SEO’s Next Era: Beyond Google to LLMs & Multi-Channel Growth

Killer Interview Quotes

“We should be more in the ecosystem… our value could be so much more than Google. Why are we tying ourselves to Google?” – Melissa Popp

“From 2010 to 2021 SEO was merely reverse engineering Google. That was it. That was our job. We can’t ignore other methods or other ways that search occurs.” – Jeremy Rivera

“Chat GPT is now your most popular and least knowledgeable customer representative.” – Referenced insight from Mike Buckby

“I question whether we actually see the death of the top of the funnel… we relied so much on top of the funnel to drive people in and guide them to the right place on our websites.” – Melissa Popp

Key Interview Takeaways

• SEO is evolving beyond Google optimization – The industry must embrace multi-channel digital marketing rather than focusing solely on reverse engineering Google’s algorithm. Modern SEO professionals need to understand how search works across LLMs, social platforms, and emerging search technologies while building comprehensive digital marketing strategies.
• AI overviews are decimating organic click-through rates – Google’s AI-powered search features are dramatically reducing organic traffic, with some insights showing only 1% click-through rates when AI overviews appear. SEO professionals can no longer rely on traditional traffic forecasting models and must adapt their value propositions accordingly.
• Content strategy must address longer, conversational queries – Users are shifting from 2-4 word searches to 30-40 word conversational queries when interacting with LLMs. Content creators need to develop workflows that address these comprehensive, question-based searches while maintaining quality and relevance across multiple platforms.
• The value of SEO is shifting from clicks to user capture – Success metrics are evolving beyond impressions and clicks to focus on complete user journey optimization. SEO professionals must become conversant in email capture, retargeting, and multi-touch conversion models to demonstrate real business value.

The Current State of SEO: More Than Just Algorithm Updates

Jeremy Rivera: So last time we talked on a lot of wide-ranging issues in SEO and I feel like the world has in some ways changed in SEO since our last conversation a few months ago. What is your take on just how much things have changed since December?

Melissa Popp: Yeah, I mean, I feel like this has been the longest year of marketing I think I felt like probably in a decade, like the amount of change and not just in what Google is displaying in SERPs and that landscape.

That’s one part of it, right? As they’re integrating AI mode and AI overviews and how terrible all that BS is because it doesn’t really give you correct answers most of the time. If anybody wants to see that, just go look at any of Lily Ray’s social media and you’ll see her calling out all the BS responses there.

More and more Google monopolization of page one in particular. So you have that whole facet that we’re all trying to figure out. And then on the other side, we have every LLM under the sun that clients are now asking questions about. How do we show up here? Chat GPT in particular is starting to leverage UTM codes. So you can now start seeing that in GA4 and other analytics tools.

The Industry’s Response: Two Extremes Emerge

Melissa Popp: I think there’s two extremes there. You have people who are going off the deep end claiming XYZ for LLM’s works. And then you have the rest of us, self included, who’s like, okay, we already have best practices that we know work in general.

What do we need to be doing to change those and to strengthen those that then also support showing up in LLMs? Because at the end of the day, we still don’t exactly know how any LLM is showing answers. And if you put 10 people side by side with the same query in an LLM, you’re going to get 10 different answers.

Jeremy Rivera: I agree. I listened to Mike King’s recent episode where he says that SEO is deprecated. There’s an aspect of that that I do agree with. But the proposal which he replaced it with seems very over engineered of, now we have to do a query fan out model system and then pipe that into a semantic analysis system.

At the end of the day, it really feels like just make more different content in more places when you boil it down. How is that different than really good practices at SEO of building authority by getting links and placements of content elsewhere, bringing authority in and brand recognition?

The 90/10 Split: Enterprise vs. Local SEO Needs

Melissa Popp: I think there’s two very clear divides here. You have the kind of the 10% of our industry that are working with clients at a scale where figuring out this nuance like query fan out and all sorts of the other acronyms and terms you’re hearing being thrown out there could be much more applicable.

