Real SEO strategies for AI search—minus the snake oil.
Available on YouTube: youtu.be/qdpFmuFD8yE
Shopify merchants are getting pitched AI SEO “solutions” left and right—none of them proven. So I called Jason Berkowitz, an SEO who actually knows the game, to answer the real question: what should you actually do to rank in an AI-powered world? (Spoiler: most of it’s nonsense.) We break down what’s real, what’s trash, and why good SEO still wins—even in a sea of chatbots and grifters.
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Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Address Validator. Incorrect addresses cost U. S. businesses over $20 billion each year. If you're tired of paying for re-delivery fees and dealing with frustrated customers, Address Validator can help. It integrates with Shopify to catch and fix address errors before they become costly issues. Every day address validator checks over 300,000 orders. and prevents more than eleven thousand failed deliveries. Big brands like Sennheiser, Heli Hansen, and Kylie Cosmetics already trust it to save them money and keep customers happy. You could even try Address Validator on your first 100 orders for free. With a dashboard showing your savings, head over to the Shopify App Store and make bad addresses a thing of the past with address validator. W Alright my friends, uh for sure AI is the hot topic. And anytime you have a hot trend, especially in digital marketing, you attract some grifters. It is just the way of things. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, you know, get figure out currently, you know, in 2025, what does SEO for AI look like? That's I've been thinking about it because I got a pitch for this show recently and you know after doing some research, some due diligence, discovered it I I just didn't think the person was legitimate in their claims. And so I said, all right, what does AI for SEO look like? And I started talking to some folks. I started trying to figure it out on my own. And then I got to discussing with a previous SEO expert guest who's been on the show, Jason Berkowitz from Break the Web. And we talked through it and we we came to an agreement of like, okay, this is what's real, this is what's not and this is what's not yet. So I want to help you avoid the scams and put your store in the best possible position for a potential AI future while also, you know, being realistic about what does and doesn't work. So, with that long-winded intro, uh I'm Kurt Elster. This is the unofficial Shopify Podcast, and I'd like to welcome Jason Berkwitz from Break the Web. Jason, how you doing?
Jason Berkowitz
I'm doing fantastic. Thank you, Kurt. It's a pleasure to be here again. And of course, it's always fun to chat with you because you just like cutting through the BS and getting right to the point and talking about like what works right now, what doesn't, what's noise and what is shiny out there. And really just helping people. So I love having these chats with you.
Kurt Elster
Let's hear some background. How long have you been doing SEO?
Jason Berkowitz
Uh I feel like I've been saying 10 years. Like you try to round certain numbers and now I'm rounding to 15 years at this point. So all these different shifts and landscape changes that are taking place, it's kind of like, ah, just another day in the world of SEO because when I started, everything was vastly different. And the way we did things. So we're in another evolution really. So been here kind of like an old man, I guess, an SEO.
Kurt Elster
Uh all right. So we've been doing this a a similar amount of time. And I have been involved with Shopify almost 15 years. uh and you know have seen things change quite a bit over time. I want to know, is SEO evolving? Is it changing?
Jason Berkowitz
I think SEO plus just marketing in general, digital marketing, is definitely changing. I think the audience and consumers are changing and they're always adapting. New generations are getting older. Which makes marketing methods have to evolve and adapt. But SEO in particular, yeah, very much changing and also very much being impacted with all the noise out there at this moment.
Kurt Elster
I it so on the client side of things, are people asking you about AI, you know, and is it changing what people ask for in SEO services?
Jason Berkowitz
Some. Some that are a bit more tech aware and what's going on, some that might be hanging out in LinkedIn and other platforms and Twitter that or X that don't stop talking about these new shiny objects. Others have heard about it, but they're not focused on it because they're juggling in a million different things. But on the flip side, for the ones that we know might be aware of it, our goal is to actually bring up the topic of discussion before it. They do. If they bring it up before we do, it's kinda like does Break the Web really have the pulse on what's going on uh in SEO and these changes? So for most clients, we have had that conversation and brought it up and asked them like, hey, is this something you want to talk about? Or maybe at a later time you just don't want to add more to your mental real estate. Uh but no one's like some are asking what we might be doing and how we might be optimizing, but with a little bit of education, it's like, hey, everything we're doing right now is rock solid.
