Information Density: The Future of SEO & AEO by Eli Schwartz – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

Stop writing blog posts and calling it SEOYou’ve been publishing two blog posts a week targeting high-volume keywords, and your traffic is still flat or decliningJun 25 • Eli Schwartz1911
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View allDoes AEO need technical SEO?In the current age of AI, technical SEO is often treated as an afterthought, and that is wrong.Jun 18 • Eli Schwartz2511AEO & SEO on brand terms needs brand efforts Ranking for brand comparison and best-of keywords is not a technical SEO challenge.Jun 11 • Eli Schwartz12Who should you hire for AEO?This person looks more like a product manager than anything else, and not a marketing engineer or a content strategist who has picked up a few technical…Jun 4 • Eli Schwartz2013Do you have search market fit for AEO/SEO?The volume numbers from any tool tell you how many people typed something into a search bar, but they tell you nothing about why they typed it.May 28 • Eli Schwartz121Google I/O 2026: What you need to know for SEO /AEOGoogle did not announce that AI mode is becoming the default search experience, but what they did announce does not bode well for those who rely on…May 20 • Eli Schwartz182SEO is a product, AEO is brandThe organizational structure of SEO as marketing leaves the team without the authority to get things doneMay 14 • Eli Schwartz2623See all
[IMG: The Future of SEO & AEO by Eli Schwartz]
The Future of SEO & AEO by Eli Schwartz As the author of Product-Led SEO and a consultant to some of the internet's largest companies, this newsletter is for people who own the growth number and need to know what search actually looks like in an AI world.contactBook a callSponsorships

Stop writing blog posts and calling it SEOYou’ve been publishing two blog posts a week targeting high-volume keywords, and your traffic is still flat or decliningJun 25 • Eli Schwartz1811Does AEO need technical SEO?In the current age of AI, technical SEO is often treated as an afterthought, and that is wrong.Jun 18 • Eli Schwartz2511AEO & SEO on brand terms needs brand efforts Ranking for brand comparison and best-of keywords is not a technical SEO challenge.Jun 11 • Eli Schwartz12Who should you hire for AEO?This person looks more like a product manager than anything else, and not a marketing engineer or a content strategist who has picked up a few technical…Jun 4 • Eli Schwartz2013
[H3] May 2026
Do you have search market fit for AEO/SEO?The volume numbers from any tool tell you how many people typed something into a search bar, but they tell you nothing about why they typed it.May 28 • Eli Schwartz121Google I/O 2026: What you need to know for SEO /AEOGoogle did not announce that AI mode is becoming the default search experience, but what they did announce does not bode well for those who rely on…May 20 • Eli Schwartz182SEO is a product, AEO is brandThe organizational structure of SEO as marketing leaves the team without the authority to get things doneMay 14 • Eli Schwartz2623The personalized Internet is hereFor now, personalization is really only in Gemini, but it will soon migrate globally to AI Mode, which then goes to AI Overviews and all of search.May 7 • Eli Schwartz112
[H3] April 2026
Use TAM to forecast SEO/AEOKeyword-based SEO forecasting is basically fiction.Apr 30 • Eli Schwartz7SEO without a hypothesis is just a to-do listStop doing SEO based on guessworkApr 23 • Eli Schwartz14Prioritize SEO efforts like a pro with THRICEIn SEO, measure THRICE, cut once.Apr 16 • Eli Schwartz151AEO is not SEO 2.0The comparison between SEO and AEO is a trapApr 9 • Eli Schwartz2823

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Surfer(Sponsored) Turn the Web Into A Data Pipeline. Generate Your API, in Minutes. Scraper Studio - launching today from Bright Data turns any public website into a hosted data API from a single prompt.Paid subscribers can download this content ROI calculatorThere is this question I am frequently asked in some form or another, and it goes like this: “We’ve been publishing two blog posts a week targeting high-volume keywords, and our traffic is still flat. What are we doing wrong with our SEO, and should we fire our agency?” The answer is that nothing is wrong with the execution of the blog post SEO process, because the problem is not how they are doing SEO, because this is NOT SEO. If I wanted to be generous, I might call it content marketing, but since it’s rarely written with any audience in mind other than Google, it’s not really marketing either. This is just content being sold by an SEO agency, claiming it is SEO work [Sponsored by Surfer]Visibility in 2026 is all about being the answer, everywhere your buyers and their agents look.Meet Surfer, the AI Visibility Platform for the agentic web.We’ve expanded Surfer into a complete, end-to-end platform for the next era of web visibility, where brands need to be discoverable by humans, AI-powered answer engines, and agents acting on their behalf.As discovery goes agentic, Surfer keeps you visible wherever it happens next.You no longer have to stitch together a stack of tools for traditional SEO, AI visibility, and agentic optimization, because Surfer brings the whole workflow into one platform.Internal data shows Surfer content is 25% more likely to be cited in AI answers, with users seeing an average 423% lift in visibility.Try the new Surfer platform →Free for a limited time.Blog posts for SEO