Ethan Smith: belief

Transcript context

…We did a podcast episode just over two and a half years ago. I think of it as the definitive guide on how to win at SEO. People have been referencing it ever since. I'm really proud of what we did there, but things have changed. Things are changing in the world of SEO. And so I'm excited to talk to you again about how to be successful in this new-emerging world where AI is changing how SEO works, the rise of AEO and GEO. Let me start with just this question. How long have you been working on SEO at this point? And has anything come close to being this significant in changing the skill of SEO? Yes. So I got started in SEO in 2007, so it's been 18 years. Actually, the largest change when I got started in SEO, I got started in programmatic SEO and commerce SEO, like NexTag and Shopping.com and PriceGrabber. And that was when you could do mass, auto-generated landing pages. And that was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things, to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially, you went from the SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change, and then this is probably the second-biggest change. I think that the main thing here is it is related to search, but it's a summarization of search and there's new inputs. So it's probably the second-biggest change. Okay, that is really interesting, because I think a lot of people are seeing this as everything is different. Nothing we've done before is going to work. We have to rethink everything. You're saying this is actually the second-biggest change, and just like Google's update back in the day was actually even more significant?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.