Kurt Elster
Have you seen some outlandish claims regarding AI and SEO? I know I have.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's always something to sell from somebody. Whether it's valuable or beneficial, that's a different subject. But right now, people, I mean, just an outlandish claim that you can optimize and offer whatever you acronym you want to call it, GEO, AIO, whatever it might be, as a service is laughable because there's no proven framework. of success. There's nothing that you know that I have dated a backup that if I do this, this, and this, it's going to give me the true measurable outcome I'm looking for. So that's one of them, you know, talking on the topic of of Charlatans. There's websites out there that are advertising their AI optimization service and I hope nobody's paying for that as a line item just yet. I mean
Kurt Elster
Well the gr I think uh you know ultimately all the griffs come down to hey we can get AI to recommend your apps or We can get AI to recommend your products when people ask. It's like if I search Google for, you know, best shoe, best walking shoe, I want to appear, you know, ideally number one, if not on the first page for that. with AI, we're really, you know, fla a variation of the same thing. We want to be able to just ask the ask the AI, ask chat GPT, perplexity, whatever it is. And like truthfully, I don't think normies know what perplexity is. I think, you know, ChatGPT maybe. Um, but same deal, if they go, well, what's the best running shoe? Like I want it to come back with my my product, my shoe. But what it's not that different, is it?
Jason Berkowitz
I mean, but then AI platforms are hyper-personalized. So all of their results are going to be based on what you might have searched. And let's say you searched or had a conversation about a pain in your foot two weeks earlier, well that pain that you mentioned influence the product results. Maybe the products they'll recommend now has a higher arch to help with it. Maybe it's more cushiony. Maybe it's more flat, whatever it might be. So It's extremely hard to even just track brand awareness in AI because the results A are hyper-personalized and B they tend to change each time you make the search. Uh right now, um yesterday I replicated a search that I did for a client two weeks ago. Live on a call and I was like, shit, it's not working right now. Uh, but it did work live on a call two weeks ago. So it's like so vastly different. The exact same search query. Everything was exactly the same. So I think, yeah, the hope would be that people find what they're looking for with these platforms.
Kurt Elster
I think these griffs gain traction so easily. Because it it's just an attractive proposition and it feels truthy. You're like, hey, you know, spend a you know, a few hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, you know, or a recurring subscription fee. And you know, we can help you appear more often in these recommendations. And I what I think people don't know is, you know, these tools are so new and evolving so quickly, none of us really have any idea. And that's why it's like it's so tough to make those promises, you know, and offer these things. And that's I think why we're seeing a lot of griffs pop up because people are also willing, you know, to chase that shiny toy. Let's talk through some of our our specific tactics and strategies, you know, that could be legitimate and whether or not they work. And I think the first is this concept of llms. txt. You're familiar with this?
Jason Berkowitz
Yes, I am.
Kurt Elster
If you go to any any website, you could It's like acme. com. You can go to acme. com slash robots. txt. It is a standard for describing how a search engine should handle a website. Sitemap. xml, a standardized form to be like, hey, here's every index on the site for a search engine. And so someone said, hey, well, let's propose a standard for AI. It's called llms. txt. And which essentially it's like a human readable plaintext overview of the site where you try and point it to what's important, with the thinking being that like AI also has finite resources. And so if it has an option to cut through the noise while running through a website, they'll take it just to reduce their energy usage. Cause it it you know it adds up, it's expensive across all these queries for them. The problem is it's a proposed standard. So there's no actual evidence this thing gets used, right?
