Episode Summary
In this solo episode of the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, host Greg Shuey tackles the widespread claim that SEO is dead in the age of LLMs and AI-driven search, pushing back with industry data, client results, and strategic insights. He argues that while search behavior is evolving with ChatGPT used more for early-stage discovery and Google still dominating solution-based searches, SEO remains essential for sustainable D2C growth.
Greg emphasizes that claims of SEO’s demise are often rooted in fear, inexperience, or engagement bait, and ignoring SEO now will only lead to increased customer acquisition costs and reduced visibility in both search engines and AI platforms. He shares current search volume data, explains the importance of structuring content for LLMs and AI Overviews, and urges marketers to adapt by integrating FAQs, structured data, and semantically rich content across all site pages.
He also previews how his agency uses AI agents to streamline FAQ development and content optimization for maximum visibility and performance. Ultimately, Greg encourages brands to stay curious, evolve with the changes, and lean into SEO and LLM optimization as complementary pillars of future-ready marketing.
Key Takeaways
- SEO Is Not Dead – It’s Evolving: Despite alarmist takes on social media, organic search remains a major traffic driver, especially for eCommerce, with Google processing 16.4 billion searches daily versus ChatGPT’s 1 billion prompts.
- AI Tools and LLMs Are Additive, Not Replacements: ChatGPT and other LLMs serve more as discovery tools, while Google remains the go-to for solution-based queries and conversions. Brands need visibility across both.
- Structured Content Is Key to Visibility: Incorporating FAQs, schema markup, and semantically rich content across product, category, and blog pages helps improve visibility in AI Overviews, People Also Ask, and LLM responses.
- Brands Who Adapt Will Win: Greg emphasizes a shift from just ranking for keywords to building impression share and brand awareness across both search engines and AI platforms.
- Real-World Results Prove SEO’s Value: Stryde’s clients are seeing 15% to 80%+ year-over-year organic growth by staying consistent with content creation and adapting their SEO strategy to include LLM and AI optimization.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Is my current SEO strategy evolving to account for how people are now using LLMs like ChatGPT and AI Overviews in Google? Am I optimizing for both traditional rankings and visibility in AI-generated responses?
- How reliant is my business on paid media, and what risks am I taking by underinvesting in organic search and content marketing? Could a stronger SEO foundation reduce my customer acquisition costs?
- Am I producing content that actually helps answer my customers’ questions, across product pages, category pages, and blogs? And is that content structured properly to be eligible for AI surfacing (e.g., with schema markup and semantic clarity)?
- Do I have a process or tools in place to track and improve my brand’s visibility across both search engines and LLMs? How can I start measuring visibility beyond keyword rankings?
- What internal resistance or outdated assumptions might be preventing me from fully embracing the changes in how search works today? Am I reacting based on fear or misinformation instead of data and experimentation?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Datos State of Search 2025: https://datos.live/report/state-of-search-q1-2025/
Spark Toro – Google Receives 373x More Searches Than Chat GPT: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-20-in-2024-receives-373x-more-searches-than-chatgpt/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:02.344)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Schuey, and I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and who are desperately trying to find a way to grow their businesses. So over the next few months, I’m actually going to be spending some time recording some solo casts. I want to get really deep into Google, both into search engine optimization
as well as paid search. And I also want to spend some time on digging into LLM optimization. So optimizing for chat GPT and perplexity and Google AI search so that you can know what’s going on right now and that you can start to adjust your strategies quickly and to be able to compete or absolutely dominate in each of the platforms.
So I actually had this on my schedule later this week to record. However, after seeing my 9,000th post this week about how SEO is dying, I decided to hop on and get this thing recorded. So today I’m going to talk about the myth of SEO dying and really debunking that. There’s been a lot of chatter on LinkedIn, a lot of chatter on Twitter or X or whatever you call it, chatter on Reddit, the forums, SEO blogs that SEO’s done.
