Episode #59: SEO in the Age of AI - Gaetano DiNardi
What AI-driven search means for modern marketers
When I first got into marketing, SEO felt like a mysterious dark art.
Crack the algorithm, and you were rewarded with massive amounts of “free” traffic.
There was a real David and Goliath energy to it: scrappy startups outmaneuvering big, slow-moving incumbents who hadn’t figured out digital yet.
And the SEO experts doling out wisdom just seemed so cool and subversive, sticking it to the man by reverse-engineering the rules of Big G. The whole thing had Rebel Alliance vs. Galactic Empire vibes.
That was well over a decade ago. And the game has changed massively since then, largely because of AI.
To help guide us through today’s landscape, I sat down with SEO expert Gaetano DiNardi. He’s worked with some of the biggest names in SaaS, and I follow his work because it’s so clearly rooted in real-world experience. He’s played the game and won, and he’s got the scars to prove it.
In this episode, Gaetano breaks down:
The SEO playbook for 2025
How zero-click search is impacting real-world traffic (and why it may not matter as much as you think)
Why brand is actually a competitive moat for SEO
How to appear in AI search previews and LLM recommendations
When a startup should consider SEO
How to optimize content for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel
I’ve included a summary of the ideas in this discussion in a longer article below. 👇
About Today’s Guest
Gaetano DiNardi is an SEO expert and principal consultant at Marketing Advice.
He’s spent over a decade in B2B marketing, helping 50+ SaaS companies drive growth and demand. He’s battled in some of the most competitive trenches out there—categories like identity theft, business VoIP, employee monitoring, insider threat detection, LMS software, and more.
You can find him sharing lessons from the field on LinkedIn and Substack.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:24] - Evolution of search over the past 10 years
[04:09] - Impact of brand on rankings
[05:36] - Did SEO degrade search quality?
[11:30] - Impact of zero-click results
[20:28] - How to get recommended in AI preview
[34:15] - When should a startup focus on SEO?
[41:39] - SEO for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU
Resources
Marketing Advice - Gaetano’s website
Scrunch AI - Brand monitoring for AI search
What Is Brand Authority? - Research from Moz
Episode Summary
Key lessons from my conversation with Gaetano DiNardi, summarized by AI.
On-Page SEO Is No Longer a Differentiator
Many of the tactics that once drove success—optimizing tags, improving page structure, building backlinks—are now simply the cost of entry. As Gaetano put it: these are foundational elements, but no longer a source of competitive advantage. Everyone is doing them, so they no longer yield outsized gains.
The impact of any tactic diminishes once it becomes widely adopted—a dynamic he framed as the “law of shitty clickthroughs.”
Brand Strength Plays a Central Role
One major shift is the role of brand in SEO outcomes. Gaetano noted that applying the same SEO playbook to a well-known brand and a challenger company produces very different results—favoring the incumbent.
This reflects how search engines weight branded signals like direct searches, domain reputation, and mention frequency. Leaked documentation and analysis (e.g. from Moz’s Tom Capper) support the idea that branded search volume correlates with higher site quality scores.
AI Summaries Are Displacing Traditional Clicks
Generative AI interfaces—like Google’s AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity—are transforming how people interact with search. These tools aggregate and synthesize responses from multiple sources, answering questions directly on the search page.
Gaetano described this shift using the concept of “query fan-out,” where a single search prompt generates a web of synthetic sub-queries to cover a topic in depth. The output is a summary that includes pros, cons, pricing details, and more—reducing the need to click through to source material.
For sites that once captured informational traffic, the impact is significant: drops in click-through rates of 30–70% in some cases.
Informational SEO Is No Longer a Reliable Growth Channel
AI systems are also changing how top-of-funnel queries are handled. According to documentation from Claude, some LLMs are instructed not to cite sources for “timeless” or consensus-based queries—like definitions or broad best practices.
That means articles targeting “What is X?” keywords are increasingly invisible to searchers using AI tools.
Gaetano emphasized that this impacts categories like cybersecurity especially hard, where many vendors have long relied on glossary-style pages to drive discovery.
Visibility Now Depends on Third-Party Mentions
To appear in AI-generated recommendations, it’s no longer enough to optimize your own website.
Gaetano demonstrated how AI assistants often cite review sites—like PCMag, CNET, Tom’s Guide, or Gartner—instead of linking to vendor pages. Even when a brand is mentioned in an answer, it may not be cited or credited as a source.
This marks a return to a distribution-oriented SEO model. Just as Google once relied on backlinks to infer authority, today’s AI systems lean heavily on third-party reviews to surface trusted recommendations.
Tools like Scrunch.ai can help track which third-party pages are being cited across different AI interfaces.
What This Means for Funnel Strategy
Gaetano outlined a clear framework for aligning SEO investments with funnel stages:
Top of Funnel:
E.g., “what is x?” type queries
Largely displaced by zero-click AI summaries
But actual revenue impact is limited, as this traffic had a low propensity to buy
No longer worth pursuing for SEO alone
Middle of Funnel
E.g., “should I buy x?” type queries
Still under-utilized and full of opportunity
Develop problem-focused, nuanced content
Bottom of Funnel:
E.g., “which x should I buy?” type queries
Dominated by third-party citations and aggregators
Invest in PR, reviews, and brand presence
Top-of-funnel traffic is down across the board—especially for consensus-driven queries. Bottom-of-funnel content needs to live outside your site, on trusted review platforms. The middle of the funnel, however, remains a viable and often overlooked opportunity: content that addresses specific problems, decision-making friction, and nuanced use cases.
Gaetano recommends starting with a “problem identification chart”—a framework drawn from Gap Selling—to map real user pain points, root causes, and solution paths. These insights can inform high-leverage, high-intent content that’s more likely to resonate with both users and AI summarizers.
For Early-Stage Startups: Don’t Start With SEO
If you’re a new brand with no organic presence, SEO should not be your first go-to-market motion.
As Gaetano explained, early-stage companies should focus instead on founder-led marketing, social channels, customer reviews, and building early trust. SEO becomes viable only once you’ve established product-market fit and generated some branded search volume.
Key Takeaways
Technical SEO remains essential, but no longer drives growth on its own
Brand presence and third-party validation are now critical signals
Top-of-funnel content is being deprioritized by AI systems
Mid-funnel content is the most strategic opportunity for impact
Bottom-of-funnel success now hinges on visibility across trusted review sites
Startups should earn the right to do SEO by building credibility elsewhere first
This isn’t the end of SEO—but it’s a very different game than the one we played ten years ago. For teams that treat search as a distribution problem and align their efforts accordingly, there’s still meaningful opportunity.