Jason Berkowitz
You you just nailed it. It's a proposal. It's like it's like me saying, hey, every website on the web should just link to breaktheweb. agnc. It's like a proposal doesn't mean anything, you know, especially when these platforms have no one's admitted that they even recognize LLMs. txt. Some ironically use it, but they don't. They use it for like their wiki and the knowledge base stuff for organization of information. And maybe that's just their way of being clever and trolling people, who knows? But y the hope would be that These platforms aren't reliant on LLMs. text to gain information about a brand, a website. We know that they can crawl pages. We know that they cannot render JavaScript. So everything should be in the HTML of a website. And if we're going to give AI the credit that I think a lot of people are trying to give it to how advanced it is, then why should an LLMs. txt be required to tell the platforms where to navigate? and how to navigate a page and what specific topics a given page is about. But yeah, it it's a proposal. I mean, you can do it. It doesn't negatively impact you, but it doesn't mean anything's gonna be implemented ever.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Well I you know, and I have implemented it on on a couple stores because it w because it was easy and harmless. Essentially it's just like a plain text document that's like, hey, this is the site, this is what it's about, and here's some links to some resources. Essentially like common questions. And then in Shopify's case, you upload LLMs. txt to files and then add a UR re URL redirect to redirect slash LLMs. txt to whatever that file is. And it works. But it you know in the analytics I have no way of seeing if anyone's ever actually viewed that file. Yeah. And that would be an easy way to tell if like, you know, anything actually uses this. But just, you know, from a technical standpoint, I don't have a solution there. But it's also completely it's totally benign. You know, it's a counts as a multivitamin. It not gonna hurt ya. It may do something, maybe. Someday.
Jason Berkowitz
Maybe someday. At this moment, probably not. But hey, if you can go to the one of those free generators and generate it, then why not?
Kurt Elster
One that uh I'm pretty sure works is structured data, like what Google uses for rich snippets. You add extra markup to a page and Shopify themes do this now. out of the box where it'll it'll describe you're on a product page and it will like describe that in a machine readable format in a a syntax called JSON. We know that works for Google, right? For for getting more info. Does this apply to AI?
Jason Berkowitz
That again, I think, is yet to be determined. I don't think there's any proof. None of these platforms have discussed their ranking. signals or what influences things. Yeah, uh Jason LD markup, which awesome name uh of that code. and other structured data can help feed information to uh Google, Google Merchant Center. They say now that uh Google Merchant Center integrates with the product feed and then Google is crawling your website, they should be able to put two pieces together without the structured data, but that is also one of those one of those instances where it doesn't hurt to get it in. And then of course product uh rich results. So the stars under your listing and the search results, the price, the availability, the shipping costs, those are all things that attract people's eyes and get the click from search specifically. And the impact it has directly on AI platforms, I still think it's yet to be determined. I mean, if these platforms are reading the HTML and you have the JSON LD in the HTML, then Maybe just by providing more concise information may be beneficial, but that same concise information should also be in your product pages, anyways. So I think again, yeah, uh Jason LD might be making a comeback and again there's people just talking about the impact it has on AI platforms or AI optimization for SEO.
Kurt Elster
That's purely but if they are, it it's purely speculation though, isn't it? Everything is.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. Just a lot of noise. And everyone's trying to jump on the bandwagon of of being the first thought leader about this specific topic in their little segment and their group. At the end of the day, it's all just leaning into fear marketing.
Kurt Elster
You know, everyone's they don't want to be left behind.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. And everyone, I mean, they don't want to be left behind. People that work in-house. They're scared about their job security. So they want to make sure that they're staying up to date. And it's like I have to remind myself sometimes like, hey, get off LinkedIn. Like stop reading things because it's like When is it too much? Already at certain point.
Kurt Elster
The tone of those conversations reads to me as nervous chatter, nervous excitement. Where you're like, yeah, this is really cool. You know, but like the octave is a little too high. Yeah. You're like, also, oh, like what what are the larger implications here?
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. Hypejacking.