are not a new misconception that cropped up with AI content, but the diminished cost of content has caused this strategy to proliferate without any guardrails. It is an expansion of how agencies learned to sell the channel and how in-house teams justified their busy roadmaps. Ever since I first entered this industry, the SEO playbook has always been some version of: write articles, rank for keywords, drive awareness, and eventually that awareness becomes revenue.In truth, nobody ever wanted to look too closely at that “eventually” becoming revenue, because then the whole playbook would break, as it should. My experience with one of my first consulting clients, which was actually an analytics platform that was able to discern that “eventually” hardly ever happened, made me reconsider how content is and should be used in SEO. SEO is not just contentReal SEO is a much simpler and more demanding proposition than writing content to be indexed because it is the practice of making your product findable at the exact moment someone is ready to use it, and that is the entire job. This is Product Led SEO.When you approach SEO as product-led SEO, the keyword or prompt you care about should not be “how to do xyz” because it has a high monthly search volume. It should be whatever the user is going to type right before they are ready to take action on your site. If the asset you end up “ranking” for that keyword is a blog post, the user might click on it, but then there’s no action to take other than to read that blog post. The user will read it, leave, and the overwhelming majority of them will never come back. Information is a commodity; you gave it away for free, and if all the user wanted was information, they are not a user with intent. If they had intent, they clicked in, saw content, and then bounced to a different result with a solution. That bounce is not a UX problem or a content quality problem. You built a reading experience and pointed it at someone who came to do something.This entire playbook is even more problematic in an AEO-dominated SEO roadmap because much of the content that typically appeared in blog posts will be usurped by LLM responses. What matters and will always matter is the conversion flow. Focus on the actionWhen I consulted for Tinder, this distinction between reading and acting was critical because the SEO that actually moved the business was not a blog full of dating advice articles but the work of making sure that when someone searched for singles in their city or for a specific dating scenario, they landed on a page that put them directly into the product experience, where the landing page was a door that opened directly into something you could do rather than something you could read.When I worked at SurveyMonkey, the same principle held, because the SEO that mattered was not articles about survey best practices but the work of making sure that when someone searched for a specific kind of survey template, they landed on a page where they could immediately start building that survey. Content marketing existed separately and served a genuinely different purpose around awareness and credibility.Comcast implements this principle in an interesting way: when users search for how to cancel their service, Comcast does not serve them a blog post with tips and FAQs; it serves them an action page, specifically built to capture that intent and route them into a retention flow. This page is exactly what a well-designed SEO asset should do: meet the user at the point of intent and move them into a product experience rather than a reading experience.Awareness only matters if it convertsThe objection I hear most often when I make this argument against writing blog posts and calling it SEO is that “informational content drives awareness”, which is an important part of SEO. In response, I always push back by encouraging the org to find conversion data to prove that hypothesis. In most cases, it doesn’t exist. If it does, of course, they should continue doing what they are doing. Even so, what makes this worse is that most of the keyword-volume content companies produce is not particularly good because it is thin, templated, and completely interchangeable with what every other company in the same category produces, written by someone who was given a keyword target and a word count.Content and SEO landing pages are differentThe smarter path is to treat SEO and content as two separate functions with two genuinely different mandates: content marketing is measured by audience growth, subscriber counts, engagement, and brand recall over time, while SEO is measured by signups, purchases, free trial activations, and pipeline contribution. SEO is not just about pumping out blog posts, and the sooner a company internalizes that, the sooner the channel starts producing revenue rather than traffic and ranking charts. A blog post is a fine tool for telling someone what your company believes, and it is a terrible tool for capturing someone who already knows what they want and is one click away from getting it from a competitor instead. Find the moment of intent, and put the product in front of it.[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]What happens when you combine best-in-class SEO with conversion optimization?BigRentz’s traffic increased by 186% (85k), added 1950 conversions in 12 months.Self Financial’s traffic increased by 50k/month, and added 685 new customers.Lastly, Secure Data added 1968 phone calls.North Star Inbound’s SEO strategies earn leads, conversions, and revenue..Book a call for a free content audit and 10% off any engagement.Intrigued? [Learn more here]Previous
