Eli Schwartz is an SEO strategist and the author of Product-Led SEO, one of the most influential books in the field. His last full-time role was at SurveyMonkey, where he led SEO before going independent. He has since spent seven years consulting for companies including Tinder and Mixpanel. He also runs a newsletter followed by nearly +15,000 readers.
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Every few years, a new technology appears and the same people declare that SEO is finally dead. TikTok. Voice search. Now AI. Each time, they’re wrong, just early enough to sell you something new.
In this episode, I sat down with Eli Schwartz to figure out what’s actually changed and what hasn’t.
Here’s what I took away.
1) GEO is not a separate investment. It’s just SEO in 2026. Breaking out “AI visibility” from SEO is the same mistake as having a dedicated mobile SEO person alongside your SEO person. Eli’s position: the team you’re already paying for should know how to do this. If they don’t, that’s the problem.
2) AI took over top of funnel. SEO owns everything below. When someone describes symptoms or an open-ended problem, the LLM answers. When they know what they’re looking for, they go to Google. The funnel didn’t disappear, it got redistributed.
3) Citations are just backlinks with a new name. The same manipulation that killed low-quality link building will kill low-quality citation building. What gets cited is what’s already a real brand, not what spammed its way onto a list.
4) Brand before SEO. Always. If you don’t have a brand yet, paid search first to validate search-market fit. Then brand. Then SEO. Spending on SEO before people are even searching for you is wasted money.
5) SEO belongs in product, not marketing. When SEO sits in marketing, it writes tickets. When it sits in product, it ships. Eli’s most successful engagement, at Tinder, worked because he had direct access to engineering.
Where to find Eli : https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwartze/
Product-Led-SEO : https://a.co/d/04cqmiRN
Enjoy,
— Jordan
