Unscripted SEO. Host: Jeremy Rivera. Guest: Laurent Cohen of GetOblic, a voice-first AI business directory. He has been doing SEO since 2003, starting in health and beauty e-commerce, and now splits his time between Florida and Tel Aviv.
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Also on Castos. Recorded 11 February 2026.
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What happens when you launch a brand new domain with 1.6 million pages in 2026, the year everyone keeps telling you SEO is dead?
If you’re Laurent Cohen, you get 300,000 of those pages indexed in about four months, and Google starts handing you broad local terms like “chiropractor near me” and “massage near me.” His site went live on September 18. He’d planned a plan B and a plan C, the way he always does. He didn’t need either one.
Well, the truth is that the interesting part of this episode isn’t the page count. It’s why he thinks those pages got indexed, and it isn’t the thing he built them for.
Key takeaways
- Laurent’s split: SEO is 20% technical and 80% semantic. You can learn the technical side from an LLM in days. The semantic side needs you to actually know the business.
- Out of 1.6 million directory pages, 300,000 were indexed within about four months of a September 18 launch.
- Every directory page carries its own voice agent. When visitors talk to it, time on page goes from seconds to minutes, and Laurent thinks that retention is what Google is rewarding.
- He put authority link building aside around 2015. Internal linking is “at the minimum” because you can’t hand-link 1.6 million pages.
- Page speed eats about a third of his day. Cloudflare’s cache took his origin response from around 2,500 milliseconds to 200 to 300.
- Facebook’s crawler hits the site hundreds of thousands of times a day, for preloading rather than indexing, and he says you can’t properly block it.
- Production AI runs on local models through Ollama, not web-based LLMs, so he controls the boundaries.
SEO is 20% technical and 80% semantic
You’ve probably sat through an agency report that was nothing but titles, descriptions and a backlink count. Laurent calls that “this fog of numbers.” The technical layer is real, but it’s the easy part. As he put it, with any LLM “you can be an SEO expert in five days if you have the energy and the time.”
“For me SEO is 20% technicality, 80% semantics.”
Laurent Cohen
The 80% is knowing your business well enough that what you put on the page makes sense to the person reading it. You have customers, you need to send them a message, and there’s “someone in the middle that’s called Google” checking whether that message is relevant to those people. If it is, they stay. If they stay, Google gives you more room.
That applies to AI content too. Laurent writes at scale with generative AI because at 1.6 million pages there’s no other option. But he’s blunt that anyone who has worked with it long enough can spot AI text in seconds, and “Google knows it perfectly.” The tells are structural, which is why no humanizer scrubs the fingerprint AI slop leaves. So you pick the keywords your end user will react to, not the ones you want indexed, and you write for them.
The retention play nobody planned
Here’s the part that surprised him. GetOblic deployed a voice agent on every page, 1.6 million of them, trained on each business’s public information. The plan was a directory where you could actually talk to the businesses.
“We thought we were indexing pages. We are not indexing pages. We are indexing voice agents.”
Laurent Cohen
Once a visitor engages with an agent, time on page stretches “from a few seconds to a few minutes.” Laurent’s read is that Google measures that, decides something is happening on those pages, and tests more of them. Do it at scale and you get the results he’s been seeing.
Then the customers told him what the product actually was. Small and medium businesses started subscribing for the SEO effect. They didn’t care about the virtual phone line. They wanted the widget on their own website because, in his words, “It’s pre-trained, it’s simple, it’s cheap and it guarantees retention.” That’s a pivot he’s making right now.
I pushed on the behavior question from my side. For years Matt Cutts, John Mueller and Gary Illyes danced around whether Google used browser behavior as a ranking signal, until the DOJ case put it on the record. Laurent’s answer was one line:
His own worst lesson wasn’t even Google. It was Facebook in 2017, when organic reach on content he was publishing every two weeks to an engaged audience fell about 80% almost overnight. The playbook, he says, is written by the platform for the platform. Google trains people so companies pay for SEM, not so they rank organically.
What he stopped doing: links and chasing updates
If you’re still counting backlinks as the main lever, this section is for you. Laurent set authority link building aside around 2015. He hasn’t heard anyone say “black hat” in ten years, and he doesn’t think heavy linking changes the game except for the top performers fighting over broad terms.
