SEO in the Age of AI: Adaptation Is the Strategy
- Jessica Bush
- 2 days ago
- 23 min read
Season 1, Episode 01 | Conversations with Vibe & Logic | March 30, 2026
Many people wonder if AI is killing SEO. In this episode, Stephan Bajaio and Trevor Stolber clear things up, argue that the panic is exaggerated, and show why brands focusing on technical basics are quietly succeeding in search. If you run a website and want to know what matters most now, this episode is for you.
Watch the Episode
What We Cover
00:00 Meet VibeLogic
01:17 AI mode and SEO hype
03:54 Stephan's contrarian take
06:27 How LLM answers really work
08:29 Real world AI search stories
11:25 Why title tags matter
17:43 H1s, content, and authority
24:18 SEO never stops
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Jessica Bush: I am joined by the co-founders of Vibe Logic.
[00:00:04] Stephan, you wanna introduce yourself?
[00:00:06] Stephan Bajaio: Sure. Hey guys, I'm Stephan Bajalo. I am CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic. I've gotten to build some software around SEO, SAS software and so forth. I've also gotten to play the role of CMO really excited to be here with my co-founder, as well as our head of operations, Jessica, and, uh, chat a little bit more about what's going on in the space and, what you should know.
[00:00:30] Jessica Bush: Awesome. How about you, Trevor, the logic side of the room?
[00:00:34] Trevor Stolber: Uh, yeah. So I'm Trevor Stolber, CTO, co-founder of Vibe Logic.
[00:00:38] I've been in the SEO industry almost 30 years now, so I actually been doing SEO longer than Google is in existence.
[00:00:45] Feel like I have a pretty good pulse on the industry. And you know, it's just keeping up with what's changing, doing tests, doing analytics, measuring data very much the logic side of the business.
[00:00:56] Jessica Bush: So we're gonna start this series where it's just basically conversations with these guys because they know a hell of a lot more than I do or anyone else who may be trying to do SEO or, improve their visibility online.
[00:01:09] The primary topic of this is going to be technical audits and why we do them, the components of them what's important, what's not. But we're gonna start with the elephant in the room, which I'm sure everybody talks about, is talking about, is being asked about, which is AI.
[00:01:26] Um, so-
[00:01:27] Trevor Stolber: I've never heard anyone talk about that at all recently.
[00:01:28] Jessica Bush: Well, you know what?
[00:01:30] Trevor Stolber: Like, not, not on the tip of everyone's tongue.
[00:01:31] Jessica Bush: Where, where have you been? Have you even opened your computer in the last, you know, few months, year, whatever? So specifically AI mode the fact that so many of our clients are asking that question, how are we showing up in the LLMs?
[00:01:46] A lot of, you know, board members are coming to executives at the companies and asking this question, "Are we showing up in the LLMs?" What about AI, right? Do you see AI as a threat to traditional SEO as we know it?
[00:02:01] Trevor Stolber: So- I don't see it as a threat. I see it more as something we need to be adaptive to.
[00:02:07] I've seen these trends in the industry over time. and one pretty strong parallel I think I have for it is featured snippets and zero-click searches. When that happened, everyone was freaking out like, "Oh no, it's the end of SEO." And SEO has been proclaimed dead so many times over the years.
[00:02:25] It's kind of hilarious at this point. We're a
[00:02:26] Stephan Bajaio: zombie. We keep
[00:02:27] Trevor Stolber: coming
[00:02:28] Stephan Bajaio: back. Right.
[00:02:28] Trevor Stolber: We keep coming back to life. Yeah. and it turns out people use search engines to find what they're looking for, so you need to be visible, so I do see it quite akin to the zero-click search and feature snippets.
[00:02:39] Something that was once very feared is actually something now that's just generally part of the strategy. We try and achieve and get those featured snippets. I don't wanna downplay it, though. This is a significant inflection point in the industry. It does seem more significant than just a new SERP feature.
[00:02:54] There's kind of a different surface, and we can get into that, although the surface is built on top of traditional web search, and that's why technical stuff is still very much needed. A-and, and also I think this is, the hype cycle is very, very high right now. We're at peak hype, I think. And, y- the data doesn't lie.
