Episode 10 | SEO in 2025: Winning Visibility in the Age of AI

Todd Laire (00:01.504)

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of the Married 2 Marketing podcast, which is titled SEO in 2025, winning visibility in the age of AI and integrated strategy. Got a few guests here today. One, I wanted to introduce Steve Bertolacci. He is the director of data enablement at Groundworks. He is a creative leader who helps companies make sense of their website traffic and turn those visits into real, tangible leads. He's a data-driven expert who not only analyzes what's happening now but also tirelessly researches new trends like the impact of AI on search to ensure businesses stay ahead of the curve. He's here to talk with us about the latest shifts in search as well as AI, and we're so excited to get his perspective. So welcome to the Married 2 Marketing podcast, Berto.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (00:54.924)

Well, thanks for having me.

 

Todd Laire (00:56.54)

Awesome. Also joined by my cohost, Emily Nash, Marketing Strategist at LAIRE and special appearance, special guest. We stole her away from her work today to join this episode, and her name is Stephanie Kidd, and she is our Senior Editorial Content Manager as well as an SEO expert at LAIRE as well. So welcome, everybody. I'm excited about today's topic, and lots to get into. So let's jump in.

 

Stephanie Kidd (01:23.339)

All right, thanks, Todd. Like he said, we're talking about SEO, specifically kind of SEO today, is SEO dead, is it not? And how AI plays into that. So I'd love to kind of just kick off, and Berto, tell us a little bit about your work experience and how you got to the role you're in now.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (01:49.194)

Okay. Yeah. I started a few years back with what used to be Trader Publishing, back when we had auto trader magazines and all those kinds of things. And then, you know, all the digital presences that built up from that. And then, you know, in the early days, SEO was really just the kind of very fringe of the marketing world. But you had to do a lot of little things that don't work anymore, and that fun stuff.

 

Over the years, I switched out from just the vehicle areas to multifamily housing, real estate, worked with CoStar on apartments.com and homes.com, and then kind of found my way over to construction with Groundworks, which is an interesting shift, but pushing SEO needs along the way. Then, along with everything, SEO is just everything data-driven because it's really hard to fly blind when you're trying to optimize everything. But yeah,

 

Groundworks is a pretty nice place to work and has a lot of focus in just more or less getting the solutions out to people who need it and making sure that we're found in different areas of wherever we can.

 

Stephanie Kidd (03:00.351)

Nice. Well, you know, to set the stage, SEO isn't dead, in my opinion, but we'll get into that more. But it definitely has changed. So what can marketing leaders, marketing managers, business owners, what can we do to maintain, you know, great performance, visibility online while navigating some of these shifts? So Berto, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen over the past year in regard to SEO and that whole space?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (03:33.12)

I think probably the biggest change has just been the new players into what we call Search with ChatGPT being a household name. Now, it rivals Google as far as being what people think of. As far as how people use it, it's still a little bit different. But just the fact that it's shaking up the whole industry is enough of a catalyst for making everybody have to focus on the different aspects of what really moves the needle with the different AI platforms and just how exactly to do that. Yeah, I think the SEO is dead articles are definitely flourishing at this point, but it just seems to be more of a, I guess, a mantra within the industry. I'm sure we'll come up with some new acronyms, otherwise it's the same basic principles, just a lot more detail in terms of getting the AI services more of the more the citation information, of just how to get your information into their index. I think the larger question is just going to be how do you ensure that you're getting the maximum amount of response from the results? ChatGPT compared to Google is going to be just a wild card in terms of are they going to provide links that actually go off-site to anywhere else or are they just going to try to house it all within the results that they give? And then from a user perspective, how does that really pan out?