Kurt Elster
Especially like in person, you really you you could feel more of that. So with, you know, the structured data, the Jason LD, you know, that's another one where They I mean that that's best practice for SEO anyway, and best practice for Shopify themes. So it's like that probably already works for your store. So if you wanted to test this, Shopify is a tool or Sorry, you wanted to test this. Google has a tool, the rich snippet testing tool, just Google rich snippet testing tool. Drop your product page in and it will confirm for you, like, hey, there's a product snippet. You know, it looks good. Hey, there's a review snippet. It looks good. And then, all right, you know you're optimized there. And at this point, the chances are you are optimized for it. What about content strategy? You know, content strategy was always so important with SEO. Let's uh let's hear your thoughts on that.
Jason Berkowitz
I mean, content strategy for SEO has definitely changed a little bit with Google's release of the AI overviews. We've seen a big shift in super top-of-the-funnel informational content. Seeing a pretty significant for the most part reduction in clicks. But if you are ranking in the top five of Google, even better increase in impressions. And that's never really a good one when impressions go up but clicks go down. Usually things should go up uh nicely together. And that's been Google just taking traffic away with AI mode and Google AI overviews. for super top of the funnel. So content strategies should shift a little bit more to middle of the funnel. Navigational type queries to help people in buyers mode. First off, people are more likely to convert. The intent of that search has a much higher conversion value than someone who's looking for What's the what makes up a good walking shoe? In a way, like if you want to get specific in in those instances. So as we adapted things, first off, I also want to mention that there's people saying out there, you know, grifters, that top of the funnel or informational content is dead. Which is dumb. Maybe it's dead for SEO and organic, but like all leadership, brand visibility, PR, email, social. This all very much serves a place in the whole digital marketing sector.
Kurt Elster
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Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. And like you said, you know, there's a time and place for top-of-the-funnel content informational. From an organic SEO standpoint. Trying to guide users to making the purchase decision is great. And you can still do that with content. And there might be queries that Google doesn't necessarily want to produce AI recommendations for, ones that might impact. Certain legalities on their side. Of course they have their terms of service, but if they give bad at advice or bad recommendations, are they liable Technically probably not, but is that something they want to deal with? We already see that they're giving crappy advice and crappy recommendations. The results are not going to be a good thing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, those screenshots of it like just saying crazy things 'cause it misinterpreted something in that AI overview are always funny.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. But there still is tons and tons of opportunity in the middle of the funnel that doesn't produce an AIO review.
Kurt Elster
Give me the example, because I'm I have not quite wrapped my head around our you know top of funnel versus middle funnel. Content strategy.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. One example that I keep seeing in the wild is best. Best type modified quick uh queries. in which AI overview seems like it doesn't want to give the best recommendations because I guess best is subjective. And that means that Google is giving an opinion on what is considered the best. So that's been one example we've seen for a few clients is optimizing a little bit more for best X. And then even more middle of the funnel would be people who are looking for a product. They just don't know where to buy it. Or they're looking for a solution and they don't know where to get it. Something like I keep getting rocks in my shoes. No, that's a bad one. That's probably super top of the funnel. That's probably not going to convert for anything. I'm trying to keep it uh themed with the walking shoes in a way. People who are looking for a specific color, people uh and that could also be outside of just content, that can be your collection pages as well, or specific product pages, people who are looking for a specific style or looking to understand the different styles. uh of a shoe may or may not produce an AI overview, but people are closer to that purchase intent versus someone just looking for should I wear walking shoes when hiking? Okay. Which no one's gonna convert. No one's ready to spend money.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. All right. Makes sense. I mean they're they're just further in the decision making. They're they're deeper into it. They there's higher intent, I think is really like the key thing there.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah, I mean demands might be lower, but conversion intent is significantly higher. So overall search demand, if you're looking at that as a metric. might be lower, but even more long tail versions or longer queries do tend to convert significantly higher. So let's get better quality traffic. uh that'll convert versus just more traffic that won't convert.