It’s cooked, stop investing in it. However, what we are seeing is the opposite of that with the majority of our clients, as well as there’s lots of industry experts out there that are really pushing against this notion that SEO is dead. there’s still just a lot of opportunity here from leveraging traditional search, SEO, as well as making sure that your content is properly up.
for the LLM so that you actually can come in and start to dominate. So let’s jump in. I hope you’re ready. So let’s talk about kind of this SEO is dead statement that we see honestly more often than we should be seeing. I would say that people have declared that SEO is dead probably every few years. They kind of get on this kick and it usually comes after
Greg Shuey (02:25.346)
There’s a big Google algorithm update or some kind of a shift in the algorithm or some kind of new platform launch, like again, chat GPT or Google AI overviews or Google AI search. A lot of people get on and start shouting from the rooftops that, know, all this money and time you’ve invested in SEO is all for nothing anymore. Google’s just going to be stealing your content. The LLMs are going to be stealing your content.
and honestly giving you nothing in return. And this honestly cannot be further than the truth. What I see and what I feel as I read these posts on LinkedIn, I probably should just stop getting on LinkedIn because it’s really making me mad. What it tells me is that people who are either true, well, they’re not even true SEOs, honestly.
they’re probably self-proclaimed SEOs and don’t have a lot of expertise in the space. They’re more or less uncomfortable with change. And, and so therefore they’re just hopping on to the next thing. Industry experts like myself who’ve been doing this for 20 years now, knows that change is inevitable. Right? I mean, when I started, we used to be able to load up a bunch of meta keywords.
tweak a title tag, keyword stuff a homepage, and build some backlinks on some article sites and rank number one overnight. And obviously that’s not the case anymore. Does that mean that SEO died back then? Absolutely not. I also think, you know, for a lot of these people, it’s just clickbait, right? It’s clickbait, fear-mongering.
in order to create engagement. But this is actually hurting, I think, the industry in general, because it’s misleading younger marketers into inaction or potentially hasty pivots that are actually going to be detrimental to their businesses that they’re working on, whether they’re in-house or whether they’re working on SEO for their clients inside of an agency setting. And it’s really causing them to make a pivot without having all of the data or the information at their fingertips.
Greg Shuey (04:40.758)
And frankly, some of these new marketers that are just getting their, their feet wet, right? They don’t know where to go to get, you know, data backed information. They see a post on LinkedIn and you know, therefore it’s gospel. So, yeah, so let’s, let’s kind of unpack this. Let’s peel back the different layers. So, you know, we’re a couple of years in to chat GPT and I will say this, that it is starting to reshape the way that people.
search, whether it’s in the LLMs or even when it comes to Google. They are changing the way that people ask questions in these platforms, not necessarily why they search, but how they search. If I take me, for example, I I’m 41. I’m not young anymore. I still use Google religiously to help me with kind
deep research and digging into questions and search queries that are kind of, I would say, more so low funnel that are helping me get to some kind of a solution, whether that’s making a purchase or reading a blog post or what. I’m using ChatGPT more as a sounding board from a business perspective, asking it to interview me.
I’ll also take pictures of things like, example, we have a travel trailer. We have a black tank on that travel trailer. That’s having issues with the spray out, that, cleans the tank after we’re done. And so I’ll take pictures of the tank. I’ll take pictures of the, the, the, the nozzle, the spray out nozzle. And I will ask chat GPT to help me kind of solve this problem. As soon as the problem solved, I’ll go over to Google and I’ll search for the part.
that I need to buy or the cleaner that I need to buy. And so I really do think that chat GPT is being used as more of a discovery tool. And then users are coming over to Google and finishing their journey actually using it to find that solution to their problem. You know,
Greg Shuey (07:00.11)
I don’t know what this looks like in the future, you know, as we start to kind of unpack people using chat GPT for, you know, product discovery, they’re getting really close to allowing businesses to be able to, you know, import their product feeds into platform. They’re getting really close to being able to integrate with Shopify’s back end.
you know, merchant processing solutions so people can buy right on chat GPT without ever leaving the platform. So what does this look like? You know, three, six months down the road. don’t know. But for right now, you know, I truly believe that that’s the way that people are using each platform to be able to solve their problems. I also wanted to touch kind of on why.
you know, this narrative is wrong and dangerous. This whole SEO dead thing is dead thing. I think I touched on it just briefly, talking specifically about, young marketers and, you know, just taking everything as gospel that they see on LinkedIn or they see in the forums or Reddit or whatnot. And I truly believe that this kills curiosity and, and innovation.
