Eli Schwartz
Growth Advisor specializing in SEO at Independent (formerly SurveyMonkey)
Growth advisor specializing in SEO who has helped companies like Quora, Coinbase, Tinder, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Zapier develop their SEO strategies, and author of Product-Led SEO.
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Key Themes
Episode Summary
Eli Schwartz provides a comprehensive guide to how SEO is changing with AI Overviews and LLM chatbots, arguing that the old playbook of content creation and keyword optimization is becoming obsolete. He advocates for treating SEO as a product discipline where PMs should own strategy, focusing on providing unique value that AI can't summarize away. The episode covers the evolution from Google SGE to AI Overviews, how to adapt SEO strategy for the new paradigm, and why understanding user intent matters more than ever.
Leadership Principles
- → SEO should be treated as a product problem, not a marketing tactic — product managers should own the SEO question
- → If you can't answer what someone would search to find your product, don't do SEO at all
- → AI Overviews make content-only SEO strategies obsolete — you need to provide unique value that AI can't summarize
Notable Quotes
"Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question."
— On why SEO strategy belongs in product, not just marketing
"If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO."
— On the foundational first step most companies skip
"Transparently, I thought this was going to be an apocalypse. Up until AI Overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore."
— On how AI Overviews have fundamentally changed SEO strategy
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