Kurt Elster
And we think we get with the middle funnel, we get we're more likely to get surfaced in an AI overview.
Jason Berkowitz
I think it's the SEO standard, it depends. It depends because it even Google is shaking things up. Uh right now, sometimes AI reviews are appearing in the middle. of organic search results. That's a new one of the last few short weeks. They're not always on top now. Basically all of our historical data of what might be happening just keeps getting wiped over and over and over again. Historical data about the presence of AIO reviews. There's now sometimes three organic listings above an AIO review. Okay, so where's clicks gonna go? Google is constantly testing to remain competitive. And I think they're gonna they should be looking at we would hope that they'd be looking at user signals. Like what do users really want? Do they want an AI overview or do they want to go to a third-party website? Google wants people to stay on Google for money, but I think it's it's just so ambiguous right now.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And this is one of those things where like this conversation will be very different, you know, in 12 to 18 months. And you know, just recently Shopify announced these these AI specific features that really, you know, several of them Not available to anyone right now, but meant for, you know, this is what is coming down the line. This is what to expect And it's uh Shopify catalog, which is a way to feed the entire Shopify product catalog to an AI agent. Uh and um global cart and they announced as well where if I am on multiple stores, this at least this is my interpretation of it, but like there's not a lot of info here. But you know, if I've got an AI agent like ChatGPT that says, hey, you should buy, you know, this shoe and this sock would be like the best running combo. And they're from two different stores. You know, it's going to give me like a product card. I can add it to cart, you know, right there. It's probably going to like load up in the shop app and then I can just buy it. That's what I envision is a a shopping modality in the near future that this happens. Um how do you see it playing out yourself?
Jason Berkowitz
I mean, based on the information shared, I think you nailed it. It's probably really good mutual PR from various different platforms to raise valuations overall. I think there probably is going to be a world where you can, very similar to Google Shopping, which nobody really uses, make a purchase directly in a platform without visiting a website. But I think that would also require a big shift in consumer behavior. Are people ready to give their credit card to Chat GPT without doing their regular due diligence that they might do on an e-commerce website. Looking at a battle's page, look for trust logos, look for security, reviews. all these different things, I think, is going to require a big shift in consumer behavior. Again, like we said before, but the assumption that people outside of our bubble even know what you know, ChatGPT, maybe ChatGPT or OpenAI did a commercial. Maybe that's how people know about it. Or from memes. But yeah, nobody knows what perplexity or you say the word anthropic or or Claude to the average person at a bar.
Kurt Elster
I've never met him.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. Claude's gonna give me all the answers. How old is Claude?
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
So um Yeah, there is I mean there's that question like, well, if we build it, is it really gonna change how consumers shop? Right? Is it or is it all hype? I mean, look at the Google graveyard. We'll build it And then, you know, it gets used in a c an unexpected way, you know, something completely differently. And so I mean there's really no one knows. No one knows until it happens. But I you're right. I think there in the past historically there has been resistance to you know switching up and going to and you know an in-app purchase like Google Shopping. You're right. I could purchase through Google. I don't think I've ever done it. Uh Facebook tried to force it on people. And now they've removed it. It's gone. It's over. Right. It's a it seems that that there is a preference uh for for folks to buy direct or at least, you know, buy from something they can experience and trust, e as opposed to like, you know, the Google shopping feed.
Jason Berkowitz
Especially if they're incentivized, whether it's through like loyalty programs or rewards or X amount of purchases, or you know that this brands, hey, if I purchase from them, they're gonna randomly email me discount codes or sales. You know, you're incentivized. And if they're also going to take a cut out of it as well, that platform, then like this is straight direct-to-consumer marketing activities. You want to own the customer versus letting At the end of the day, Google or OpenAI technically own the customer, just like Amazon, for example. They have a great list and it's a great distribution network, but you don't own the customer.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. You're right. It is there you have to separate the excitement that the tech bubble brings from you know the reality of everyday people we're gonna have to use those. Let's let's recap here. Yeah, essentially when it applies to AI, there's so much we don't know. When we were talking before, you had a for your clients, you had a way that you were starting to test the impact. of SEO on AI. And I thought it was smart. What was it?
