Table of Contents
E-Coffee with Experts Podcast
Last Update September 25, 2026
How AI Is Changing SEO: Brandon Leibowitz on Trust, Links, and Podcast Visibility
How AI is changing SEO came up in the first two minutes of Brandon Leibowitz’s interview on the eCoffee with Experts podcast, and his answer was blunt. Search stopped being a traffic game. It is now a trust game.
Brandon is the founder of SEOOptimizers, he has been in digital marketing since 2007, and he has sat through more Google algorithm updates than most people have read about. Host Ran Mehia pushed him on ChatGPT, link building, digital PR, and what he tells business owners who want to start their own agency.
Below is the whole conversation, condensed into the parts you can actually use.
Nobody Taught SEO in 2007, So He Learned It on the Job
Brandon graduated with a business marketing degree in 2007. One of his first job offers was to run a company’s SEO and digital marketing, which nobody had taught him, because universities were not offering those classes yet.
He told the company straight out that he did not know how to do it.
Their answer changed his career: “Don’t worry, we’re new to this as well. We’re going to learn with you.” They sent him to seminars and workshops.
At those seminars, speakers kept mentioning affiliate marketing, dropshipping, and running ten sites at once. That planted the side hustle idea.
So he worked full time at ad agencies and built his own client roster before work, after work, and on lunch breaks. As long as the industries did not conflict with his employer’s clients, nobody minded, because everything he learned came back into the day job.
Ten years ago, he went all in.
Traffic Is Not the Product. Conversions Are.
Here is the line worth taping to a monitor: “Most businesses don’t really care about traffic. They want those conversions, those leads, those sales, phone calls.”
That is why Brandon stopped selling organic rankings in isolation. His work now wraps around the whole funnel.
- Google Ads to cover the terms organic search has not caught up to yet
- Remarketing and retargeting so a visitor who bounces stays in the funnel
- Email follow up and social touchpoints to stay top of mind
- Conversion tracking, because a session that never turns into a lead is a vanity metric
And visibility is no longer one channel. His words: it does not matter if someone searches on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Yelp, or YouTube. You need to show up where the question gets asked.
How AI Is Changing SEO and Search Behavior
Brandon called the current moment “the wild, wild west.” Nobody knows yet whether ChatGPT stays on top, whether Gemini takes it, or whether AI Mode becomes the default for everyone.
What he is confident about: people will keep shifting toward AI answers and away from ten blue links, because an AI answer is interactive.
He compared large language models to featured snippets, the answer boxes Google started rolling out around 2011 to 2013. The difference is the conversation.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Featured snippet gives one static answer | LLM gives an answer you can argue with |
| One way, read only | Two way, you refine and follow up |
| Click through to the source was the default | Links are small, sometimes buried |
| Rank the page | Build the entity and the brand mention |
That last row is the real shift. AI platforms behave like social networks: they do not want you leaving. Brandon put it plainly, the LLMs “kind of lock you in there, just like social media.”
So his focus moved toward entities, brand mentions, and topical authority, the signals that get a company named inside an answer instead of just linked under one.
The Most Underrated Ranking Factor Is Still Page Structure
Asked for the ranking factor businesses keep ignoring, he did not say schema or Core Web Vitals. He said pages. Most sites simply do not have enough of them.
His dentist client is the example. The site had one page that said “we’re a dentist, here are all our services.”
The fix was breaking every service into its own page.
- One page per service, targeting one primary keyword
- Support that page with blogs and articles on the same topic
- Interlink the cluster so the money page collects the authority
- Repeat down to the sub-service level
Why it works: if someone searches teeth whitening and your only mention of it is buried in a long list, that visitor has to dig for it. A standalone page is more relevant to the query and easier for the user.
He practices it too. His own site runs over 200 pages, one per service, because “I need a page about link building. I can’t just lump it into off-page SEO.”
The pushback he hears constantly is that it makes a website feel cluttered. His counter is that a clear hierarchy is better user experience, not worse.