 

Stephanie Kidd (05:02.399)

Yeah. What are your thoughts on keywords? At LAIRE we do a lot of like, at least kind of, it has evolved somewhat, but we, we've done a lot of keyword position tracking where we're looking, you know, pigeonholing onto specific keywords and assessing their performance over time. Is that still kind of king or is, has it shifted in how we measure performance of SEO in general or, you know, even just individual page performance?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (05:34.828)

I mean, think the way people are still searching hasn't changed enough to really say it's no longer relevant. People still use very short keyword examples. Even what we used to call longtail is now relatively short compared to when somebody is using a voice assistant and speaking a few sentences at a time. So the amount of people doing the kind of short-to-longtail searches is still the vast majority. Whereas the people talking to one of the agents is very much kind of bleeding edge at this point. Yeah, keywords are still highly relevant. You have to know how people are searching. The numbers still point to they're searching largely the same way.

 

Stephanie Kidd (06:16.523)

Right. You mentioned a second ago, you know, some outdated tactics that marketers do, you know, when you started your SEO career, and me as well. You know, there are things that we did five, 10 years ago that are not ideal in 2025. What are some of those outdated tactics? And we can even take it a step further. What would you recommend instead?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (06:43.627)

I mean, think, yeah, I think Will Reynolds probably, you know, coined the term the best of just, you know, real people stuff, you know, making sure that you're always writing for the person, not for a robot. You know, with keywords, getting into just the keyword stuffing parts, you know, that can, that can go away. And as long as the writing is still consistent and clear, then whether it's a person reading it or whether it's an AI agent that's mimicking the person reading it, you know, the result is still, they're still after the same thing. So the noise of just keyword stuffing, that sort of thing, that can go away and then just enables us to be able to focus on how to write better and just how to provide better information for what the person's after.

 

Stephanie Kidd (07:30.187)

Could you speak a little bit to intent-based SEO? How does that play into this conversation and the importance of intent in 2025?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (07:43.212)

I mean, people are, people always start their journey with just whatever they're looking for, whether it's a restaurant that's nearby or whether it's, you know, more in-depth information for our business. It's usually a problem with somebody's house, and they're trying to find out what it means and how to fix it. So the different intent is oftentimes something that's nearby, some sort of transaction. They want to buy something. They want to research something. So the ways that people go about doing that just changes a little bit with repeat searches and trying to kind of refine what sort of results they get. But otherwise, from a targeting of that intent, you still need to make sure that you have your feelers out there for just broad information down to very specific information for what amounts to that user's kind of research journey.

 

Stephanie Kidd (08:34.089)

Yeah, switching gears slightly. We've noticed with our own website and clients, we've seen a lot of instances where organic traffic is declining, but we have impressions or even clicks increasing or keyword volume increasing while traffic is still going down. How would you recommend brands adapt to this kind of new normal of the zero-click searches and still build authority, even if it might be a little discouraging to see clicks going down? Yeah, I guess however you want to unpack that.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (09:19.487)

I mean, keeping track of everything that shows up on the page is always important. Google loves to shove ads over everything above the fold and more ads below the fold. They keep pushing the organic stuff down to the very bottom. It's almost like position one is almost on the second page. So, keeping an eye out on how many things just get interjected above that and how to make sure that you're showing up within those different areas. If you're selling components, make sure that you have the shopping feeds, make sure that from a paid side, can monitor just how much you can spend for those areas. But also from an organic, how else you can work yourself into those other components. The local pack for local businesses is also huge. A lot of people, they want to see that part more than they want to see the organic information. So they're going to start interacting with that map before they really get down to everything else. So, for businesses like Yelp, they end up losing out a lot because they're talking about the business. But you know, the Map Pack is really what people are after. And then with the AI overviews, excuse me, with that one, it poses a challenge because it changes very frequently, but it's difficult at the moment to really tell with the citations that Google is providing, which then becomes the kind of new organic, how many people are interacting with that citation and clicking on it. So when you read the information, it gives you that little chain link button. When you click that, then you get things that pop off to the side on desktop or mobile. They just kind of show up at the bottom, but still provides the organic link. It's just harder to tell right now how much interaction we're getting with those. At least ChatGPT made it a little bit easier for theirs. They started adding the UTM information so you can see it in Google Analytics, but it's also difficult to see because you don't get impression data. So you can see clicks, but it's half the picture.