[00:03:11] Something you hear me say regularly, the data doesn't lie. The, the numbers quoted are, are showing sort of monthly active users, but they're not performing typical web searches in those numbers. There are some, and we think it's somewhere between point five and one percent of all LLM use cases or all LLM use is the, is search, right?
[00:03:33] The rest of it is still traditional search engines, and the data sort of shows that, you know, the people are not getting huge amounts of traffic from LLMs and huge amounts of conversion. It's a different journey, it's a different visibility surface, but you have to sort of temper the hype, the expectation and the cost to justify it, right?
[00:03:52] Stephan, what's your take?
[00:03:54] Stephan Bajaio: I... It's funny, I, I literally just jumped off a call with someone who used to work with me twenty years ago.
[00:03:59] I had the privilege of working on some of the world's first e-commerce websites. This was at a time when we were still dealing in the D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D version of the internet. I think we're there right now with AI and LLMs, and I think I tend to be the contrarian in the room. I think you would be chasing the wrong form of animal if you focus too much on it right now.
[00:04:23] The reality is, Companies, and I agree with Trevor on the hype cycle, I think people are far too hyped right now, and it's because it's more than a search engine or a search platform, right? There's a lot more to AI and the use of LLMs in marketing and in everything else, than just trying to find stuff.
[00:04:42] I think AI and LLMs are kind of being misused as a channel instead of a medium by which to produce better and more, interactive content, which I think will be more appealing. And I also think that, marketers, board members and so forth I will akin this to the gold rush. The only people that made money during the gold rush was those who sold pans and picks.
[00:05:09] So I would say rather than trying to invest in an entire expedition to try and find gold I would rather spend my efforts, time, treasure against ensuring that the data off which a lot of the future is going to be based, which is my website, my digital data, both with my internal data of what's available in my company from a wisdom perspective, and what I'm showing the rest of the world with my website, that I'm doing the best possible job of structuring that, building that, and making that as functional and usable as possible.
[00:05:43] At which point, what ingests it, how it ingests it, and how it chooses to, dare I say, regurgitate it, but actually like display it, could change vastly between now and six months from now. So- Mm-hmm ... you could supposedly get the keys to the kingdom, and it would have been yesterday's kingdom.
[00:06:02] So it's-- I, I wouldn't go chasing the dream of AI right now.
[00:06:07] I would really start focusing and look inwards. The companies that I think are gonna structure themselves for that think about marketing in a different way, think about data in a different way, think about usability in a different way. Those are the ones that come out the winner.
[00:06:21] Jessica Bush: That's like Blockbuster not getting ahead of the curve and-
[00:06:25] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, not wanting to do the deal with Netflix.
[00:06:27] And I mean, if I could just like also preface that a little bit by how do a lot of the AI overviews and LLM results work? Where do they go? They go to a search engine.
[00:06:39] Trevor Stolber: They fan out these queries and then go do searches based on that, and then bring it back and contextualize it into something that hopefully looks like your answer.
[00:06:47] Stephan Bajaio: I think it's crazy that right now we're looking at LLMs from a, quote-unquote, "rankings," right? First of all, when an LLM produces a result, it doesn't usually give it to you in the same context of a search engine. So we've been taught that a search engine goes highest relevancy first to lower and lower and lower relevancy.
[00:07:11] The problem is, A, hallucinations find their way into result types, right? So B, we don't know the highest or first response from an LLM is highest relevance. We don't know that. We don't know. Well, and it
[00:07:25] Trevor Stolber: changes too, right?
[00:07:26] It's
[00:07:26] Stephan Bajaio: not a ranking system. Well, one, they don't say. You're absolutely right. From a, from a results perspective, it's been shown they're not keeping those same results. We could all put in the same prompt right now, and it's gonna vary it up. And you gotta understand also that the context window of an LLM is gonna be even more pervasive in personalization potentially than search history.
[00:07:47] Trevor Stolber: Yep.
[00:07:48] Stephan Bajaio: Search history was done in keyword strings. The context window of what an LLM can take into account is entire back-and-forth conversations. So- And it will
[00:07:58] Trevor Stolber: tell you what you wanna hear.
