“All the top funnel content, we call it the top funnel traffic trap, is just being eaten up by AI Overviews. ChatGPT and LLMs are pulling that information from their own inventory and they're not actually recommending brands. And by building informational content, you're more likely to attract researchers or folks trying to learn your niche, not folks in market for your solution.”
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™ · November 2026
Context
Asked what SaaS founders are worried about with AI, Sam describes agencies still running SEO like it's 2020, with how-to and what-is articles. He says that content now feeds AI answers and attracts people who aren't buyers.
Transcript
…a month, and and then they'll actually try and run it and realize actually there's a lot of security implementations here. There's a lot a lot of things I've never thought about. And if I run and roll this out, there's a lot more to it than I initially thought. So it's a fun, it's a crazy time.
…you're when you're talking to those teams and those owners? What's going on in their mind right now with with AI? Are they concerned about uh their their moats uh with the business? Like how are they approaching it? Like what are they investing in? I'm curious what what's going on in their head?
Yeah, I can tell you because we speak to a lot of SaaS founders and SaaS marketing leaders and growth leaders every each and every week. So usually that there's a few main pain points that come up and there's a few frustrations, and usually what causes them to initially reach out to a company like ours is probably it's got to the point where the marketing team have pushed for SEO, maybe for months or years, and eventually the CEO of the company or the founders got frustrated because every time he or she is going into ChatGPT or Claude and looking for their software, comparing options, looking for the problem they solve, they keep seeing competitors recommended instead of them, and then they'll finally hit that tipping point where they're like, yeah, we need to do some of this. We need we need to do AI SEO or GEO or AEO, and we need to start being kind of recommended to prospects because as you know well, Matthew, the the buying journey journey, especially in B2B, has changed massively. And I'm sure it's similar with kind of the folks you work with, but a lot of um a lot of websites that we we're kind of helping in SaaS companies, their traffic's massively down…
Yeah, so I think like middle of the funnel, maybe um, listicles are starting to be really, really big. And I feel like SaaS has not uh like other industries, maybe like top 10 lists or uh comparison charts and stuff like that, might be newer to other niches, but to SAS, it's it's kind of always…
Yeah, I think unfortunately, listicle-based articles, comparison articles, best of lists, X versus Y they're a necessary evil in SaaS, SEO, and AI search. And I guess the reason why is there's you've probably heard of the 95.5 rule. At one given time, only five percent of your roughly five percent…
Yeah.
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