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[IMG: Nicolo]
Nicolo' Caiti 6hThis is a brutally honest and much needed reality check, Eli. The distinction between actual SEO and the "blog post hamster wheel" perfectly diagnoses why so many organic growth charts are flatlining despite massive content investments.The shift to Product-Led SEO is critical. As you pointed out, information is a commodity. If a user arrives with high intent and we only offer them a reading experience, they will immediately bounce to a competitor who offers a direct action. With AI Overviews now absorbing top of funnel queries, the only defensible SEO moat left is the interactive conversion flow itself.I spend a lot of time exploring these exact shifts in digital strategy and intent driven visibility. If you are open to exchanging ideas and navigating this evolving landscape together, I would love for you to check out my space: https://www.google.com/search?q=https://nicolocaiti.substack.com/When a company is deeply entrenched in the "two posts a week" mentality, what is the most effective metric you use to pivot their leadership toward this action oriented SEO strategy?ReplyShareNo posts
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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Airopsdofollow.com helps leading SaaS brands get found across Google and AI search through strategic brand mentions and expert-led campaigns. Book a callPaid subscribers can download the technical seo checklistThroughout my consulting career, I have pushed back against the importance many agencies place on technical SEO. I was never a fan of how most SEO engagements began with an expensive audit that produced endless to-do lists without yielding meaningful increases in traffic. But now the pendulum has swung the other way. In the current age of AI, technical SEO is often treated as an afterthought, and that is wrong. The argument being made in every LinkedIn thread and way too many expert posts that LLMs are so good at reading content that they don’t need a site to be structured well is going to cause some major issues.The fact that this even needs to be said reflects how badly the SEO industry has conflated the sophistication of LLMs with the idea that those systems somehow no longer need to crawl the web. [Sponsored by Airops]Getting retrieved by AI search is not the same as getting cited.Strong rankings and clean pages still lose when AI systems decide which sources to reference. The gap is everything that happens between the prompt, the fan-out, and the final citation.On June 25, AirOps Head of Research Oshen Davidson breaks down where citation wins actually come from, alongside Melanie Dell’Olio (AI Solutions) and Josh Spilker (Head of Search Marketing).You’ll walk away knowing:Why many retrieved pages never make the final answerWhich page elements get content parsed and reused (headings, lists, tables, stats, schema)How to find pages being surfaced but not selected, then prioritize the right fixesWhat to measure beyond rankings: citations, mentions, repeat visibility, refresh timingTactical, no fluff, built for teams who want AI visibility that moves pipeline.[Save your spot →] From Research to Revenue: 5 AEO Actions to Take Now. June 25, 3:00pm EST.Traditional SEO is alive and wellFirst off, much of this thinking assumes that SEO is dead and that only AEO matters. If you read my newsletter weekly, you know that this premise is, of course, false. But, even for AEO, you need technical SEO because much of what will show up in an LLM will build off what is in the search index. Without SEO, there is no AEO.What’s unfortunate is how widespread the argument that technical SEO is not needed has become. I’ve heard this statement from CMOs, from content teams, and from agency people who have been selling content retainers for years and would very much prefer that the technical work not matter. A big reason for this is the lack of strategic technical talent; they actually can’t address the stakeholders’ needs, so they brush it off as unnecessary. Technical SEO issues can be powerfulA couple of years ago, I was working with a global brand that had a serious organic visibility problem that no one on their team could explain, even though the content was genuinely good, with real depth on the right topics.When we dug into the site's actual technical state, the problem wasn’t the content at all, nor was it the brand. The real issue was that the site had been built up over a decade of good intentions and no architectural discipline, with every product category using its own logic for URL construction: underscores, hyphens, dates embedded in the URL, and a hierarchy that didn’t reflect anything a user or a crawler would recognize as intentional. Category pages competed with product pages for the same queries; the internal linking was random, conveying little to no signal about what the site was authoritative about, and the canonicalization was a mess of migration decisions made over the years with minimal SEO input.We didn’t touch the content because it was fine; instead, we rebuilt the URL architecture from the ground up, established a coherent internal linking model that reinforced subject and product clusters, and cleaned up the canonicalization so the site would finally send consistent signals about which pages mattered. This brand