[00:07:59] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, so, like, it, and it could serve those things up to you with those biases. So the idea that it's not... It doesn't even give you a confidence score along the way.
[00:08:08] So I'd say, like, nobody's got a perfect crystal ball on this. we do know, however, your site will be, will be analyzed, 'cause it's your content. So if you aren't focused there, and you're worried about- And y- y- your house is not in order and you're worried about what the future looks like, I'd say go back and clean your house
[00:08:28] Jessica Bush: Yeah.
[00:08:29] I'm gonna bring chickens into the conversation- Let's do it ... because this encapsulates all of this right now. Old habits die hard, right? My husband was searching last night for the best hatcheries around us, 'cause he's... needs to get more chickens. And so he goes to Google and he searches, something about finding chickens, right?
[00:08:48] And so the AI overview gave him a summary, right? And it did call out some of the nearby ones. But I watched him, like, I was paying attention. He still scrolled down to look at the search results. So, like, we are thinking in terms of what we've been doing for decades now we think in that way. Yeah.
[00:09:06] I think it's gonna be really hard to get people to move away from that when they're trying to find the best place to go for X, Y, Z. So.
[00:09:14] Trevor Stolber: Yeah. I actually have a really, interesting real world study that I saw out in the wild, that very relevant to what you were saying, the opposite side of it.
[00:09:23] So I was getting my hair cut. And this person was talking with a friend about, like, whether her husband had a job opportunity in a new city, and so she put into an LLM is this city the best place for us to move to?"
[00:09:36] Her question was, "Is it?" And it gave a response back, telling her all of the reasons why it was the best possible option for her. It didn't assess anything, it didn't rank anything. It made something up that acquiesced to her, her query- Mm-hmm ...
[00:09:50] Stephan Bajaio: and
[00:09:50] Trevor Stolber: she had interpreted it completely different to...
[00:09:53] And I, I'm seeing this happening in real time, and like, I can see what's going on, and I'm like, "How many people see that and just take that- Yeah ... that way?" 'Cause it is what we're used to.
[00:10:01] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. And I think, I think there is... Listen, it's, we'd be crazy to say that there's no place that AI eats search up, and I think it will, but I don't think it does it in the way that we're talking about.
[00:10:13] I can see certain things Being like, "Yeah, I don't wanna have to search for multiple things on that.
[00:10:19] Solve that for me." And now there's certain things you're gonna be willing as an individual to give up to an AI assistant to kind of like figure out for you, right? And it might be, give me a recommendation on where I should eat pizza nearby or things like that 'cause you've, you've started to understand me.
[00:10:38] Do I think people are gonna be choosing their cars based on what the LLM tells them, making life decisions, B2B decisions based on that, really substantial stuff? No. Could it help limit the crazy thousand choices when you don't want a thousand?
[00:10:53] Yeah, it could, and that's where PR and other channels are gonna have to take hold and start thinking about multi-channel and the way that you influence the things off which the LLM understands, right?
[00:11:02] If you're not listed, if you're not mentioned, if you're not part of the conversation, it's gonna be really hard for an LLM to cite you as a source.
[00:11:10] So your mindset is gonna have to shift. If anything, I think marketing departments are gonna have to start thinking less channel and more audience and more value prop and more cross-channel and more campaign than they ever have.
[00:11:25] Jessica Bush: We're gonna get to our main topic, which is, just the technical side of SEO. So, I've noticed that one of the first things we check when we introduce ourselves to a new site is the title.
[00:11:38] Why is this your starting point? Yeah. So And it, it's funny some of the things we see. The title is the, what the page is about, right? It's... You can't be more descript on what something is about than the title. And very often we just see issues with, like you just...
[00:11:55] Trevor Stolber: You look at a title, and you should know what the page is about. If it says home, that's a pretty strong indicator that there's something that needs to be done there 'cause people are not searching for home unless you're a home provider. so, you know, you'll see, and this, this is all aligned to...