 

Stephanie Kidd (11:18.601)

Yeah, attribution has definitely been a challenge, just making sure that for our clients, we're providing the most accurate data. Yeah, and I think that will hopefully continue to improve making attribution easier in terms of seeing when you get clicks or other types of activity from these LLMs and stuff like that. 

 

Todd Laire (11:45.332)

Berto, I have a question. Berto, how are you working through attribution? How is it showing up for you, and how are you reporting on that? To lead the witness a little bit, we see it sometimes. We don't see it in our metric reporting as much as we do with user feedback. How did you hear about us? They might show up as an organic search lead, but they told us specifically that they use ChatGPT to find us or our clients or what have you. How is that, how's it showing up for you, and how are you reporting on it?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (12:20.905)

Yeah, I mean, with our industry, because we fix people's homes, it's a little bit nuanced. Our demographic tends to skew a little bit older, whereas ChatGPT tends to skew more towards the technically advanced people. So we still see some people coming in through ChatGPT, but it is really small. mean, it's like a 10th of what Bing is. So it's just like a few scales down. Whereas on the Google side of things, we can see that people are clicking over from Google, but we can't tell which link they clicked on Google's information. Monitoring the grand total clicks in through Search Console data is good, but it's a bit of a blind spot. We're still working on just making sure that we can see that we are ranking within the AI overview. Then, just assuming that Google is still going to let some of those clicks pass through. Then it's not ideal in terms of making the word assumption that you're going to get the click still.

 

Stephanie Kidd (13:22.187)

Let's see, do you have any kind of top best practices for a brand who is wanting to improve their visibility in either AI overviews or some of the other LLMs? Any kind of like high-level, you should do this to improve your visibility?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (13:45.824)

I mean, the schema on the page is always very important. It helps to just further refine what the information is that you're trying to convey in a clean, structured format. The AI agents pick that information up. They can use that and then making sure that the content that you have on the page also matches what you have in the schema. Other than Google talking about spam, you want to make sure that it's very clear for how the bot is looking at your information. When writing, it does help almost to go back to your old research paper type approach, where you have your very clear title, your very clear sections, very clear headers, the information under the header is about what's on the header. I there's new terminology for chunking and other stuff like that, but it's it's just writing clearly and making sure that you're not bloating the amount that's getting written. You don't necessarily need to have tons of information. If you can write very concisely, can keep it more or less what works for a person. That's probably the single biggest two items outside of getting into more PR based just citations and other locations that talk about your information as if it were the primary source of that information. And it's not always applicable for every different industry, but if you can have somebody else reference your information, then it does help out the AI bot to know that this is where it came from.

 

Stephanie Kidd (15:22.153)

Yeah, absolutely. I have some experience, tangential experience in terms of link building and that sort of thing. Would you say backlinks are still a key part of the SEO game here?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (15:41.856)

Yeah, I mean, I think the link's importance never really goes away. It's a little bit of a different game now. Other than Google trying to stamp out any sort of paid link, you still have the need for every authoritative source that you can get that's about your information. You should have people referencing your information back, which amounts to links and just the context of those links. I think where it's very different now is you can't just go out and get a bunch of links on random blogs; it should be a blog that's specific to what you're talking about that then references what you have. Or if you have other authoritative sources like Better Business Bureau, especially for local businesses, or just any other review or anything that validates the quality of what you have on your website, essentially.

 

Stephanie Kidd (16:37.003)

Do we want to talk a little bit about how SEO and paid media work together now? Emily, do you want to kind of jump into that?

 

Emily Nash (16:47.382)

Yeah, I was doing paid advertising back in the day with Berto doing SEO in my earlier career. I'm excited to hear all the changes that are occurring and having this conversation for today's audience. So smarter strategy with SEO is what we want to talk through. So let's kick it off with where should SEO and paid media teams be working together?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (17:14.997)

I think the making sense out of the data that Google provides is probably the single biggest part. If you can still swing it to where if you have really good placement organically and you don't need to spend as much from a paid side, that's the ideal scenario. Or if you just need to have just more general search information for somewhere to the keyword planner, if you want to find out just what else you're missing from an organic side, oftentimes that'll show up on the paid side. Probably the single biggest area, but just definitely tuning the amount that you spend over top of what you could get organically is usually the biggest moneymaker there. And then just from a user intent, anything else that you can share between the groups, the better off that is.

