Happy Thursday!

I’ve been watching brands pour money into paid while completely ignoring the biggest shift in search since Google itself. That needs to change.

Dylan Ander is back. Last time he came on, we went deep on CRO. This time we went somewhere I don’t think most ecom brands have spent nearly enough time: what search looks like now that AI runs everything.

Dylan’s been printing money from SEO since he was 18. He had a $2M/year SEO contract with Planet Fitness. And right now, about a third of all revenue at his SaaS company Heatmap.com comes from Google organic, with zero branded keyword. Read that again. Zero branded keyword.

His sharpest take: the brands ignoring GEO right now are making the same mistake brands made when they ignored SEO in 2010. Except this time, the window is closing faster.

I pulled 5 of the biggest takeaways.

Viktor — The agent who actually gets sh*t done!

Every founder I talk to has the same backlog. The Klaviyo audit nobody's had time to write. The checkout bug from last month that you keep meaning to debug. The coupon code leak sites you found once and never circled back on. The 8am morning brief you wish someone would build for you.

That whole list is real work. It's just nobody's job, so it sits.

Viktor is an AI coworker that lives in Slack or Teams (if you use that). You @mention it like a teammate and it actually does the work. Pulls reports from Shopify, audits Klaviyo flows, chases owed invoices, debugs checkout, drafts cease-and-desists for leaked coupon codes. It connects to 3,000+ tools so it plugs into whatever stack your team already runs.

I heard about Viktor FROM a ~$10M DTC founder running a 6-person remote team. He plugged Viktor into Slack and let his team @mention it like a coworker. Three weeks in: checkout fixed on day one (392 network requests on load, traced to 15 extensions, resolved in 10 minutes). A 13-page Klaviyo audit covering 56 flows and 405 campaigns, surfacing a 67% year-over-year drop in revenue per send. Eight coupon leak sites found and shut down. A daily 8am brief across Meta, Google, GA4, and Klaviyo. His exact quote: "all the 'I know I should be doing this but don't have time' stuff is actually getting done now."

That's the use case. Over 13,000 teams use Viktor to operate like a brand twice their size, without adding headcount they don't need yet.

Sign up and get $100 in starting credits.

SEO didn’t die. It got a lot bigger.

Dylan broke down how search has evolved from backlinks and rankings into a content ecosystem. He calls it GEO: generative engine optimization. Getting your brand recommended inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.

Here’s the key shift. LLMs pull from two places. The training data set, which is a snapshot from 12-18 months ago, and live search. Getting into the training data set is rent-free memory. If your brand is mentioned consistently across LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, X, Quora, and your own site, the LLM starts to know who you are.

Three metrics for GEO: share of voice, mention rate, and citation rate. None of them show up in Ahrefs or SEMrush. Dylan built his own N8N tracking template that pings Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok with 25 questions about your brand and logs whether you were mentioned. He’ll send it to anyone who emails [email protected]. Free. No catch.

Tactical stuff you can do this week: Duplicate collection pages with audience-specific URLs. Post every piece of content across LinkedIn, Medium, X, Quora, and Reddit. Build one exceptional research piece per quarter with original data. Cover as much of the Google SERP as you can and the LLMs follow.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

• GEO is just SEO with more surface area: SEO used to be two-dimensional, your website and its backlinks. Now it’s content clusters across a dozen platforms, all pointing at each other and at you. LLMs don’t care about your domain. They care about who shows up in the most relevant places with the most consistent signal. Cover the real estate and you get into the model.
• The training data set is permanent. Start filling it now: Most LLMs update every 12-18 months. The work you do on Reddit, LinkedIn, Medium now is being baked into the next round of model training. The brands sitting this out are letting competitors write the script.
• Parasite SEO is fast and it works: Post a well-optimized Reddit thread on a long-tail keyword and you can rank on Google within 20 minutes. Dylan’s move: find the keyword in Ahrefs or SEMrush, post it in the right subreddit, push some of your other assets to link to that Reddit post. You can end up owning 3 or 4 of the top 10 results for a single search.
• Programmatic collection pages are a Shopify cheat code right now: Duplicate your category pages with audience-specific URLs. Change the headline, the URL slug, and the 300-500 words of copy below the products. Dylan is working with a brand that has 300 of these pages and they’re ranking hard. Google doesn’t penalize 20 or 30 of them.
• Direct traffic is your GEO signal: You won’t see much revenue directly attributed to Claude or ChatGPT in your UTMs. That’s not where the money lands. When LLMs surface your brand, people Google the name or type the URL directly. If your direct traffic is climbing, something is working upstream.

Dylan packed more tactical substance into one episode than most SEO courses cover in 10 hours. Seriously. Go listen to this one twice.

It’s Thursday, and it’s all downhill from here. Get some rest this weekend, drink some water, and I’ll see you Sunday.

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