[00:12:11] And the reason it's really important is it's aligned to a core concept that Google has called MC or main content, and they refer to this in their quality rater's guidelines, which a lot of people are surprised to hear exists. There is actually a very detailed document that tells quality raters which really exist.
[00:12:28] An army of still an army of humans to actually rate web pages with subtle perturbations of algorithm changes and give that feedback. So it's not a direct influence to the algorithm, but it does tell you what Google's thinking and the, the... what's in the quality rater's guidelines does find its way into the algorithm.
[00:12:45] And this core concept of main content is basically like, what box do you put your website into? What is your site about? If you try and be too broad and about everything you're trying to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to nobody.
[00:12:58] But you go the other way, you're too specific and you hone yourself into this very, very small specific box and nobody out here that's really your audience will find you. So it is a, it is a balance and, you know, we often just find the title does not align to really what you're trying to position towards.
[00:13:13] Jessica Bush: What's the most common mistake that you see in the title when you do this audit? Is it the home? Is it
[00:13:21] Trevor Stolber: that No, that's not the most common. I mean, that, that... If you see that, that just tells you that nobody's done SEO on this site. Yeah.
[00:13:27] But no, I think the- the- the most common one is- is keyword targeting, right? And- and keyword research is obvious, but there's so many nuances to it. Both Stephan and I have deep background into- into titles. Like, I don't know if you wanna jump in, Stephan, with a few examples of, like, how people misinterpret a certain title, or they'll think- think something and not think through what it really means.
[00:13:49] Stephan Bajaio: , It's funny, I've been in rooms where I've been laughed at for mentioning a title tag because an SEO will say, you know, who's been in this industry forever, "Oh, title tag," but it's like, yes, if- if the house is missing a window, it's missing a window. It doesn't matter whether or not the window is the most fundamental thing in the room, it actually is missing a window.
[00:14:11] I will tell you that if you haven't even taken the time, like on a resume, to bold or highlight and/or, you know, put in the right element of which a title tag should be pretty straightforward, it's a telltale sign you're probably not doing SEO on your pages. Yeah.
[00:14:29] Jessica Bush: So what's the solution there?
[00:14:30] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, I mean, the, the solution is, is basically keyword research is one of the basics and the fundamentals. You've pretty much got to start there. Almost every engagement and SEO starts with keyword research.
[00:14:41] So if you're starting a brand new site or, you know, moving in a different direction, you wanna do the keyword research before you produce the content. If you've already got an existing body of content, but it doesn't quite speak to the keywords that you're trying to target, you need to do some realignment, and that comes from information architecture.
[00:14:57] So we're always looking at the data and understanding, like, what is the site telling us? Where does content need to be positioned? What keywords are we serving? What keywords aren't we? And it comes right back to that theme of main content. Your main site theme should reflect the main content that your site is about.
[00:15:15] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah. I think you need to-- there's also an aspect of keyword mapping, right? Which is understanding what pages are supposed to be about what, right? And if you do that, at least at the very rudimentary base, which to Trevor's point, you don't have to do it from scratch. Hopefully, if you've already established some level of credibility in Google or on the search engines, Google Search Console is gonna show you what you're already s-sort of ranking for anywhere in the top one hundred, let's say.
[00:15:43] And you can start saying, "Okay, well then this, this page seems like it's interpreting it this way. Is that correct or not?" And so the title should be reflective of that as well. So you don't just go slapping titles up on your website, 'cause if you put the same title on multiple pages, that would just be confusing to the search engine.
[00:16:00] And to be honest, most people don't even see the title.
[00:16:03] So the point is like, forget that. Just worry about whether or not if you say your page is about something, does it actually say that thing? Are you mirroring that in your title tag?
[00:16:15] Are you writing it in a way that- If it were to be in the search results, it would actually be clicked on because it's evocative enough to want you to click, and does it map back to the page, and is it unique? Those are the things, Trevor and I kind of think about that in our sleep 'cause we've been doing this for so long, that we, we have to map that.
[00:16:34] 'Cause if you're gonna optimize something, right? That's what we're optimizing. We're optimizing the connections. Yeah. The ways things are connected.
