Rethinking SEO in the age of AI

Eli Schwartz, an SEO growth advisor and author of Product-Led SEO who has worked with companies like Zapier, Tinder, Quora and SurveyMonkey, discusses how AI answers in search results (AI Overviews, LLM chatbots) are reshaping SEO traffic. The conversation covers why top-of-funnel search is being absorbed by AI, where SEO still wins (mid-funnel intent), when SaaS companies should or shouldn't invest in SEO, and common myths about links, technical SEO and AI-generated content.

01Key learnings

• Treat SEO as a product: start by understanding the user's search journey and what they would actually type before investing anything.
• Skip SEO if you can't name the specific searches your target user would make; many SaaS products lack a real search journey and shouldn't invest in it.
• Expect AI answers to absorb top-of-funnel discovery queries, and focus SEO effort on mid-funnel, intent-rich queries where users are ready to evaluate or buy.
• Measure SEO by business conversions such as MQLs, signups or revenue rather than rankings or raw traffic, which can be vanity metrics that don't convert.
• Evaluate SEO like any other channel by estimating the full cost in time, resources and tooling against expected return, and compare it to paid, sales or events.
• Use AI as a tool to improve genuinely useful pages and product descriptions, not to mass-produce low-value filler content that users and Google will ignore.
• Build programmatic pages only when there is real scale and a real user use case, with a product that monetizes the page, as with Zapier's integration pages or TripAdvisor's property pages.
• Treat link building as brand building; earned mentions from relevant, widely read sources matter more than buying guest posts on low-authority sites.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.