I also think this narrative is wrong because many DTC brands rely on performance channels like Meta, Google ads. And if they flat out start ignoring SEO as a channel or AI optimization or LLM optimization, whatever you want to call it, they ignore that. What that means is that they are going to start seeing a higher customer acquisition costs because they’re more reliant on those paid channels and you are not.
You know tapping into that organic that free traffic source and You know the the last one, you know as SEOs You know, we produce a lot of content a lot of helpful content a lot of blog content and if we stop doing that from an SEO perspective we are no longer feeding that content into the search engines and
Greg Shuey (09:13.592)
we are not feeding that content into the LLMs, which are a hundred percent trained on web content. If we stop doing that, you’re just flat out going to stop showing up. And so I also think that that’s kind of a dangerous slippery slope to go down as well. So let’s talk about some stats. If you follow Rand Fishkin and Spark Toro, he is really good about posting these stats on, on LinkedIn. I’ve also downloaded, you know, a couple of reports over
over the last few years, one specifically from a company called Datos. They’re a SEMrush company. They do a lot of data collection and research around search. the state of search report, which they released at the end of Q1, I assume another one’s gonna be coming soon, paints a very clear picture of kind of what’s going on here.
As of what’s the end of Q1? End of March 2025, Google’s still handling around 16.4 billion, that’s with a B, searches every single day. Whereas chat GPT processes around 1 billion prompts per day. So, you know, Google is still the powerhouse when it comes to people searching for solutions. When we look at a percentage,
of increase or decrease over the last year. People say, you know, my heavens, Google is just losing market share by the day. Actually, that’s not true. So traditional search is really only down about 1.63 % when compared to the same period of time last year. They also share the stat that AI tools, this isn’t just chat GPT. This is, you know, any form of AI tool.
And I’m sure that this number is going to increase pretty significantly as Google fully rolls out their AI search platform here soon. I still haven’t seen it in the wild, but I know that some people have. But those AI tools, so prompts and searches through AI tools are only up 0.38 % when compared to the same period of time last year. And so, yes, they’re growing.
Greg Shuey (11:31.182)
Search is down just a smidge, but it’s not enough to be an alarmist and say SEO is dead and that you should abandon ship by any means. Also, you know, an interesting stat that I saw is that even with AI tools rising very slowly, SEO clicks to a website account to, you know, 50 % ish of trackable web traffic across all industries.
And then in terms of the type of searches that are happening on Google, e-commerce as well as lower funnel, high intent queries continue to drive the bulk of organic conversions for businesses. And so you can clearly see with these data points from an unbiased third party that search isn’t going anywhere. Organic search isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. think
You know, honestly, if I had to pull out a crystal ball, think that we’re probably somewhere around three to five years before we start to see AI tools really, you know, take a huge chunk of what’s happening with in Google. That is if Google doesn’t adapt, which I’m guessing that they are going to at lightning speed and all will be well in the world.
So yeah, I thought that those stats were interesting and to kind of put to rest this whole SEO is dead garbage. Yeah, so when we think about these different AI platforms, these different LLMs, I touched on this just a little bit in this episode so far. I think of these as almost like an answers layer.
another data layer on top of traditional search, I mentioned. LLMs, they borrow data from the search engines, they borrow data from product feeds, content rich websites, and brands who actually take the time to structure their content properly in order to be eligible to show up in the LLMs, in order to be eligible to show up in AI overviews, people also ask those types of things. They’re more likely to be surfaced.