[00:16:42] Trevor Stolber: I, I wanna touch on that a little bit because you, you, you mentioned something about the title that's displayed in the search and the title that you click on and what's actually the, the, title of the site.
[00:16:51] And there's so a lot of SEO tools and some recommendations, best practices will tell you, "Don't go over 80 characters, otherwise it will get truncated." But that's really missing the point.
[00:17:00] It depends on the intent of the page. Some pages need a really long, specific title, others don't. Your homepage and core category pages probably need a shorter and snappier title than a detailed description of how something works. But the really important point that a lot of the best practice SEO recommendations and what some of the tools say is the search engine will still evaluate the entire title, whether or not it gets displayed or not, and you might need that full lengthy title to really describe what the page is about.
[00:17:29] So there are reasons why you would wanna keep a title to a certain length and reasons why you definitely would not and the generic SEO advice and SEO tools that you get misses that. So there's important detail there that's just not captured in many places.
[00:17:43] Jessica Bush: so I want y'all to talk a little bit about the H1 in particular. What is it, right?
[00:17:49] I've noticed a lot of the people that we work with don't even have- H1 set, let alone set to be the topic they wanna be found for. And then same thing in the body, like I've also noticed and heard y'all say multiple times, "This page is intended to be XYZ," but you never say XYZ. And so I'd love for y'all to kind of talk about both of those a little bit.
[00:18:16] Trevor Stolber: Yeah. I mean, this is... I, it sounds incredibly simple and obvious, yet the reality is it's not. The title tag on lots of pages isn't anywhere on the page. The, the important string, and let's just, just use, let's use, blue round widgets, for example. Your title might say blue round widgets, and then your header will say, "We're the best company at widgets," right?
[00:18:38] , The h- the H1 is intended to be the primary main title, and it, it's got confused a little bit over the years with design versus correct code semantics. And I will sound a little contradictory here and preface it by saying, there are SEO best practices, and an SEO recommendation is exactly that.
[00:18:56] It's best practice for SEO. You still need to get the brand messaging right and the positioning right. So it's not like a, "You need to make your title when your headings say this," but it is important that you get the right words in there. So there's a, a discussion and a conversation on how best to do that.
[00:19:12] and then y- what you'll see is, you know, oftentimes if you take that round blue widgets, right, and you search for that string, doesn't appear anywhere on the page, or it appears once in a subheading down the page. And, you know, it's really, it's a classic thing. You know, pr- a prospect will say, "Why don't we rank for X?"
[00:19:30] And we're like do you really say it anywhere?" 'Cause you actually don't. And it's surprising to people because their, in their mind, this page is about that thing that they do, but they don't say it. So that's where the keyword research comes in, just understanding. This is where I disagree with a what a lot of the SEO tools say. They will cite the title and the H- H1 heading, primary heading being exactly the same as an issue. Some of them even call it an error. What is the main heading of a page, if not a title?
[00:20:02] Jessica Bush: Yeah
[00:20:02] Trevor Stolber: it is the title of the page, and they should be very similar.
[00:20:06] Stephan Bajaio: So if those structures are not sending the right messages, if, and, and they're to some level hierarchical, okay? But they are supposed to be strong messages. So the use of the terms, we don't wanna be spammy. We do not want to do, to Trevor's point, put in a find on our page, and the thing lights up like a Christmas tree- Right.
[00:20:27] Yeah, yeah ... 'cause it's
[00:20:28] Trevor Stolber: all- You can over-SEO too.
[00:20:29] Stephan Bajaio: Right. It's, it's, that's, that's a, that's an SEO's favorite Thanksgiving meal, keyword stuffing. But like, we don't want we don't want to spam the system. We don't want to do that sort of thing. But what's interesting is when you start realizing the other words that come along together, right?
[00:20:47] Derivatives of these words words that tend to be found with them, the problems they solve, the intent. As you start building that into your content, you're making your page more relevant, right? And It's more than just a keyword Right? And it's more than just a mapping of the keyword to that, it's also recognizing what the other pages that perform currently well in Google are actually including, not because we wanna copy, but because Google's already set the pace of the race for that term.