Whereas the rest of us in this industry are probably working with clients in this 90% that we all know how crappy the content is in the local space. It ranks well because there’s nothing better out there. Do I think that for a home service business in some outskirt of Cheyenne, Wyoming needs to be a whole strategy around query fan out and exactly the nuance of how LLMs work? Absolutely not.

But I do agree that SEO is changing. I do not believe SEO is dead. And please for any journalists who might be watching this, come up with a different way to say it. Stop saying SEO is dead. We’ve heard that for 20 years.

The Historical Context: SEO as Google Reverse Engineering

Jeremy Rivera: I was talking to Michael Mcddougald of Right Thing Agency who argued  that from 2010 to 2021 SEO was merely reverse engineering Google. That was it. That was our job. Like if we did that more successfully, we were more successful. We got more traffic and that’s not the game anymore.

We can’t ignore other methods or other ways that search occurs. We can’t ignore other ways that our efforts translate visitors into dollars. So I propose that we stop focusing on whether to call it SEO and focus more on, hey, as an industry, we need to do digital marketing as opposed to just being labeled as SEOs only.

The true challenge isn’t that the nature of what we do is changing, as opposed to what is our unique selling proposition as an industry. And we can no longer viably say, hey, we’re Google reverse engineers.

Google’s Monopolization and the Click-Through Crisis

Jeremy Rivera: Anybody that is listening credibly to Google on its interviews saying, not only has search volume not decreased, but we’re actually sending more clicks into the ecosystem should not be calling themselves an SEO professional. We know we’re being gaslit.

You get these insights where literally they’re saying 1% organic click through on off of the SERP if it shows an AI overview. It’s dramatically, drastically impacting us and that’s on top of HCU, that’s on top of massive algorithmic shifts that already stabbed multiple content producers.

Melissa Popp: Why would anybody trust them? They’re a for-profit company. Their mission is no longer to make the world better. It’s to make as much money as possible. We have to remember, all these other LLMs also are for-profit. So we’re actively working against companies and organizations who don’t care about what we’re doing.

Expanding Beyond Google: The Multi-Platform Reality

Melissa Popp: People seem to forget that there’s more out there. You look at Bing and a lot of people laugh about Bing, but Bing is baked into Microsoft and Windows systems which the majority of world use. When you search for something in Windows, you’re searching Bing from that search bar or you’re going into Co-Pilot.

You think about last year and the explosion of TikTok SEO and that whole product that people started creating. You had 50-50 split of some SEOs thinking, yeah, we should absolutely be figuring out SEO for this. But then you had social media marketing folks saying, no, no, no, this is our area.

Search exists in so many different places, not just this myopic view we have that it’s just Google that matters.

Repositioning Our Value Proposition

Jeremy Rivera: What do you think about following Matt Brooks of SEOteric’s advice and aim to reposition of ourselves higher in the digital marketing ecosystem?

Melissa Popp: Our value could be so much more than Google. Why are we tying ourselves to Google? Search may work different on different channels, but the fundamentals are still there. Where do we bake in other parts of marketing into what we’re doing, not only to boost other channels, but potentially also to boost SEO.

It’s almost like we’re having a midlife identity crisis as marketers. This thinking of who we are and what we offer, AI has the potential to not only change what our workflows and our efficiency looks like, but also gives us more time to actually think on the strategic side and be more creative.

The Death of the Top Funnel?

Melissa Popp: The way Google is going, the way queries are changing, of how people are interacting and talking to LLMs, I question whether we actually see the death of the top of the funnel.

We relied so much on top of the funnel to drive people in and guide them to the right place on our websites. And we’re losing that across multiple platforms, not just Google. We’re losing that on social media. We’re losing that in video platforms.

If you can get a correct answer in AI mode or AI overviews with Google, why would you click on the link to begin with?

Testing and Experimentation in the LLM Era

Melissa Popp: I see a lot of people claiming XYZ works for AI optimization. How does anybody know? All these platforms are so radically different that we do not know the things we know about Google’s ranking system.

We know far more about what works on Google than we do what works on ChatGPT and other LLMs out there. So we need to be trying things. I want to see more data, more case studies before we just claim, this absolutely works.