 

Emily Nash (18:04.62)

On that note, so putting dollars behind to support your organic strategy, would you have any insight into how your businesses or your company or in general, people are approaching budgets for paid on Google with the elimination of clicks with SEO?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (18:24.213)

I mean, for us, we're always looking to make sure that we target the right audience that will eventually convert. Because if we hit up somebody that is really just a different vertical, then it ends up as wasted dollars. Looking at the conversion information that you have between Google Analytics and feeding back into your ad platforms is the biggest one. For us, it gets a little bit further down the funnel where we don't necessarily just want a lead form filled out, but we want to make sure that that person who fills out that waveform is really interested in the product and service. So we want to go back and scrutinize how we, how we target some of those people and make sure that, you know, they're the right people for what we sell.

 

Emily Nash (19:06.638)

Yes, we're always asking about the quality of the lead post the form submission to understand that to be able to further optimize the ad so that we're not bringing in unqualified leads.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (19:18.591)

Yeah, yeah, I do wish that Google's enhanced conversions for the platform was easier to integrate, but that one's a constant thorn in my side. Being able to tell the information from our CRM back over to that platform is great to have, but they just, they don't make it easy.

 

Emily Nash (19:35.694)

No. Okay, so talking more about paid and SEO, how can paid campaigns support SEO? We talked about this a little bit, whether it's keyword planner informing SEO or conversions informing organic. Is there anything else we could add into that?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (19:54.188)

I mean, from our personal mistakes, the negative keywords is really big. Yeah, that was one where organic team kind of picked up some of the information and started running with it because it had keyword volume, but then not using that as more of the negative set. So it's good to be closely in step with each other from the two different groups. But yeah, outside of negative keywords, it's sometimes it's, I guess, getting into some of the other products that they have outside of just the standard advertisements. The home service ads, that's kind of a different beast altogether. That one kind of competes with what you have with Google Business places, but it's good information to keep together to make sure that you're not using the paid end to just kill your results on the organic end. But that's a really, doesn't apply to every vertical. More specific, if you have an actual business location, it's pretty applicable.

 

Emily Nash (20:55.918)

Looking outside of where LAIRE tends to dabble more in B2B, so we're very focused on quality of leads and form submissions, other than, say, like product listing or something else like Google might offer in that area. So I wanted to add too, the paid advertising, it sounds like too, with SEO, we're constantly seeing immediate results with what messaging and say a headline is working or what's converting and then that information can tend to feed into what content is working on their organic side. Is that something that your teams will partner on?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (21:33.194)

Yeah, I mean, that's a good point from a user experience standpoint, the way the landing pages information comes out is far easier to do on the paid side. Definitely helps when you can target one particular landing page, and then you can run your Optimizely or whatever on that to run different test campaigns. But if you have winning combinations that work for those paid landing pages, it does really help to then make sure that gets implemented on just all organic pages, which, it kind of goes back into just more from a user experience standpoint, making sure that you have pretty well templated landing page layouts that you can use. So that way, not every organic page looks completely different. You want it to be pretty similar so you can roll out those winning experiences. But oftentimes, that's the things that you don't really think about. Then you look at how the users are interacting with the forum. And then you realize that it just needs to change pretty drastically. It's always the opposite of what I choose.

 

Stephanie Kidd (22:31.839)

Yeah.

 

Emily Nash (22:32.044)

Is it because you're on the SEO side and you're coming with that kind of data?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (22:39.017)

I mean, from trying to do the same thing from the organic standpoint, it's a little more difficult because it does kind of span out across so many pages. So it's harder to run some of those A-B tests unless you have a pretty well-ironed-out layout, which oftentimes is not the case. So much easier to use the paid search data for that.