[00:21:20] And it's saying, "Hey, you know what? Acceptable, in order to be at the front of the line, includes other words like these." Therefore, you may want to include that only because that's what the messaging seems to be. Now, I wouldn't do that if it doesn't apply to your business, 'cause you wanna be relevant to your business.
[00:21:37] No point in getting traffic to a page that's then irrelevant, right? But if you start seeing patterns, which is what SEOs do, we see patterns in our sleep if you see patterns or an SEO is helping you see the patterns of what's already performing, you would not be crazy to start considering some of those things in your content.
[00:21:58] And then also looking at the gaps. What are the things they're not doing well? What are they not talking about well? That's where LLMs can actually come into play, I believe, and help you look and analyze, are there any key topics that are missing on these pages that someone might care about in this process?
[00:22:15] That makes you better at showing up for the consumer than the next guy, and that should technically, help you perform better in the LLMs and/or search engines.
[00:22:27] Trevor Stolber: Yeah. This has been a long-term trajectory, and I think the LLMs and AIOs are just a continuum of the same thing.
[00:22:34] So when I started in SEO, it was ridiculously easier than it is today. You really had to just put the keywords in the right tags and you were gonna rank. It- for a while there, it was that easy. Yeah. And then al- algorithms developed and trends over time. But it used to just be about the keyword.
[00:22:50] Then it became the phrase, and then it moved to the topic, and now it's really about the conversation. Are you in the conversation on that topic? And you have to align your content, your website, how it's structured to the people you're looking to serve and what conversations they're having. So for me, it's just a continuum of the same thing.
[00:23:11] Stephan Bajaio: , The context of your page in regards to the rest of your website is also very important, right? So that would lead to how you link to it and the links you're using, right? Is probably- Yeah ... one of the direct correlations of, so you figured out what the page is supposed to be about, and you started writing about the intent, but if the rest of your website's not willing to confirm that, and no one else on the web does, then are you really about what you say you're about?
[00:23:41] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, And you know, like I think like
[00:23:42] content 101 is let's just do blog posts on random topics we think about, right? 'Cause we need to be producing content, and that's like your basic 101 content marketing. But John Mueller basically said, you know, "It's hard to consider anyone an authority if they haven't published at least twenty articles on the topic." And like, if you're an authority on a topic, you probably should have talked about it,
[00:24:02] right?
[00:24:02] Yeah. I, I just think it, it's all part of that and, yeah, y-you just have to position yourself as being an authority on the topic. It's in the Google quality rater's guidelines. They talk a lot about that as well. This comes to the E-E-A-T, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
[00:24:18] Jessica Bush: Speaking of authority on a topic, I think, that's a good segue into my last question, which is kind of like a common thread that I keep hearing through this conversation, which is you brought up main content, you brought up Google guidelines a few times, and then you mentioned, Trevor, in the beginning, SEO was really easy.
[00:24:38] And I think what I'm hearing and learning since I've been with you guys is it's continually changing, and it's constantly optimizing. You can't just go in, fix your H1, fix your title, all of those things, and just assume you're done. Right. Right. Like, we find with...
[00:24:54] I think we find with our clients, w- I mean, we obviously we're doing regular audits, and we continually find new things based on the guidelines in Google and then everything else we know in the data. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit more about main content, about specifically, but then also about Google's guidelines and why it's important to like, stay ahead of the curve there?
[00:25:19] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so your competition is not standing still for one, right? It's a very dynamic surface. We're dealing with multiple algorithm updates, multiple changes, people trying things that... People's use of the searches even affects where you rank. So, and, and I actually tell people this, "Don't, don't keep searching f- to see if you're number one and clicking back."
[00:25:41] 'Cause if you are, you're actually doing yourself a discredit because if your website isn't being visited after being found at number one, the search result didn't serve the intent as well as it could have done, right? So if you click on it and then click back, that actually has a slightly negative effect.
[00:25:55] So very, very dynamic. I, I think, y-yeah, so your, your competition also not staying still. The search industry changes very frequently. There's multiple algorithm updates and, you know, I have said like 50% of being a good SEO is just keeping up to speed with the industry. And to an extent you do that through testing, you do that through analysis.