Jason Berkowitz
Outside of it being extremely inconsistent, sometimes.
Kurt Elster
Sometimes it works better than others.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah, I mean just because the responses. might change so frequently, especially when there's updates being pushed on all these different platforms every single week There's like a joke on Reddit that when you see a platform's quality of results start going down and new releases coming up like within a day or two. So one thing we've been doing is say, for example, we want to gauge a brand's perception on a platform. Ask the platform. We do this in Google Sheets with APIs, just so that we can track performance over time and have it run automatically. Tell me everything you know about XYZ brand. If there's other brands that might have a similar name, we might get more specific. Tell me what you know about XYZ shoe company and different attributes and associations. So we'll ask for it to be listed out in like a JSON format. Uh max ten, so you just see ten uh outputs right there.
Kurt Elster
You try to standardize both the query and its response.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah, just to avoid it getting really long.
Kurt Elster
You know, if we also want to- Yeah, they always default to like so verbose.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. Like stop mansplaining to me uh the the things you know about walking shoes, um, as an example. But yeah, it just helps it to look at a later time we can do an export and then upload it to AI and ask for some correlations of data. So that's one of the things is is tell me the the top ten things you associate with this brand. And then on the flip side, for the industry or target market or target keywords, tell me the top brands that, like the top brands that are best at servicing walking shoes. in a list format in a way. And then you track those results over time. You can run this every single day depending on, you know, how much budget you might have, because they all cost money. I mean they come out to like A couple of bucks a month at the end of it. But you can track, okay, our brand is not ranking anywhere. Then they show up. Sweet. Then they get moved to like number two. And they're at number eight. Then they're at number one, then they're gone again. So it's it's kind of a bit all over the place. There are tools that aim to help track brand mentions. I think there's a world where that's going to be a cool tool to have. I don't know if we're there yet, but there's also other data like uh Didios uh from Semrush and SparkTuro. They have clickstream data, which is our anonymous browsing data, which gives some really good insights. Uh and they do they publish a lot of studies on people's interactions and AI and you know, dimensions and frequency and platform usage overall. So that's what we do. We're not When we actually like are going to do something with purpose with all this data, then we're gonna charge for it. We have it set up for a couple clients just to try and gain some understanding. That's really it right now.
Kurt Elster
And are there any trends you've noticed or does it still feel fairly random?
Jason Berkowitz
So actually kind of random. Okay, so the naming the top brands. That's kind of random. Name me what you know tell me what you know about XYZ brands. That's pretty consistent because that's already an established entity. in the platform. But it's the people you want to just like with us as SEO, we want to create new rating fans. So people that haven't yet heard of the brand But would absolutely be customers of the brand, that's where it gets a little bit harder to track a top ten list, for example.
Kurt Elster
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Jason Berkowitz
Concern? No. Thinking about it? Yeah. I mean I think I think it's beneficial to have a pulse. on the changing landscape of technology. The best SEOs that have been around, if you knew SEOs 15 years ago that are still absolutely killing it today, it's because they have the trait of evolving and adapting and accepting. And the older we get, the more stubborn we get, and the willingness to adapt and evolve decreases significantly. So things are changing right now and things are going to continue to change. But the swiftness of a great SEO will be put to the test in their willingness to adapt and evolve and other marketers as well. So Having it as a concern, maybe not being aware of what's taking place. Absolutely, because also there's a lot of data to show that Really good SEO just helps with really good visibility in these platforms in AI mode, in AI overviews, ChatGPT, Claude. So when you think about like, oh, the more times you your brand appears on the web, you're more likely to be more favorable in these AI platforms. Okay, cool, digital PR and link building. Same thing. Uh the more information you add about your product and specific information like the weight, sizes, dimensions, all the different variations. that'll help feed information to the platforms if someone's looking for a size large. Okay, great. Good SEO with good product feeds and good schema markup. So Really good SEO now from like any correlations that people are seeing is is just good SEO with these platforms. Uh that's a big one. And of course, like the usual suspects like Reddit, Cora are still being cited as sources of information. But then I wonder what's going to happen there because those are very subjective opinions. Unless someone's asking for reviews about something, sure. User generated content could absolutely be valuable. But what about something that should be objective?