“I care only about intention and relevance.”
Laurent Cohen
He’s careful to scope that. A 15-year-old site is a different playbook. But if you’re starting a company today, his order is well-structured pages, content that gets refreshed (he has an engine rewriting and reinjecting content day and night), and most of your energy on retention. Bradley Benner made a similar case from the link side in relevance over DR.
On core updates, same answer. The named updates of the 2000s were real pivots you could feel. Today’s rolling updates don’t change what SEO is, so you don’t need to follow every one. Keep up with specifics that matter to you (a speakable schema if you use voice, for example) and stick to your own rules.
Page speed, bots and Cloudflare
If Laurent could hand you one piece of technical advice, it’s this: focus on the speed of your pages. “Those images are killing you.” Shrink them hard and cache everything.
- Cache. Using Cloudflare’s cache, his origin times dropped from about 2,500 milliseconds to 200 to 300.
- AI bots. Around month three, a flood of AI bot traffic hit the site, the bulk of it from Germany. Cloudflare’s bot tools handle most of it and he calls them cheap and simple to set up.
- Facebook. The biggest volume now is Facebook’s crawler, hundreds of thousands of requests a day, and it isn’t indexing. It’s preloading. You can’t properly block it, so you plan for it.
If bots as a traffic segment is a live issue for you, Dan Kurtz went deep on it in bots as a customer segment.
Three AI tools, trained like employees
I came into that part of the conversation with a line from my friend Matt Brooks of SEOteric: ChatGPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative. Then I asked whether AI visibility tracking is just another inflated metric, the way rank tracking bloated Search Console impressions. Laurent’s answer is simplicity. LLMs fetch their results from search engines, so he focuses on SEO and leaves the noise outside. “Nobody knows yet exactly how strong you can do GEO.”
The same goes for the tool pile. His rule is to select three tools, train them, and treat them as employees.
“The best AI tool will be the one that you have trained in-house. It will be your sidekick.”
Laurent Cohen
For the product itself he doesn’t rely on web-based LLMs at all. GetOblic runs local models through Ollama, several of them, inside its own environment, “to make sure we have boundaries.”
His soapbox: stop everything and learn AI
If you’re not using AI professionally two hours a day, Laurent’s advice is to stop everything. Take a month, possibly three, and deep dive. You come back and you’ll be able to kill it, in SEO or anything else. After a conversation that got fairly dark about AI, he ended on the opposite note: “we’re living a fantastic time.” He’s 54, working 13 hours a day, and says he wouldn’t have believed that two years ago.
So here’s the question to take back to your own site. If Google is measuring whether people stay, what on your page actually gives them a reason to?
Questions this episode answers
Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
Laurent’s data says yes. A brand new domain launched September 18 got 300,000 of 1.6 million pages indexed in about four months and started ranking for broad local terms. His read is that many companies walked away from SEO, which left room for anyone still doing it.
Does user engagement affect rankings?
Laurent believes retention is the main thing behind his results. Voice agents on each page stretch visits from seconds to minutes, and he thinks Google measures that and serves more of the site in response.
Do backlinks still matter for a new site?
Not much, in his experience. He set authority link building aside around 2015 and focuses on relevance, refreshed content and retention, with internal linking kept to a minimum at his scale. He says older sites run a different playbook.
How do you speed up a large site?
Compress images hard, cache aggressively, and put a CDN like Cloudflare in front. His origin response went from about 2,500 milliseconds to 200 to 300.
Go deeper
- Laura Hoot on why the industry doesn’t really think SEO is dying
- Jon Henshaw on AI hype and Google’s sources of truth
- Programmatic SEO and how it can increase your organic traffic, for the page-at-scale side of this conversation
Where to find Laurent Cohen
You can explore the directory and the voice agents at GetOblic, and Laurent writes at Laurent’s Substack. GetOblic is also on LinkedIn.
Disclosure: I’m a GetOblic affiliate.
About this recap
Every quotation on this page is verbatim from the recording and is Laurent Cohen speaking. Laurent doesn’t name his company on the recording; it’s GetOblic. The episode was recorded on 11 February 2026, so “four months” is as of that date.