 

Emily Nash (23:02.254)

I have a question that wasn't on our list, but what would be your ideal strategy pairing SEO and paid advertising? Is that too broad?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (23:13.919)

I mean, strategy as far as pairing the two of them, I think it's just more consistent messaging and just ensuring that your experience, whether you click on the link at the top that's a paid link or the link at the bottom that's organic, you still want the user to end up with finding what they're after. I think where a lot of shopping sites tend to do a worse job with is the paid link for something very specifically searched will oftentimes take somebody to a very generic category landing page. Whereas the organic result will take them directly to that product that they really wanted to purchase. So, making sure that that user journey aspect is pretty well moving in tandem, think is probably the best overall strategy.

 

Emily Nash (24:00.398)

I like to think of it as cookies and cream, paid and SEO go together. All right, one more. I'll talk, and we'll wrap up the paid section. So what metrics are you carving out between SEO and paid that inform performance?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (24:21.099)

What metrics in terms of just general analytic information?

 

Emily Nash (24:25.958)

Metrics in terms of integrating strategies between SEO and paid. So what would stand out from the paid side or just integrating the both? Like, for example, like conversion metrics would be a big one, but anything else in there that you would pull out?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (24:42.079)

Yeah, I mean, ensuring that your conversion information is consistently firing off across the board is pretty huge. You know, getting it to Google Analytics is one part of the process, but you also need to get it over to the Google Ads and Microsoft Ads and just whichever other display campaigns that you have. But just ensuring that it's consistently firing for every form, every phone call, and just every other chat or anything else that you have on the site. It's usually the most likely item to break out there. But it's kind of a constant battle to make sure that it is consistently firing, consistently passing the right information, working out any sort of bots or spam-related agents or anything like that, and just passing real information over. For us, we get hit with a lot of spam bots. Whether it's some other service kind of hitting our paid ads or just some other crawler that's mimicking human behavior, there's a lot of just general stuff going through a weed form that we don't want to trigger so we make sure to filter that stuff out and make sure that it's the exact same from a date search site and organic site.

 

Emily Nash (25:50.414)

One more question before I move on is, is there anything you would add for today's audience looking forward that AI is impacting an integration of SEO and paid working together?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (26:04.489)

I mean, from a content writing and title writing, and everything else, just dealing with the copy that goes into each one, it's pretty huge. Being able to generate and use more, I guess, feedback loops is pretty massive. Pretty much anything that you can do repeatedly, then the AI is going to be better at dealing with the automation of that because it just does a lot of the same thing, but does it a lot faster. So you can have it at scale. So when you're talking about very specific campaigns, you can generate a lot of those winning experiences for better titles and better descriptions, both in the ad campaign as well as on the landing page. That one's been pretty large for us. It's just one more thing to integrate that's not all that easy, but it's good tools out there. It's just finding the right combination of all those to work it in.

 

Emily Nash (27:05.26)

And I'll just unpack that. It sounds like automating it in the sense that there's in any given ad, there could be 30 headlines for descriptions, et cetera, et cetera, graphics, if you're doing display, taking what's winning and just iterate on that. So it all aligns to landing page, using sometimes using AI for that own iteration to make it quick to test or faster testing to understand winning, winning variants.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (27:34.636)

Essentially, yes. I mean, it's the winning strategy of how to connect all that is really the hard part that is our current struggle. Being able to use some of the AI modeling engines that can take a lot of other information into account does help to kind of have some of that output. But then having that dynamically fed back in is where it's a more difficult at the moment.

 

Emily Nash (27:36.27)

Okay, thank you.

 

Emily Nash (28:01.684)

We fed back into the system like Google, for example.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (28:06.463)

Yeah, I fed back into that platform data.

 

Emily Nash (28:10.391)

Is that the strategy that you're implementing now with Groundworks?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (28:15.327)

The, from a paid search side, there are components that handle much of that optimization. It's just not necessarily tied back to how some of the on-page information gets laid out. So we kind of have the content writing from the SEO standpoint and product standpoint operating a little bit outside of what the paid search end is doing. So there's a little bit of a divide right there, but similar systems to both ends of it, just not as connected currently as what it does, what it really needs to be.