Kurt Elster
In the past, I used to you know often my my search terms w on Google would include Reddit, right? I'd literally be like, you know, whatever the topic is plus Reddit. Because I want, you know, I knew that I would get like authentic, you know, real person generated content there. Now that's not the case anymore. I mean, I use ChatGPT so much I recognize the syntax. And so many of those Reddit posts are Chat GPT. And then like the truly insane one is like when the comments are also in. And so, you know, we're in this phase where there's a little bit of the snake eating its own tail here. Um I think that's a that's a future problem to worry about. Something I think about. Yeah, so we know all right, the one-time things that we could do is just like general SEO stuff. Robots. txt, make sure we've not excluded robots. Because that's how OpenAI will access the site. If you're technical, you could do this LLMs. txt thing. You know, it's like 20 minutes of screwed around if you have to do the research. It's not a big deal. Probably doesn't do anything. Doesn't hurt anything either. The structured data, you're if you're on Shopify, probably already does it just fine, but verify it. You know, I think that's helpful. Um within the Shopify catalog and your product listings, they're increasingly, you know, they're they're leaning on um additional taxonomy. And so make sure that is right, you know, and correct and consistent for your products. Like produ what's product category, what's product type. Got the weight filled out. Do you have an ISP? Like whatever info you have, put it in there. It's not gonna hurt. And especially knowing that ChatGPT and others are gonna ingest these product catalog feeds, you know, absolutely get that info in there now. Um, but beyond that, it's like, you know, those traditional content SEO efforts are are what's gonna win, it seems.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah. I mean Gemini uses Google Shopping, so like you just said, filling out all yeah, filling out all the attributes available, connecting with merchant sensors, seeing if there's merchant sensor issues. There might be a point that actually in OpenAI, you can submit a form to join a beta program to submit your product feed to I sent all my clients that link today. Oh, I did it a few days ago. I uploaded every single client and made me the contact because I want to be the one to know if something happens. And that's just like you're joining a potential wait list. uh to see and who knows where they are in that if they've gotten it figured out but yeah really good product images that's always been a good one like quality images and and a few images uh if you can all the G10s, uh weight variables, all the different stock availabilities. If you do have reviews on your products, get that in there as well. Connect with Uh Google reviews, seller ratings, increase your your shopping score overall. Uh get those aggregate reviews. in an aggregate ratings in your Jason LD schema as well. It's a lot of brands that have reviews on their product pages but are missing aggregate ratings, which means that they're the ones that stick out without the star ratings in a negative way. In those specific instances. Yeah, just good on-page SEO and good off-page SEO.
Kurt Elster
A hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. So this is not I mean the good news, the takeaway here is this is not as hard to optimize for as you might think. And in many cases, you've it's you probably already did it. Which is great. So as long as I got you here, what AI tools are you using every day?
Jason Berkowitz
It depends what for. Like I have a Pixel 9 cell phone. And I think I guess you can maybe do this on all the other phones too, but Gemini on on the Gemini app is incredible. Uh it turns out I found out I have fungi growing in my backyard. And I did this by turning on Gemini chat to view what I see in my camera. And I started digging it up with a shovel. I'm like, what do you think this is? And it's like, that looks like fungi. Um I said is it poisonous? I wouldn't touch it. That's what it said. I have a dog, I don't want my dog uh eating it. So like personal I really enjoy like trying to Like I'm a I'm a city boy originally from New York, so learning how to like maintain a household. I'm learning every single day. So that's been cool to see like, hey, what is this pipe? connecting to this pipe and this wire likely do.