Greg Shuey (13:46.382)
in these AI generated responses, which is another big piece to search engine optimization. It’s no longer about optimizing for rankings. It’s optimizing for relevance. It’s optimizing for visibility. It’s optimizing for impression share and building brand awareness. think that’s kind of the shift that we need to take as SEOs is we need to work on
Traditional rankings, yes, we have to keep doing that, but we need to be thinking kind of outside the box in terms of how do we grow that impression share? How do we grow that brand awareness so that we’re everywhere? We’re everywhere where our customers are looking. And as a result, when they are ready to make that purchase, they’re either going to come in through a direct visit to the website.
or potentially a branded search. They’ll go back to Google, they’ll search the brand name, they’ll come in, that looks organic, but it’s gonna be triggered as a branded search in Google Search Console. But yeah, I see that as being kind of the next iteration and kind of approach that SEO should be taking. And it’s approach that we’re taking here at Stride.
If we start looking at some of our client numbers, I mean, again, I get on and I’ll respond to messages on LinkedIn and whatnot. You know, for the most part, it’s about 96 % of our clients right now are seeing growth with their search engine optimization. If we look at some of our biggest success stories, you know, we’re seeing, you know, year over year impression growth at anywhere between 500 to 1000%.
Sometimes more, I mean, we’ve got one right now that’s increased their impressions by over a million impressions a month compared to the same period of time last year. And that takes into account, again, your AI overviews, your people also ask, it also takes into account your AI search now. And we’re seeing significant growth by just continuing to play the long game and doing your search engine optimization. In turn, on some of those big clients, we’re still seeing
Greg Shuey (15:58.798)
40 to 60, even sometimes 70 to 80 % increase year over year organic traffic and revenue from that organic traffic. So SEO is alive and well on the, you know, on the lower side, you know, I don’t think we have a client right now that’s seeing less than about a 12 to 15 % growth, in terms of organic traffic, revenue growth from, from, from search. And so, it’s definitely.
It’s definitely the right path to go if you want to continue to build a moat around your business and be able to tap into that quote unquote free traffic and revenue that Google and the LLMs will will be sending you. So let’s talk about, you know, what
you should be doing differently. So if you haven’t made any changes to your SEO or your content marketing strategy over the last, you know, six months, you’re probably a little bit behind. If we think back to some of the things that I mentioned earlier in this episode, you know, people are using chat GPT. They’re even using Google these days to answer questions and people may refer to those as prompts.
in the different LLMs where they’re asking questions, they’re seeking guidance, they’re trying to uncover information before going over to Google and continuing their search for the specific solution. One of the strategies that we’ve seen work really, really well for our clients is to just spend a significant amount of time really digging in and identifying frequently asked questions and
and then answering those questions and making sure those are on our clients category pages, making sure they’re on our clients product pages, making sure they’re weaved in and out of each of our clients blog posts. We’ve actually built some really cool AI tools here. This is, this is one use case for AI is we’re starting to really dig in and develop a different AI sales and marketing agents to help us kind of do.
Greg Shuey (18:09.642)
more of the mundane work so that our team members can spend more time in the data, in the strategy side of things. And so we’ve built a really cool AI marketing agent that will actually go out and tap into different data sources and pull from the APIs, from some of our tools to help streamline that process and be able to come up with pages and pages and pages of FAQs and help us develop and optimize the answers that we can then take and proofread and clean up a little bit before we push those out to our clients.
web pages and you know, this in and of itself, you know, when, when we implement this activity, we see almost within a week and immediate up into the right, trajectory in terms of number of ranking keywords, in terms of number of, SERP features. So these are your AI overviews, your people also ask, as well as, increased visibility in the LLMs.
So we use a really cool tool called peak PEC.ai that we use to be able to monitor our clients and their visibility in the different AI platforms like chat GPT. This tool allows us to be able to kind of benchmark against our clients competitors to help them understand what their overall visibility is compared to their competitors where they currently rank
an average position in terms of when they are referenced and linked to, what the overall sentiment is, as well as what those individual prompts are, and then the response to those prompts and where our clients show up. And so we’re able to optimize and be able to continually tweak content to be able to maximize the visibility in there.