Link Building: Quality Over Quantity, Every Time
Brandon’s framing of digital PR is refreshingly honest: “we’re doing digital PR, but we’re just trying to get Google to see that you’re published on all these different places.”
His process starts with reverse engineering, not outreach.
- Pull competitor backlinks with a tool like Ahrefs
- Look at what kind of links they are: articles, interviews, guest podcasts, directories
- Cherry pick only the relevant, authoritative ones
- Expect to replicate maybe 10 to 20 percent of them, then get creative
What he trusts and what he avoids:
| Tactic | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Guest posts on real sites with a phone number and address | Works, if the site is genuinely legitimate |
| Guest posts on thin blog-only sites, PBNs | Skip it, too much spam to weed through |
| Cheap wire press releases | Usually the same sites everyone else gets, often noindex or on subdomains |
| Real journalist outreach | Best quality links available |
| Guest podcasting | Underrated and growing |
He is skeptical of press release reports for a reason. Clients bring him lists of placements Google cannot even see, and a year later “80% of those sites are down or those pages are gone.”
When he has a genuine connection, he uses it. He is in Los Angeles and knows a couple of writers at the LA Times. A real pitch to a real journalist beats paying a hundred dollars for a wire blast.
Guest Podcasting Is the Link Strategy AI Cannot Flood
This is where Brandon sees guest posting breaking down. If he pitches you an article today, your first thought is that AI wrote it. He is not wrong, and he sees the loop coming: AI trained on AI articles pitched by AI.
Guest podcasting does not have that problem. He has done 300 plus episodes.
What one appearance delivers:
- A backlink from the host’s website
- Additional links from podcast directories and platforms
- A face and a voice behind the brand, which builds trust fast
- Clips for social media for weeks afterward
- Subject matter expert positioning, because you are demonstrating expertise out loud
He offers it to clients, but he does not force it. Roughly half say yes. Some hate being on camera, some have no time, and for those people he just moves to the next tactic and customizes the plan.
Patience Beat Ambition, and 2020 Proved It
Ran asked what he would tell someone starting an agency. Brandon’s answer was one word: patience.
He built slowly on purpose. He was a director of SEO at an agency while quietly growing his own book of business, and only left when the math clearly favored going solo.
Then 2020 hit. Half his clients were local businesses that shut down overnight.
Because he had spent years building a base instead of jumping ship on day one, he stayed sustainable through it. Someone who had quit their job the week before would have been in a very different position.
His warning about business ownership is worth hearing: SEO turns out to be the easy part. You also own operations, financing, accounting, hiring, training, and culture.
Delegation Is the Ceiling Most Owners Never Break
The second lesson is letting go, which he admits is brutal for founders. The business is your baby.
The way through it is arithmetic.
- What does this person cost per hour
- How many hours does it free up
- Can those hours generate two or three times that cost in new work
Then systematize it. SOPs, documented processes, screen recordings, so tasks transfer cleanly instead of coming back to you.
His caveat matters: “Don’t just let it go and not monitor it.” Hand it off, then inspect it.
Key Takeaways
- Rankings are a means, conversions are the goal.
- Show up in AI answers, not just Google, because search behavior is fragmenting across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Bing, YouTube, and Yelp.
- One service, one page, supported by a content cluster and internal links.
- Judge a backlink on quality signals, never on the size of the report.
- Guest podcasting compounds: links, trust, authority, and social content from one hour of work.
- Build slowly, delegate deliberately, and document everything.
Understanding how AI is changing SEO does not mean abandoning fundamentals. It means the fundamentals now have to earn you a brand mention, not just a blue link.
Where to Find Brandon
He made a free gift for listeners at seooptimizers.com/gift, which includes his contact info, free recordings of classes he has taught, and a link to book time on his calendar for a free SEO review of your site.
And when he is not working, he is at the beach in Venice, deliberately off the computer after 14 hour days, which is its own kind of advice.
