marketing which was a very smart play but you got to — you know, that’s where the search optimization comes in in a unique way, you know, being aware that they’re going to do a branded search or try to find this thing outside of it. And that’s going to have an influence, going to have an impact.
So yeah, I think at first people might see that brand and bring it over to Google, but I bet that it’s going to — like, yeah, no, it’s going to have to because what are you going to do if you’re in Claude and it says this brand does this and you ask it for the URL like “I don’t know, I don’t know what the website is.”
The Need for Cross-Department Collaboration
Jason Berkowitz: SEO is also — to your point — has always been in this weird little silo all by itself like the SEO department and not working with other marketing teams and they should all be collaborating together. I mean, SEO can help fuel other marketing initiatives just like other marketing initiatives could help fuel SEO.
I mean, PPC data is gold for SEO. You know, what’s converting, what’s not, the fact that sometimes brands aren’t communicating interdepartmentally with that I think is a huge — I mean it’s kind of like, it’s already too late, SEOs like just leave them in the corner to do their own little weird stuff but it shouldn’t be like that.
And you bring up the great point where influencer marketing should very much, hey what are the implications of supply chain issues or we go out of stock, you know?
Current Focus and Action Items
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, exactly. So kind of rounding off the interview here, what’s your top action item when somebody comes on board with y’all? Like what’s your hyper focus point to bring value in this value list attribution and list page? Like where’s your home?
Jason Berkowitz: I still think there’s tons of value even in just traditional SEO. Like SEO is definitely not dead.
Maybe super informational content, you’re getting less clicks. But I mean, if you have a query that gets tons of hundreds of thousands of searches a month and you’re cited in the AI review, you’re getting clicks. And now also AI reviews are getting tested below like three or four organic results. So who knows what’s going to happen with CTR, but we’re still doing everything as we have.
We have a different mindset maybe, but we aim to show some quick wins within the first month, which could be usually the easy low hanging fruit — sometimes adding internal links, sometimes adding a key page to the menu and the footer, some of those things.
But then, of course, traditional on-page SEO, just helping match pages to what somebody’s looking for in search. Good off-page SEO, digital PR, link building, having good first-party data that journalists will eat up, connecting with other publications that maybe have content gaps, whatever it is.
It’s still working. It’s still working well. Top of the funnel traffic is down, but organic revenue is up for just about all of our clients that are in the e-comm space that you could attribute as best as possible. There’s always these weird attribution stuff, but we’re still doing things.
Using AI as an SEO Assistant
Jeremy Rivera: Even with less attribution capability, we still have capability and we can turn it around and use the capability of LLMs to our advantage. Like looking at, hey, what’s my library of content? I just did this today. “Give me five topics that these articles line up into.” Okay. “You’ve got 15 articles. I want a checklist type article that walks through the values and hyperlink to these articles from it.”
So that way when I post that checklist, it backdates to the beginning of the year, but I’m going to get internal links to all of that on a non-category page. Instead, it’s topically relevant and a little chunk of information.
So, you know, it’s on hydrid.com and it’s linking to all these IV hydration therapy checklist guide, but it links to all the articles. But I don’t have to go in and create a category page with all of the WordPress nonsense and all of the extra rigs.
But I just got a chance to send all of these internal links out. And so of course then I’m going to find some easy external links to send there so I can then pass that indexation so that we don’t keep losing pages out of the index.
Use LLMs to your advantage because that analysis of looking through X number of blog posts to find a theme, that would have taken a couple of hours and then writing it up would have been another hour or two or exporting it out. But I just got that done in like half an hour.
Jason Berkowitz: I mean, it’s a great SEO assistant. Absolutely. It can’t take the strategy because that’s like sometimes critical thinking and getting creative with how you implement SEO in a way that doesn’t go against the brand, brand messaging, brand voice.
But yeah, I mean, the things that you can do now, things that used to take us five, six hours of research, like sometimes an hour and then even small little things of like copy paste, copy paste, just automated.
That’s where I think it’s like a cool time to be alive because you’re getting more done in a short amount of time.
Where to Find Jason
Jeremy Rivera: Absolutely. Love it. Shout out again where people can find you if you’re on LinkedIn or on Blue Sky or Twitter specifically. Where can people interact with you get more nuggets of wisdom?
Jason Berkowitz: Yeah, primarily on LinkedIn, Jason Berkowitz. You can find our agency at breaktheweb.agency. You can Google “break the web,” we’ll come up. But I primarily hang out on LinkedIn, but also to a point, because there’s a lot of shininess out there that’s just, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: I know what you mean. Alright, thanks for the great conversation.
Jason Berkowitz: Thank you, Jeremy.