We also use tools like also asked answer the public. Those are some tools that we use to be able to surface frequently asked questions. We tie into those APIs for our AI marketing agent as well. And I think it’s important to stress here, although I just mentioned it as like content isn’t just for blog posts anymore. Content needs to be helpful and that content needs to be wherever it’s going to be most helpful for your ideal customer profiles.
Greg Shuey (20:31.886)
And then taking all of that content and using schema markup will also help you to be able to be eligible for SERP enhancements and AI visibility as well. As we look at content in terms of what type of content ranks well in the search engines, it’s still a lot of long form content. But the content needs to be scannable. It needs to be delivered in bite-sized chunks. It needs to have bullet points in there. It needs to be factual.
If you’re going to reference different stats or facts, you need to be able to back that up with third party links to resources. And it needs to be semantically rich. When we’re answering questions, answers should be concise, bullet point format, having clear headings and your heading should be the actual question that people search for. And also include relevant keywords in those things. And then again, structured data, making sure that all of your data is structured properly.
wrapped with schema markup where assessable or where applicable. And that allows Google and the different LLMs to really understand your site and potentially power your inclusion in AI overviews. So, you know, how much content should you be producing on a regular basis? That’s a question that we typically get on a weekly basis, I would say, when I’m talking with new potential customers.
That kind of depends on your industry. Like you’ve got to dig in and you’ve got to look at, know, do a competitive content analysis, run a number of queries through Google question based queries through Google to see who’s showing up, who’s rising to the top, digging in, looking at how much content they’re producing. If you’re a business that’s brand new to producing content, you’re probably going to have to produce a lot of content every single month. If you’re one that’s more seasoned has been around for five.
10, 15 years and have a lot of helpful content, you can probably dial that back to maybe a post or two or a month unless you really want to continue to drive that home. And so yeah, I think that, you know, there’s still a lot of opportunity. Well, I know that I don’t just think I know that there’s a lot of opportunities still from an SEO standpoint. As the SERPs continue to evolve, I think that, you know, there will continue to be even more opportunities and
Greg Shuey (22:55.298)
Sometimes I feel like we’re in the wild, wild West still, you know, that’s how I felt 20 years ago when I got into SEOs. It was the wild, wild West. Anything goes. It’s kind of like that now with the chat GPT, with the AI overviews, with the people also asked, like it’s still kind of people are figuring it out and Google will continue to refine that over time. So is search dying? No, absolutely not. Is it evolving a hundred percent and it’s evolving fast. It’s evolving probably almost every day.
And I believe that the brands who take the time to really dig in and do their own research, who really take the time to dig in and figure out what’s going on, looking at the search engine results pages, looking at who’s showing up in AI overviews. And people also ask and asking why, just keep asking why and digging deeper and deeper and deeper. You’ll be able to uncover kind of that formula that works for you and your industry. And by leveraging that formula,
You’re going to get a lot of value out of that. You’re going to get a lot of mileage out of that content. You’re going to get a lot of traffic, a lot of impressions, a lot of traffic, and then a lot of organic revenues. So, yeah, I think that’s probably about where I’m going to wrap up today. I could probably keep rambling on and on and on, but I feel like I’ve gotten my point across pretty well. as we dig in over the next.
I don’t know, or try to record every couple of weeks, kind of digging into the SEO side of things and the LLM and paid search side of things as we dig deeper. you know, I, I hope that we’re able to provide one or two really strong takeaways that you can take and start implementing in your business. And if you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out. mean, head over to the stryde.com and you can fill out our contact form and we’re happy to have a discussion with you.
because again, I do feel like this is you get in early and you’re gonna, you’re going to see results compound very quickly. So that’s what I’m to leave you with today. and I hope that you join us next time. Thanks so much everyone for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
