The SEO industry is having an identity crisis.
For two years, marketers have been declaring SEO dead. ChatGPT changed everything. AI overviews replaced organic results. Traffic vanished. The old playbook stopped working.
Eli Schwartz has a different take. As an SEO strategist who's guided companies from startups to enterprise through every major algorithm shift, he's seeing something the death-of-SEO crowd is missing: the role isn't shrinking. It's expanding.
Stop thinking about SEO as just phones and computers.
At CES 2026, Schwartz saw the future: glasses, watches, cars, and robots with AI baked in. These are all search surfaces now. His smart alarm clock just got upgraded to Gemini - now he can have full conversations about what time it will rain and what to wear, not just ask if it's raining.
"The role of SEO should be expanding," Schwartz explains. "SEO is the role of the marketing team that optimizes for searches on every single surface people search on."
Your vacuum cleaner will have search. Your car already does. The number of search interfaces is multiplying, not consolidating.
Apple's announcement that Siri will be powered by Gemini changed the game.
Google now controls the two largest search distribution platforms: Google itself and Apple. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok will take some market share, but not enough to matter - just like Bing never really mattered.
"Google was the gorilla and they remain the gorilla," Schwartz says. "Search is Google. If you want to optimize for search, you want to pay attention to what Google is doing."
This restores clarity to a fragmented landscape. Use the tools that have always dominated Google: Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor. You probably don't need another tool that only tracks LLMs.
The one company that could challenge Google? Meta. They have 2 billion daily users across WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. They have the engineering talent (billion-dollar AI engineers working on Llama). And critically, they've solved what OpenAI hasn't: monetization. Meta has a proven ads platform. If they decide AI search is their future, they have the distribution and infrastructure to compete.
But for now, Google dominates.
The 2020 playbook was listicles and thin content. You went to Semrush, found high-volume keywords, wrote generic articles like "Top 10 Winter Vacation Destinations," and ranked.
AI killed that model.
Now when someone asks "where should I go for winter vacation," AI handles the top-of-funnel research. It asks follow-up questions: How much do you want to spend? Do you want to ski or a heated pool? Family trip or solo? Plane or drive?
AI guides users through that discovery phase. By the time they're ready for your content, they're much further down the funnel.
The new playbook: Create specific, emotional, experience-driven content for users who already know what they want.
Don't write "Top Winter Vacations." Write "Why St. George, Utah Is Perfect for Your Budget Family Winter Getaway" - with personal experience, specific recommendations, and clear fit for a defined audience.
This is middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content. AI brought users to you already qualified. Now convert them.
In the offline world, specificity wins. You go to a pizza shop for great pizza, not a diner. The diner makes pizza, salad, and burgers - but none of them well.
The online world became the diner. Companies tried to rank for everything, sell to everyone, write content for every keyword. That was the incentive structure: high-volume keywords, tons of traffic.
The new reality rewards the pizza shop approach.
If you sell shoes for toddlers, you don't need to compete with Zappos on the keyword "shoes." You need parents of toddlers to find you and know you're the best for their specific needs.
Schwartz worked with an insurance company that said they sold to "everyone in all states." After digging deeper, they discovered 80% of conversions came from women in their 30s living in metro areas. Once they knew that, they could create content for that persona - addressing her specific problems, answering her specific questions.
Know who actually converts. Then optimize for them specifically.
Many companies are reallocating SEO budgets to LLM visibility efforts - buying tools, hiring agencies to optimize for ChatGPT citations.
Schwartz says that's a mistake.
LLM visibility is not directly measurable. You can't track conversions back to being mentioned in a ChatGPT response. Google won't break it out in Search Console because it's expensive and there's no upside for them.
LLM visibility is a brand metric. You want to be visible in AI responses because it's good for your brand - like a billboard, not like a performance marketing channel.
If you're going to invest in LLM optimization, pull budget from brand, not SEO. Your $10,000/month SEO budget should stay $10,000/month. If you want to spend on LLM visibility, find that money elsewhere.
SEO still drives measurable acquisition. LLM visibility builds awareness. They're different channels with different goals.
Schwartz needed to match paint colors for his house. He took pictures and ran them through Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to identify the exact color. Then he went to the store and bought test paint.
AI didn't solve his need to buy paint. It just changed how he researched it. The paint store and the paint brand have no idea AI brought him down the funnel.
"The problem you were Googling for doesn't go away," Schwartz explains. "Just the shape changes."
People still buy running shoes. They just don't search "running shoes" anymore - they get specific about features, use case, and price through AI, then land on a specific product page ready to buy.
Google just announced direct buying in AI responses. They already have Google Pay and Google Shopping - they're not inventing anything new, just moving the transaction into a conversational interface.
The journey became smarter and more organized. But it's still a journey that ends in a purchase.
Your job is to be visible at the right stage of that journey.
If you're Boeing selling F-35 fighter jets, no one is Googling "F-35 near me" or "how much does an F-35 cost."
Should Boeing invest in SEO? Schwartz says it depends on perspective.
If you're a resource-constrained startup, probably not. Invest where your buyers actually are - maybe that's conferences, personal networks, or direct sales.
If you're a multi-billion dollar public company and SEO costs $1 million per year (the electric bill for your factory for one day), then sure, do it. Who cares? Make sure your brand shows up for relevant searches instead of Wikipedia.
The question isn't "should we do SEO?" It's "what's our buyer's journey?"
Schwartz met with a B2B IT company spending $10,000/month on SEO. They had impressive client logos: Dell, Coke, HP, government agencies. When he asked how they got those clients, every single one came from personal connections - a former colleague, a brother who's a VP, a classmate.
"Take all your SEO dollars and invest in more friends," he told them. "Your best clients are coming from your personal network. Nothing is coming from SEO."
Know your actual acquisition channels. Invest accordingly.
SEO isn't dead. It's more complicated.
The game used to be: write content, get traffic, call it success. Now it's: understand your user, know where they are in the journey when they find you, create specific content that converts them.
The measurement is harder. The attribution is messier. The buyer's journey is longer and more fragmented across AI interfaces.
But that makes the work more valuable, not less. You can't outsource this to Upwork anymore. You can't just follow a playbook from 2020.
The marketers who understand user intent, create genuinely helpful content, and optimize across expanding search surfaces will dominate. Those waiting for clarity or clinging to old tactics will fall behind.
The opportunity is still massive. The playing field just shifted.
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Connect with Eli Schwartz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwartze/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
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02:03 - SEO is everywhere
03:58 - Why Google won
11:22 - How to invest in SEO in 2026
13:45 - The content playbook shift
19:36 - When NOT to invest in SEO
26:56 - LLM visibility is brand budget
Eli Schwartz is an SEO expert and consultant with over a decade of experience driving SEO and growth programs for B2B and B2C companies.
Eli’s clients have included WordPress, Shutterstock, BlueNile, and Zendesk, all of which he has helped build Global SEO strategies to increase organic conversions at scale.
He is the author of the book Product Led SEO.