 

Emily Nash (28:46.764)

Interesting, maybe a later development in this case.

 

Stephanie Kidd (28:50.039)

Part two.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (28:51.499)

Yeah, development never stops.

 

Emily Nash (28:54.136)

We got into the weeds there. I'll pass it back to Stephanie for talking through some tactical tips and predictions.

 

Stephanie Kidd (28:59.569)

Yeah, I guess continuing the conversation about metrics, KPIs, for a brand or a marketing person who is seeing traffic or clicks go down, what are some metrics that are really important and a really good indicator of performance, whether good or bad? Specifically in terms of organic search.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (29:33.366)

Yeah, I mean, if your conversion rate is increasing while your number of clicks is decreasing, that can be a good thing in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes, that means that Google is just doing a better job at sending you qualified traffic to begin with. But if both are going down, then that's definitely problematic. Watching that lead conversion is really just your single biggest indicator to make sure that you're getting enough of the right people over there. And it may be too that Google is just really just doing a better job at weeding out some of the either not related traffic or just spam bot traffic or something else along those lines.

 

Stephanie Kidd (30:11.531)

Yeah, I've seen that for a couple of clients where their total number of ranking keywords is kind of declining or stagnant, but you know, contacts, conversions, those are increasing. And I've kind of framed it as, you know, Google's trimming the fat, they're getting rid of the keywords that you're ranking for that don't, you know, share the correct intent or really aren't relevant. So yeah, guess moving into some super tactical things, we talked about some best practices, but what would you say in terms of quick wins? Is there anything someone, a marketing manager perhaps, who's short on time, what are some quick things that can be implemented to improve SEO and AI visibility if they exist?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (31:07.531)

I mean, some things, as far as how quick they are, it's sometimes easier to run a tool than it is to actually make the changes. But some of the tools that they do have now for scanning your site and giving you more direct feedback are much better. Google recently put out their Vertex AI Search component, which is almost like an old-school Google appliance. But it gives you a siloed version of crawling your own website, giving all the content to that search engine and giving you Google style search results really helps you to see from how Google is deciphering your information, helps you to see how they would write the AI overview if all they ever looked at was your websites and gives you the top 10 organic results of just what it can find on your websites. So it's an interesting way to get a feedback loop, and then you can really take your Search Console data for all your keywords, run it through there, and just get an output of just how every search relates to what the content shows up as through Google's lens, Which is not free, but it's through Cloud Platform. But it's a good tool to use for just kind of, I guess, a faster feedback loop of what Google does. Otherwise, there's a lot of other AI tools out there, and I haven't really gone through enough of them. It's still on the docket to keep reviewing more of these. ChatGPT is still harder to decipher; always looking for some better tools out there.

 

Stephanie Kidd (32:44.465)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of the tools that you have used, are there any others you recommend? Or other people recommend to you, maybe if you haven't used them?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (32:56.395)

Um, nothing really that stands out at the moment, um, because we are still reviewing a lot of them. So it's, um, I think the problem now is just, there's so many out there, uh, and then not all of them are great. So it's, uh, it's a lot of sifting to find something good. And it may be just waiting a few more months until, you know, one kind of rises to the top.

 

Stephanie Kidd (33:18.027)

I've noticed a lot of them are quite pricey, and at this point, there's not a lot of social proof of, you know, is this actually going to be helpful and worth the cost. But yeah, I'm keeping tabs on different developments, and I'm hoping that there's, you know, a great, you know, affordable tool that will solve all our problems.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (33:43.564)

Yeah, it's hard because it changes so fast that those who have tools are probably just selling it at a premium just because people will jump on it and maybe whatever. But in a few months, it may be obsolete. It's hard to have a track record when it's all new this year.

