Based on insights from SEO experts Jeremy Rivera and Jason Berkowitz
The SEO industry is experiencing a fundamental shift that most practitioners haven’t fully recognized yet. In a recent conversation between Jeremy Rivera, Cookeville SEO specialist and founder of SEO Arcade, and Jason Berkowitz, founder of Break the Web, two industry veterans revealed why traditional SEO approaches are failing and what’s working instead.
The Death of Google-Only Optimization
“SEO isn’t dead, but Google-only optimization is leaving because the value proposition can no longer support itself,” Jeremy explained. This isn’t just about algorithm updates—it’s about a fundamental economic reality.
“There are fewer—you have to, as an agency, as a freelancer, it’s becoming harder and harder and the error is less there and the ROI is harder and the timeline, the predictability is decreasing,” Jeremy continued. “Unless you’re at this end of opportunity where this is the amount of work and this is the amount of pay you get for it. Specialized technical SEO for huge brands, major money there. But you have to win that position against incredible levels of talent.”
The challenge becomes clear when Jeremy describes the skill requirements: “So if you’re not in the ballpark of being able to handle—skill-wise, talent-wise, understanding-wise—what the technical ramifications are of canonicalization, multilingual, you know, hreflang, you know, crawling decisions on fractal menus, JavaScript, SPA, crawling and analysis—then the sandwich where you used to eat when it was just SEO, there’s a lot less meat on that bone and there’s a lot more people trying to eat the meat on that bone.”
Google’s Systematic Content Theft
Jeremy traced Google’s parasitic evolution: “Now you can look way back to 2008 and look at an industry. Google took over credit cards first. Then they took over the travel niche. And then they took over the booking niche. And recently they just took over emojis… But they’ve been conquering. Like if you look at the horizontal spread of these useful SERP features, Google has always been parasitic.”
“Featured snippets. ‘We’re going to take part of your content and display it right in there.’ You know, that was the start of it. And that was when the first real move, I think, where Google industry-wide started to claw back from SEOs,” Jeremy observed.
The impact is measurable. “AI overviews—as you’ve probably seen as well—yeah, they’re just destroying clicks. Primarily though, from super informational queries where people weren’t looking to spend money anyways,” Jason noted.
The Revenue-First Strategy That’s Actually Working
Despite the challenges, successful agencies are adapting. Jason revealed their winning approach: “The biggest wins that we’ve been seeing, especially as of late, is just pivoting—putting more effort into middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type of URLs and pages. Instead of going super top of the funnel and informational, which already had significantly less conversion value anyways.”
The results speak for themselves: “It’s still working. It’s still working well. Top of the funnel traffic is down, but organic revenue is up for just about all of our clients that are in the e-comm space that you could attribute as best as possible.”
This mirrors the revenue forecasting challenges that many SEO teams face when trying to connect their efforts to actual business outcomes.
The AI Assistant Reality Check
Both experts addressed the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. But their perspective differs dramatically from the “AI will replace SEOs” narrative.
“AI is not in any position at this point. LLMs are not in a position at this point to really cause much disruption or damage to everyone,” Jason stated. “It’s everyone’s fear marketing and they got something to sell and then you got GEO or AI or whatever you want to call it optimization, which is a farce, you know, because it’s all just good SEO because you can’t do anything.”
Jeremy identified a fundamental flaw in current AI systems: “There’s an inherent bias to be a yes man built into LLMs that is extremely problematic when you—the nature of copyright, copy editing, good copy editing is aggressive no… But LLMs seem to be calibrated in such a way that they want to please us. That’s the problem.”
However, when used correctly, AI becomes powerful: “Use LLMs to your advantage because that analysis of looking through X number of blog posts to find a theme, that would have taken a couple of hours and then writing it up would have been another hour or two or exporting it out. But I just got that done in like half an hour,” Jeremy shared.
Jason summarized the proper role: “I mean, it’s a great SEO assistant. Absolutely. It can’t take the strategy because that’s like sometimes critical thinking and getting creative with how you implement SEO in a way that doesn’t go against the brand, brand messaging, brand voice.”
The Quality Problem No One’s Talking About
Perhaps most concerning is the quality degradation affecting everyday users. Jeremy observed: “What happens to the everyday consumer who first is not even aware of AI, different AI platforms? They might know ChatGPT because of memes. They might know Gemini because of commercials… But what happens with the potential change in consumer behavior when they don’t get the information they’re looking for? The quality of results is bad.”
“They’ve shown they’re just as prone to hallucination as ChatGPT. And it’s even more egregious because they are putting it out there in a form of authority of ‘this is an answer’ and they’re giving answers about ketchup soup and macaroni and cheese recipes, including glue, because the LLMs don’t understand sarcasm,” Jeremy noted.
Breaking Down SEO Silos
Jason highlighted another critical issue: “SEO is also—to your point—has always been in this weird little silo all by itself like the SEO department and not working with other marketing teams and they should all be collaborating together. I mean, SEO can help fuel other marketing initiatives just like other marketing initiatives could help fuel SEO.”
“PPC data is gold for SEO. You know, what’s converting, what’s not, the fact that sometimes brands aren’t communicating interdepartmentally,” he continued.
For example, a power washing company running Google Ads might discover that “deck cleaning” converts at 8% while “pressure washing” only converts at 2%, even though both get similar traffic. This PPC insight should immediately inform their SEO content strategy—prioritizing “deck cleaning” content and long-tail variations over generic “pressure washing” terms. The conversion data reveals actual customer intent that keyword volume alone never could.
This connects to broader digital PR and content gaps strategies that require cross-departmental coordination.
The integration challenge extends beyond internal teams. “There’s a lot of influencers who are getting paid to name drop because they know that in order to find that thing, they’re going to have to go and Google it,” Jeremy explained, describing how influencer marketing must coordinate with SEO efforts.
The New SEO Fundamentals
Despite all the changes, both experts emphasized that core principles remain valuable when applied correctly. “I still think there’s tons of value even in just traditional SEO. Like SEO is definitely not dead,” Jason stated.
The key is understanding what’s changed. Jeremy explained: “You know, it basically breaks down to just kind of treating each LLM as an additional search console. Are you indexed? Are you there? And if you ask it, where do you appear in citations? Which is what we look for in Google Search Console, right?”
This approach treats AI platforms as additional search engines rather than replacements for traditional SEO work—a perspective that aligns with foundational SEO education from resources like the Moz beginners guide.
What This Means for Your SEO Strategy
The conversation reveals three critical shifts every SEO professional must understand:
Revenue Over Traffic: “So at the end of the day, brands need to make money. That’s the whole goal and we try as much as possible to calculate ROI,” Jason emphasized.
Tools, Not Replacements: “That’s where I think it’s like a cool time to be alive because you’re getting more done in a short amount of time,” Jason said about AI assistance.
Diversification Required: “Google is a search engine. That doesn’t mean that it’s search engine optimization. It’s not the only search engine,” Jeremy concluded.
The industry veterans agree: adapt or get left behind. But adaptation means understanding what actually works, not chasing every new trend or fearing every technological advancement.
This analysis is based on expert insights from industry professionals. For comprehensive SEO education, explore resources from Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. Learn foundational concepts through the Ahrefs SEO basics guide and Moz’s beginner resources.