Classic SEO = Content, Technical, Backlinks, Strategy, and let’s face it, a website is the “easiest” property to optimize for SEO and LLMs. Good backlinks are hard to build without strong partnerships and PR. And, third party reviews? Not usually the job of an SEO. Before we talk about how to wrangle and get results in this new era, let’s have a look at the history of 3rd party, video and social platforms feeding into the SERPs:
2 decades ago! Google launched Universal Search, blending images, news, and video into the standard ten blue links including links to YouTube videos which Google acquired in 2006. Bring back the 10 blue links! <JK>
2009: Google launches Real Time search directly into SERPs, pulling live status updates and tweets directly into search result pages for breaking news/trending topics. I was at a Google conference in Cambridge when this happened and we were encouraged to tweet #something to see how it worked. Real time magic, baby!
2023 UGC and Discussions era : Google begins to prominently surface short-and long-form video snippets, forums, and creator posts. Today we see SERP features like
- Discussions and forums
- Find related products & services
- What people are saying
- Videos
- …..and of course, Sponsored and AI Overview dominate above the fold.
2024: Reddit and Google hopped into a marriage of convenience a couple years ago, exposing real conversations about services, products, advice, tips, everything really.
2025 (Direct Post Indexing): Major platforms like Instagram and TikTok officially integrated deep web-indexing for public profile posts, allowing everyday social posts to populate standard web searches.
And here we are!
Not really a hot take, but mine is that SEO is reverse engineering and always has been. What do the engines like? Why? Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s the same for LLMs if experience to date is any prediction of the future.
To be an SEO, you have to have a hacker mindset. Do the work and get your hands dirty. What are engines like Chat/Perplex/Claude/Copilot surfacing for you and your competitors? What can you possibly influence for SEO and AEO in 2027?
- Claiming 3rd party profiles,
- Publishing original content that is useful that competitors have and you don’t,
- Establishing citations from existing partnerships (still with backlinks if possible),
- Ensuring you have rich video content with solid meta data,
- Optimizing your website code for LLM retrieval
- Following conversations in forums and having your SMEs contribute in meaningful ways are the best ways we’ve found to date.
- Measure, rinse, repeat. Same as SEO.
How about you? How are you measuring? This is the next frontier and we’ve talked to a lot of other agency colleagues in the space about this. While everyone is measuring something (including platforms like SEMRush, Hubspot, etc)….doesn’t seem like anyone has the answer.
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