@ericosiu: Had a fun time speaking at @ah...
@ericosiu
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Oct 22, 2025
1
Had a fun time speaking at @ahrefsevolve.
Some takeaways from my talk on the future of SEO:
- ChatGPT Apps could be a new form of SEO. Whether it becomes a big thing or not is impossible to guess. What is for sure is that the risk to reward ratio is too great *not* to try to get an app up if the traffic is relevant to your business.
Why? Because if you capture a high ranking, you'll likely hold it for awhile.
- ChatKit could help reimagine how products are built. Imagine your frontline marketers building agentic workflows that you can then plug into your apps. There is no one better than the people on the frontlines with the context to help guide product development with mini workflows that can plug and play.
- Black hat SEO has always worked, but here's a better concept: do black hat SEO in a white hat way. Remember back in the day everyone would drive spammy links to web 2.0 properties which would then link to your money property? This was called a 'link wheel'.
What if you instead just built real relationships with real people and had more authoritative, powerful websites linking to each other and your site instead? That's a more powerful 'link wheel'.
Now apply that to modern day Reddit and listicle outreach. ;)
- SEO is no longer just Google. It's everywhere. That means YouTube, Amazon, Apple App Store, Reddit, etc.
In fact, I think YouTube is still a heavily underrated marketing channel for the next decade.
- We think about our funnel now as 1. incredible offer 2. user signs up 3. user receives a reverse free trial 4. account expands. Distribution is nice, but expansion is nicer.
- Be even more generous with free products because the cost of building software will continue to decrease. With our products, Karrot (LinkedIn personalized ads) and ClickFlow (AEO software), we think about splintering off features and giving them away for free as much as possible.
There's more in the slides so if you want them, just comment 'search everywhere' and I'll send them to you.
Some takeaways from my talk on the future of SEO:
- ChatGPT Apps could be a new form of SEO. Whether it becomes a big thing or not is impossible to guess. What is for sure is that the risk to reward ratio is too great *not* to try to get an app up if the traffic is relevant to your business.
Why? Because if you capture a high ranking, you'll likely hold it for awhile.
- ChatKit could help reimagine how products are built. Imagine your frontline marketers building agentic workflows that you can then plug into your apps. There is no one better than the people on the frontlines with the context to help guide product development with mini workflows that can plug and play.
- Black hat SEO has always worked, but here's a better concept: do black hat SEO in a white hat way. Remember back in the day everyone would drive spammy links to web 2.0 properties which would then link to your money property? This was called a 'link wheel'.
What if you instead just built real relationships with real people and had more authoritative, powerful websites linking to each other and your site instead? That's a more powerful 'link wheel'.
Now apply that to modern day Reddit and listicle outreach. ;)
- SEO is no longer just Google. It's everywhere. That means YouTube, Amazon, Apple App Store, Reddit, etc.
In fact, I think YouTube is still a heavily underrated marketing channel for the next decade.
- We think about our funnel now as 1. incredible offer 2. user signs up 3. user receives a reverse free trial 4. account expands. Distribution is nice, but expansion is nicer.
- Be even more generous with free products because the cost of building software will continue to decrease. With our products, Karrot (LinkedIn personalized ads) and ClickFlow (AEO software), we think about splintering off features and giving them away for free as much as possible.
There's more in the slides so if you want them, just comment 'search everywhere' and I'll send them to you.
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@jessjoyce @krinal @ahrefsevolve here you go: subscribe-forms.beehiiv.com/74992022-fdeb-…