Peter Rota on what actually changes in AI search

Noor Khan

Welcome in. I'm Noor Khan. I work in semantic SEO and AI search. If it's felt like the ground is shifting under this industry lately, you are not imagining it. Most of the conversation about it is either hype or panic, so I wanted to sit down with the people who are actually doing the work and talk about what's really going on.

Noor Khan

Today I'm with Peter Rota: 14 years in SEO, he's running technical SEO for a billion-dollar enterprise, and he's one of the most followed SEO voices on LinkedIn. Peter, good to have you.

Peter Rota

Yeah, good to be here. Thank you.

Noor Khan

Before we get into the big stuff, I want to ask: what's been on your mind lately? What are you digging into?

Peter Rota

Right now, what's given me the most energy is becoming a better marketer, because I feel like GEO and AEO are rewarding people who are actually building a brand, understanding their customers and things like that. So I think that's what's most exciting. Even just posting on LinkedIn has made me realize the importance of building a brand, storytelling and copywriting. Those are the things I'm most excited about these days.

Noor Khan

I love the posts you've been sharing with your audience. They're really great.

Peter Rota

Appreciate it.

Noor Khan

I have to start here, because this stuck in my mind: you posted that you never optimized your site for ChatGPT, and then it gave you your first lead. What do you make of that?

Peter Rota

I think it's the reality that if you have a basic foundation of SEO, you're going to get 80% of the way there to optimizing for LLMs and things like that. But obviously there's also building a brand presence and consistency of messaging. If you're doing good SEO, you're ideally hitting most of those things. There's obviously stuff you can do in addition to SEO, but I just found it funny that I didn't go out of my way. I'd barely touched the site beyond getting some links, from LinkedIn posts or people who wanted to link to me. It's funny how people over-obsess about all these crazy things you need to do, and then here's a site I haven't touched, and it's showing up in LLMs.

Noor Khan

Something everyone is dealing with: they open Search Console and see impressions going up or holding steady while clicks go down. Is that the pattern you're seeing too?

Peter Rota

Yeah. That's probably been going on for us for a year and a half, two years, since they started introducing AI Overviews and then obviously LLMs. What we're communicating to leadership is that we've always focused on conversions, and we're trying to focus on that a bit more. We're still reporting clicks, but we're also showcasing impressions as visibility, because just because someone sees you and doesn't click, at a later date they could come back. Everything's important, but we're not saying clicks are the be-all and end-all. If our clicks are going down, it's not great, but it's not the end of the world it's been portrayed to be.

Noor Khan

And sometimes that's just what happens: people get their answer and don't click through to the full content.

Peter Rota

Yeah, that's the nature of some of our content that has lost clicks, like a lot of our insurance glossary content. We've been going down in clicks, but our impressions are going up. So every piece of content does serve a purpose, even if it doesn't mean someone clicks through to your website and converts.

Noor Khan

So let's do the argument everyone is having: SEO, AEO, LLMO, a new acronym for everyone. Some people say it's a new discipline, and some say it's an SEO rebrand. What do you think?

Peter Rota

I definitely have an opinion on it, but mine has changed over time. Initially I was basically saying good SEO is good GEO. But as I did an audit for a client focusing on GEO and AEO, I felt there were things I wouldn't have thought about as an SEO, especially the perception of a brand: what a customer thinks versus what LLMs think. And even pages we don't see as important in SEO, not an FAQ page, but things like support docs. That's not super important for SEO, but we can see that people want that kind of content. And there are sites that do well in SEO, but then they don't always show up in LLMs. So I think it's definitely a different discipline, but like I said before, you're going to get 80% of the way there with good SEO, good technical SEO and things like that.

Noor Khan

Something that changed how I think about content: AI doesn't read content from top to bottom. It pulls chunks, and if a well-written piece buries its answer, that answer won't be used. How do you structure things for that?

Peter Rota

I've structured it pretty similarly to SEO, but it's been given more importance. They talk about the inverted pyramid: you put your most important content higher on the page and get right to the valuable content, instead of building up to it with a fluffy intro and all this other stuff. Something that's always been important for SEO and LLMs is semantic HTML: making sure you're using bullets, unordered lists, tables and things like that. You've done it for SEO, but it also makes it easier for LLMs to extract the content. We're running some tests right now at my company: we're about to test serving markdown files to agents. So it's a lot of fundamentals, and getting your most important content in early, instead of burying it in the middle of the page like people were doing five years ago.

Noor Khan

Can you give an example, something practical that shows how you structure content?

Peter Rota

It's similar to what I was saying, but another thing I've done is put key takeaways at the top. That lists the most important things, because it's important for LLMs to get the most information fast, and if someone still wants to read the content, they can. It's how I've always structured traditional content anyway, so I'm not making a significant change, just breaking it up so it reads well: strong internal linking, good header structure, things like that. The discipline is still pretty new, and as people get more data on what does and doesn't work, we might change how we do things. But for now I've done it much like we've done our SEO content.

Noor Khan

I want to make it practical for a minute. People listening need to figure out where to put their effort first. If I handed you a new website, with one person helping you, and the site had no history and no content, what are the first three things you'd do?

Peter Rota

Definitely go back to the strong foundations of SEO. Do the fundamentals: make sure the content's optimized, strong internal linking, building out the content that matters to your audience, like your services or solutions, an about us page, contact us. Implement JSON-LD schema and things like that, and make sure both LLMs and Google can crawl the site. Once you've done a strong job on-page, start creating those social profiles, and look for anywhere that's beneficial as third-party information, which LLMs will pull. Once you've done that, start to look at your crawl logs and Google Search Console to better understand how they're crawling your website and whether there are issues. Those are the most impactful, at least out of the gate.

Noor Khan

Is there a skill outside SEO that has mattered more to your career than the technical knowledge itself?

Peter Rota

That's a great question. The thing that's been most impactful in my career: I've never said I'm the smartest SEO, but I always show up each day and I try to learn as much as I can, and just be really consistent. Consistency is important in SEO, because you need to do something over and over to have success, versus putting all this effort in at the start, getting tired and giving up. So it's been my desire to keep working as hard as I can, being consistent and learning as much as I can, honestly.

Noor Khan

Before I let you go, a few quick rapid-fire questions. Twelve months from now: citations or rankings, which matters more?

Peter Rota

I'd probably say rankings. Citations are important, but I would honestly put mentions higher as being impactful. So I'd say rankings, because rankings are probably going to drive more traffic to your website than citations.

Noor Khan

What would you tell someone who is overwhelmed by all of this and doesn't know where to start right now?

Peter Rota

It's a great question. I think it's going back to building up those fundamentals first. Once you have that, it's largely experimentation and testing things. And when you see things on LinkedIn or Facebook, try to understand whether the person is actually doing something to benefit themselves or to benefit you, because a lot of people share things to push people to courses or to create rage bait. You really need to understand the intent, the authenticity, and whether someone is actually qualified to say it.

Noor Khan

Perfect. Peter, that was genuinely sharp. Thanks for coming on.

Peter Rota

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Noor Khan

Peter is also sharing his SEO audit template, so I'll put it in the description along with his link. Thanks again, Peter. That was great.

Peter Rota

Thank you. Pleasure.

Noor Khan

Hope that was helpful. Send it to someone who'd like it, and I'll see you next time.