Jeremy Rivera: The iterations of these engines are coming out so quickly that even if we did reverse engineer exactly what it was within Google’s algorithm that we were pretty sure worked this particular way, we have yet to see clearly how bad actors are influencing LLM’s decisions.

The Bot Sandwich: New Communication Realities

Jeremy Rivera: Chat GPT is now your most popular and least knowledgeable customer representative. So retooling how you approach content to be so much more thorough about what it is that you do, reading your content with much more of an expectation of, I need to thoroughly commit to what my USP is and be far more explicit.

There’s like a double bot sandwich between human sense of bot. We have used bots to create more content on our site and they interact and interface and exchange information and then come back and connect the two of us.

The Skills Gap: Adapting to New Workflows

Jeremy Rivera: If you’re not learning how to use N8n to daisy chain multiple commands, if you’re still stuck in the mode of I need to log in and edit this WordPress post, you’re probably going to lose in the arms race.

Melissa Popp: The bias of these models and the personalization aspect of AIs and LLMs – anybody that’s using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, they say they don’t keep your search history and you can turn off memories. That is not true. I’ve watched it happen multiple times.

Nonprofit and Multi-Channel Implications

Jeremy Rivera: How does everything that we’ve talked about impact nonprofits and organizations that don’t have a product to sell at the end?

Melissa Popp: This comes back to branding, multi-channel marketing, and distribution. Any organization out there, you think of news websites, video game and other fandom-based informational sites that are relying on ad revenue – they’re not necessarily looking for people to fill out a form or pick up a phone.

Multi-channel is more important than ever. Get on the truck, everybody.

The New Value Metric: From Clicks to Capture

Jeremy Rivera: The value in SEO is no longer the click. It is the capture of that user. We as an industry need to become more disciplined and conversant in shepherding that through to the end.

Just cause they came here and left doesn’t mean that they’re gone. If we captured their email and we can retarget to them, that’s another content flow. We need to be more conversant in those alternative client acquisition conversion models.

Melissa Popp: The needle is moving of what our end goal is here. For so long it was a click and now I think that’s changing too. SEOs don’t want to let go of their impressions and clicks, especially when the impressions aren’t driving any clicks.

Future Forecasting Challenges

Jeremy Rivera: I could confidently say in 2015 something like, here’s the marketplace, here’s the forecast, this is an organic CTR estimate, this is about how much traffic. I don’t think you can confidently do that same thing now.

AI overviews change the organic click through rate process. LLMs change the nature of the queries and people are arriving there differently. So it’s not as easy to use those metrics as solidly before.

Interview Insights Summary Table

Approach	Traditional SEO	Modern Digital Marketing
Primary Focus	Google algorithm reverse engineering	Multi-platform search optimization
Success Metrics	Rankings, clicks, impressions	User capture, email acquisition, multi-touch conversions
Content Strategy	Keyword-focused articles	Conversational, comprehensive content addressing 30-40 word queries
Platform Coverage	Google-centric	Google, LLMs, social platforms, voice search, emerging technologies
Skill Requirements	On-page optimization, link building	Automation workflows, AI integration, multi-channel coordination
Value Proposition	“We’ll get you ranked and drive traffic”	“We’ll capture and nurture your ideal customers across all digital touchpoints”
Forecasting Ability	Confident traffic projections	Directional insights with adaptation strategies
Client Education	Algorithm updates and technical fixes	Comprehensive digital ecosystem understanding

The conversation between Jeremy Rivera and Melissa Popp highlights a critical inflection point for the SEO industry. As RicketyRoo and other forward-thinking agencies adapt to this new landscape, the message is clear: evolve or risk obsolescence. The future belongs to digital marketers who can orchestrate comprehensive user experiences across all search platforms, not just those who can reverse engineer Google’s latest algorithm update.

For more insights on evolving SEO strategies, explore our advanced SEO techniques and listen to previous episodes of the Unscripted SEO Podcast where industry leaders share their adaptation strategies for the post-Google monopoly era.