Best In class SEO is the "AI Robe" Strategy
With so much star power, AI get's all the attention. But SEO can leverage this for a 2x return on strategy.
This week’s sponsors are Semrush Enterprise and North Star Inbound. Their support keeps #SEOForLunch free for everyone each week.Right before the holidays, I was catching up with Kevin Indig (Growth Memo). Within minutes, AI came up. After comparing client examples, we both agreed on the obvious truth.
If you want SEO work approved right now, tie it to AI and LLM outcomes. That’s the AI Robe Strategy.
Leadership is obsessed with “future-proofing.” The second your SEO initiative also sounds like an AI initiative, it gets treated like a priority. Same recommendation. Faster yes.
A special THANK YOU to this week’s sponsor: Semrush Enterprise
The Platform for Winning Search, Everywhere
For big businesses, visibility means more than rankings and Semrush Enterprise empowers brands to own every layer of search.
By unifying SEO and AI search visibility into one platform, you get comprehensive performance tracking, live content scoring, and real-time optimization guidance. Teams can swap manual busywork for impactful strategy with advanced automations. And it’s all backed by the market’s leading search database.
It’s how leaders become dominant across both search engines and AI.
Why This Works Right Now
Someone might be thinking, “Great Nick, now we’re resorting to lying to keep SEO a priority.”
Nope. This isn’t deception. It’s incentive alignment. No false promises, no bait-and-switch. The work supports AI and LLM visibility, and you still get SEO wins as the byproduct.
Most SEO backlogs are full of high-ROI work that gets ignored because it’s expensive, slow, and not sexy. The irony is that “LLM optimization” overlaps with SEO fundamentals:
Clarity (entities and structure)
Credibility (citations and brand signals)
Accessibility (crawlability and discoverability)
Same work. Better packaging. Faster approvals.
The overlap: SEO wins that also help LLM visibility
If you want “AI results” without the bullshit gimmicks, start here.
Entity Clarity and Consistency
Make it obvious what you do, who you serve, and why you’re credible. Strong About and author pages + consistent naming helps search engines and gives LLMs clean context to describe your brand.
Content Consolidation and Pruning
If five pages compete for the same intent, you don’t have five assets, you have one problem. Merge duplicates, reduce cannibalization, and build a single best-answer page LLMs can confidently pull from.
Structured Data and Page Structure
Clean templates, headings, and schema where it truly fits make content easier to parse. This helps crawlability and snippets, and improves accurate extraction and citation in LLM answers.
The AI Robe Framework (how to pitch it)
For every SEO recommendation, add three lines.
Not three slides. Not a 40-tab spreadsheet. Three lines.
LLM outcome: retrievability, citation likelihood, brand associations, answer accuracy
SEO outcome: topic coverage, crawl efficiency, CTR, topical authority
Business outcome: pipeline, revenue, retention, support deflection, CAC
This forces your roadmap to connect to dollars, not “best practices.”
This forces your roadmap to connect to dollars, not “best practices.”
One rule: if you can’t tie it to business impact, don’t pitch it.
One Recommendation, Two Rewards
I have a client in the mattress space who treated SEO like publishing, not “words on a page.” That approach drove 1M+ blog visits.
Then AI Overviews hit, and traffic got cut in half.
SEO isn’t dead, but the playbook has to evolve. For them, that meant “SEO+”: ship work that pays off now in search and also holds up in LLMs.
One simple example: “Is [Brand] sold in stores?” They started online-only, but recently opened physical locations. Customers were already asking, yet the web still reflected the old narrative. And LLMs will repeat outdated info if you let them.
So we framed it as brand narrative control, not “another blog post.” Easy yes.
Result: LLMs picked it up fast, and we took over the answer for a high-intent query.
Google AIO
Gemini
ChatGPT (note this client owns all citation sources)
Can This Be Reproduced?
Yes. I ran the same play with a CRM client, where “Brand A vs Brand B” comparison queries are common and convert well.
Google AIO
ChatGPT
“Clicks” and Secondary SEO Value
LLM tracking is still messy, but you don’t need perfect attribution to see impact. A basic referral source report showed direct LLM traffic landing on the page.
And here’s the part nobody wants to admit out loud: it wasn’t just an “AI visibility” win. It drove meaningful organic traffic, too.
Two birds, one stone. We got approval by speaking to the AI priority, delivered the AI outcome we pitched, and captured classic SEO upside as a byproduct.
Oh, and that “SEO is dead” traffic? It drove $100K in incremental sales.
If you’re still fighting the “LLM vs SEO” battle, you’re losing.
Use the AI hype to get real SEO work shipped, and win everywhere your customers search.
~ Nick
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I love the if you can't beat em join em but make the hype work for you POV.