[00:26:15] I, I think we had a conversation earlier, like the documentation that Google provides, which there is a plethora of, is regularly updated. It does change and like there are changes that happen that most of the industry doesn't catch up with. Like I think robots.txt is one of the big ones, right?
[00:26:30] It's not actually a current standard, even though people generally accept it to be the law on, on how you control indexing and how Google will see a site. It changed from a directive to a hint, and those are two specific delineations that Google has. Now you should control that on the page level with a meta robots tag.
[00:26:47] A lot of sites still don't do that, and a lot of SEOs still use robots.txt as law. Google still takes it as a hint 'cause it changed from a directive to a hint.
[00:26:55] 'Cause what happens now in, in academia will happen five years' time in, in the actual, technology. So, just staying up to speed with what's changing. Very, very dynamic environment. And-
[00:27:06] Jessica Bush: Yeah ...
[00:27:06] Trevor Stolber: that's, I think that's why there is this Vibe and Logic side to it, right? 'Cause if it was just an algorithm, it'd be purely logical and you would be able to back calculate it.
[00:27:15] Used to be able to do that back in the day when there was about 200 parameters to the algorithm. You could maybe back engineer that a little bit, but not today. It's, it's too much of a dyn-dynamic surface to do that with, with any certainty.
[00:27:25] Stephan Bajaio: Search is a zero-sum game, right? It's optimization, in fact, no matter what you call the first parts of these. So it's like search engine optimization, AEO, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization. W- all of this stuff, at the end of the day, it's optimization.
[00:27:43] Optimization's a verb Right? It's an ongoing thing. You don't stop. Now, i-i-it's also a race. it's an ongoing race, right? You never achieve the goal. You rank number one, great. Someone is at number two and they want number one, and whether or not you will hurt... trip up and they'll pass you in the race and ultimately be number one or, it won't be self-inflicted, it'll be something they do.
[00:28:06] So there's a lot of different ways that rankings change. And the thing about it is not in my mind, and this is gonna sound contrarian, but I tend to be that guy it's not about chasing the rankings. That's not what we're in the business of doing in organic, and like a lot of people still view SEO that way.
[00:28:27] W-what we believe, a-at least the way we approach things, is we map things out to understand where we're trying to go, what we're trying to achieve, and then we try to think about holistically how we go after that.
[00:28:44] So getting a good grasp on what are the true needs of your audience, your consumer, the person, how do you help them along the way, how do you build content that meets that need, how do you use search as an avenue, not just a channel to rank for, but an insight off which you build content that actually serves your user.
[00:29:10] If you can build that into a process and a chain, then you're constantly creating content that builds on itself and builds your authority. That's not about chasing a keyword. That's about ensuring that anything that is going to interpret you out there in the future is gonna understand that if they don't mention you as a brand associated with this topic, they would be doing an injustice to their users.
[00:29:35] Trevor Stolber: 'Cause
[00:29:35] there's a current acronym soup argument of which one wins and what do we really call it. Right. I really like it being called search everywhere optimization. 'Cause that's, that's really what we're trying to do now.
[00:29:45] Mm-hmm. And, and it kind of fits within our ethos, right? and our tagline is basically, "Be visible where decisions are formed." So it's not I need to rank number one there and that's SEO. I mean, that is classical SEO, but what we envisage it in today is be visible where decisions are formed, and that means on that forum, it means that Reddit thread, it means on YouTube, it means in social channels, all of the places where your audience is.
[00:30:09] And you might ask, "Well, okay, well, where are our audience?" Well, that's a really good question, and that's like what we've developed our solution for, is to basically find out what topics people are searching for and where that audience is, be able to put that together in a really deliberate way such that you can position the right content where your audience is.
[00:30:27] So be visible everywhere your audience is. Nice. I loved this conversation. I hope y'all did too, and I wanna keep doing this- like maybe
[00:30:37] weekly. Right.
[00:30:38] Jessica Bush: take care. All right,
[00:30:38] Trevor Stolber: awesome. Thanks.
[00:30:39] Jessica Bush: Bye. Bye.
[00:30:40] Stephan Bajaio: Bye, guys.
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