also had a small international audience, so, for added measure, we developed an internal strategy to give them a foundation to build on as we expanded into other countries. This effort was extremely successful, and the lift came almost entirely from that structural work, without a single new article written, just the site finally communicating clearly to crawlers what it was about and which pages deserved to rank. To be transparent, there was a ton of pushback because the risk to traffic was tremendous, given that we were changing nearly every URL. What finally got the green light was my explanation that, since we were so close to the bottom, the only direction was up. This brand is doing very well in LLMs, but I don’t think that would be the case had they not addressed their underlying architecture that was hurting their SEO.That story is not unusual in my experience, and the consistent pattern across every company I’ve worked with is that when a technically sound site underperforms, content, the brand is usually the problem, but when a content-rich site underperforms in a way that it shouldn’t due to brand signals, it is worth looking at the technical architecture.Here is the technical seo you should focus on today. RenderingRendering is actually one of the places where the AI era has made technical SEO more consequential than it was before, because most AI crawlers are lightweight systems that are not running a full browser stack and executing JavaScript the way Chrome would, which means that if your content only exists after a React component renders it client-side, a meaningful portion of the AI crawl ecosystem is simply not reading it. This was a manageable problem when Googlebot was the primary crawler you were optimizing for, because you could at least rely on Google’s JavaScript rendering queue even when it was slow, but it’s a harder problem now because you’re dealing with a fragmented set of crawlers with different capabilities. When it comes to search, Google will be dominant, but if you are focusing on AEO, every model might matter.CanonicalsA page with conflicting canonicalization signals would never make it cleanly into any crawl index because the model doesn’t know what to rank. When it comes to inclusion rather than ranking, this is an important area to clean up. Look at your Google Search Console report, find those duplicates, and fix your canonicals.Internal linksInternal links are the closest thing to explicit editorial judgment that a crawler can observe, and most sites treat them as an afterthought. Internal linking ends up being something put in recent posts to link to old content, but not to link new content to old. The topical relationships of content are critical when it comes to showcasing a site as an expert, so this is something you want to get right.An e-commerce site where the product team owns the product pages and the content team owns the blog will almost always have an internal link graph that reflects that organizational divide, with each section linking internally within its own domain and almost never across it, which is a structural problem that communicates to crawlers that these two bodies of content have nothing to do with each other even when they are obviously about the same product.The fix is not complicated, but it requires someone to proactively make these adjustments.Crawl budget and crawl efficiencyCrawl budget for most sites isn’t that big of an issue because Google will crawl nearly every page on a site. AI crawlers are not Google and do not have Google’s infrastructure or its tolerance for crawling inefficiency, so even smaller sites want to conserve crawl budget.A site that wastes AI crawler visits on paginated archives, session-ID URL variants, filtered search result pages, and duplicate tracking parameter strings that were never cleaned up is destroying its crawl efficiency. Crawlers will eventually deprioritize this site relative to cleaner sources that return useful content on the first crawl.Technical SEO was never about tricking algorithms. It was always about making sure the work you did was actually readable by the systems that decide whether it matters. Fix your basic technical SEO, and you'll set the right foundation for AEO.I've spent years arguing that SEO is a product problem, not a content problem. The AI era has just made the proof obvious. If your site can't be crawled cleanly, no amount of good writing will fix it, and an LLM won't do you the favor of working around your architecture. [Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]What happens when you combine best-in-class SEO with conversion optimization?BigRentz’s traffic increased by 186% (85k), added 1950 conversions in 12 months.Self Financial’s traffic increased by 50k/month, and added 685 new customers.Lastly, Secure Data added 1968 phone calls.North Star Inbound’s SEO strategies earn leads, conversions, and revenue..Book a call for a free content audit and 10% off any engagement.Intrigued? [Learn more here]PreviousNext
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[IMG: Paul Arino | Growth Tips]
Paul Arino | Growth Tips Jun 18Liked by Eli SchwartzGreat article Eli... everyone is talking about creating great content for AI search, but this article perfectly explains why our "technical foundation" matters more than ever.If the bots can't crawl us efficiently, our great content won't even make it into the LLM's in the first place!ReplyShareNo posts
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