In a recent episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, I sat down with Brandon Leibowitz — founder of SEO Optimizers and an 18-year veteran of the industry. Brandon has a refreshing, grounded perspective on the AI search landscape: the fundamentals still win. Here’s what stood out from our conversation.
AI Search: Informational, Not Yet Transactional
Brandon Leibowitz: Just trying to write for AI — which is more question-and-answer format. Making sure you have schema on your website, because schema is really important for AI to pull that content in. But it’s more informational stuff that happens on AI. It’s not really transactional, which doesn’t really affect the bottom line of most of my clients. AI kind of traps you on there — you can’t buy from there yet.
Brandon Leibowitz: The more touch points you have and more places people find you, the more likely they are to want your product or service in the future. But right now, just try to stick with the best practices that are already in place. The AI overview is just a featured snippet — a new way to rebrand it for Google.
The Schema Approach: Page-by-Page Entity Differentiation
Brandon Leibowitz: Every page should have different schema for the different products. Each page has their own unique schema entities. We use validators to make sure it validates and reads properly, so Google is able to read it and see what those entities are.
Audit Your Competition’s Schema
Brandon Leibowitz: Put your URL into a schema validator — and put your competitors’ URLs in there too, so you can see what schema items they’re utilizing. Just because your competition has it doesn’t mean it’s correctly set up. But if you see that they have a tag you might have overlooked, and multiple competitors are using it, then it might be a good idea to rethink that and add it into your schema.
Holistic SEO Still Rules
Brandon Leibowitz: Just doing technical doesn’t really move the needle if you don’t have good content and good backlinks. You have to put all those pieces together. Sometimes there’s a bigger piece that’s missing that really needs a lot more emphasis. That’s where you can use Search Console or a tool like Ahrefs to audit and see low-hanging fruit that will move the needle quicker.
Connect with Brandon at seooptimizers.com/gift or LinkedIn.