Kurt Elster
Oh man.
Jason Berkowitz
Uh I know. Simpleton. Uh when it comes to like content creation and like getting real good creative information between open AI. I'm testing 4. 5 with ChatGBT. It's hasn't been that great for me. But uh Claude. Yeah. Uh Claude's been good for content, perplexity for research. Um, but still, even with their research capabilities and citing sources, sometimes it's Still doesn't make sense. And sometimes they still very much hallucinate for the randomness or like the venting, yeah, Chat Chipper T will just hear all my thoughts. I think we've built some really cool GPTs for our client-facing team to help take like, hey, here's the complex SEO ideas we want to say. Make this like understandable for a ninth grader to understand. So those are kind of some of the functions there. What about you? What are you using?
Kurt Elster
So for me to I use ChatGPT for almost everything. Um, you know, sometimes I'll even use the the API, like I'll have Python scripts, you know, so I could do some SEO work between you know ChatGPT and Shopify. And I'll chat GPT will be the one who will have written that script for me. Um, but yeah, it's like 99% that. Uh I use perplexity for search on my phone. It's funny. On my phone, I will do all of my Google searches without Google. I'll do it with perplexity. on my desktop, then I'm like, well, serious business. I d I do, you know, an actual Google search. I don't know why. It's like old school of you. Yeah. And that's my most toxic millennial trait. Um is desktops must use Google search. Yeah, use that. Uh, you know, and then you know, like the creative generation stuff or like here's an off the wall one. At the end of this podcast, your audio, I'm gonna run it through Adobe Enhance. Which is an AI audio tool trained on voiceovers. Make you sound like a million bucks. The, you know, not that you sound bad, but it'll like it'll make it sound like you're in a voice booth. It's really cool. Sometimes you get somebody with jacked video. There's a tool called Topaz Video AI. It's really quite incredible. Yeah, resource intensive, but it'll do it. It give it video and it you'll get a version out and output that is significantly better than what you put into it. So I mean there's a lot of neat stuff. You know, one of my favorite examples that I have, we have two Teslas and they both have full self-driving. I let this thing drive me and my family around regularly, you know, daily. And it it works, but that's that's an vision-based AI that is making decisions, you know, on piloting a 5,000-pound vehicle around. But that's a crazy thing to do when you think about it. But it works.
Jason Berkowitz
Yeah, I guess. I mean I think the concept is cool. I'd love to because I hate driving, especially long drive. I would love to just sit back and and not have to worry about it. I think Mark Rober, you know Mark Rober?
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Jason Berkowitz
Uh he's a ex-NASA guy who has a YouTube channel. He did a whole test on self-driving and if you know, they would hit somebody or not. Just based on their interpretation. Yeah. Uh but I think there's definitely gonna be a time where, yeah, that's a reality. I mean we're not in like Back to the Future uh twenty fifteen. That never happened. That was already ten years ago at this point. But I think, yeah, there's definitely a lot of cool use cases. And I think, you know, when it comes to like the work that we do as marketers, there's a perception that AI is going to replace this, AI is going to replace that. Maybe some things. I think freelance content writers, that's a hard one. Uh they probably should level up in terms of strategy, maybe editing. But In the near future, they're still very much going to need a human element for various different things. So while AI can help make things a little bit easier, we also use you know, app scripts and stuff with APIs just to make processes and things significantly faster, we still need a human to just look over everything.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, a person still gotta review it. That's the catch. Uh all right, final question. Where can we go to learn more about you?
Jason Berkowitz
You can go to breaktheweb. agency, you can Google break the web, and you can find me on LinkedIn.
Kurt Elster
I appreciate it. Uh Jason Berkowitz, Break the Web Agency. Thank you so much.
Jason Berkowitz
Thank you, Kurt. This was awesome.
Kurt Elster
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