 

Stephanie Kidd (33:59.871)

Yeah, exactly. Well, getting to the end here, what is the biggest thing or a couple of things that you would recommend, or I guess something you wish every content marketer or marketer, digital marketer knew about modern SEO?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (34:22.635)

I mean, I think the single biggest thing is always if it seems spammy, probably is. So make sure you're focusing on the people and less about the bots themselves. And then, just when writing, just be as concise and clear as possible. Just because it's hard for the general person who gets hit with a bunch of information that they have to sift through to get that one little nugget of what they're after.

 

Stephanie Kidd (34:47.305)

Yeah. What is your, you know, we touched on this at the beginning, we've seen lots of articles that are saying, you know, SEO is dead. I've seen so many articles say that. What is your take on that?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (35:04.843)

I always feel like SEO is undead. You know, it's almost like a vampire running around, but yeah, the, the SEO is dead mantra seems to be just really popular for writing articles, but less meaningful. It's just, it's always changing. There's always AI involved in every step of the process. There has been for years. It's just that it's changing with the number of players that are coming out, and whether you call it a different acronym or not, is still basically the same net effect.

 

Stephanie Kidd (35:08.265)

Yeah.

 

Emily Nash (35:09.058)

Mm-hmm.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (35:32.969)

If you want to target ChatGPT instead of Google, you still have to write and do things that help ChatGPT decipher your information. So it still ends up, how do you optimize your content to get picked up in these different services? But the rest of it's more just, you know, from a tactical level of just which one really is the best for your primary audience and just how to go specific to that one.

 

Stephanie Kidd (35:55.755)

Yeah. Do you have any bold predictions for SEO in 2026 and beyond?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (36:03.307)

I mean, I think the number of AI agents and companies that are out there will end up more consolidating to the better ones. There'll be a lot fewer of the just kind of fly-by-night services. That'll be probably the largest driving factor of whether somebody like Apple partners with somebody like ChatGPT and, you know, continues to push in that regard. So I think the landscape of search engines will also follow suit with that consolidation of the AI platforms.

 

Stephanie Kidd (36:35.435)

Todd, do you have any questions or Emily?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (36:42.411)

I mean, just from a paid search standpoint, just, mean, how do you see, yeah, other than Google, you know, how do you see all the different paid search platforms utilizing some of these other AI platforms?

 

Emily Nash (36:59.662)

Yeah. Well, I think it's, I wonder if B2C pushes the limits so that B2B can find what's going to work in a business-to-business type space. So I think AI is feeding more iterations and variants to test for audiences. And by that, I mean, I've seen models before. So this is a video, not a modeling of a presentation, but I've seen models of like people leveraging video, leveraging different AI models to speak to different products. And that's very much B2C. And if you're in that space, it's highly, it's much faster, quicker, much more competitive, not that B2B isn't competitive. So I want to say that we're going to LAIRE with B2B type clients that are one lead represents a closed one deal that's much larger than an individual product. We're going to take some of those learnings that are happening now and apply that, right now it's kind of it's it's understanding like how we can get to those iterations in that in the space, if that helps.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (38:08.181)

Yeah, it does.

 

Stephanie Kidd (38:11.851)

Any final words of wisdom or encouragement for marketers navigating the new SEO landscape?

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (38:21.611)

I mean it's going to change in a couple of months, and don't get too used to things being as they are right now.

 

Emily Nash (38:25.432)

Okay.

 

Stephanie Kidd (38:29.577)

Yep, love it. Todd, any questions or thoughts?

 

Todd Laire (38:34.726)

No, I think this has been great, great episode. I want to thank our guest, Berto, for joining us and giving us some silver lining nuggets, so to speak, because I think we're all learning this at the same time. And it's like, what do you know that we should know? And so I think this has been very important. So thanks again, Berto, for joining us.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (38:58.485)

Thanks for having me.

 

Stephanie Kidd (38:59.679)

Yeah. All right. Thanks.

 

Todd Laire (39:01.6)

All right, we'll see you next time. Catch you on the next episode. Thanks, everyone.

 

Steve 'Berto' Bertolacci (39:07.019)

Okay, see you.

 

Stephanie Kidd (39:07.259)

Bye guys.