
SEO Beyond the Funnel: From Personalization to Brand Salience in the Age of AI | Jes Scholz
Welcome back to The Search Session. I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and in this episode, I chat with Jes Scholz, a well-known growth marketing consultant and voice in the SEO community, about what really matters in SEO today. We discuss why SEO feels exciting again after years of repeating the same playbook, and how AI is pushing us to relearn and adapt.
Jes shares key insights on:
Why brand fundamentals stay the same, even as SEO tactics evolve—building brand salience and connecting visibility back to the brand is what truly matters.
The importance of focusing on category entry points and user intent, rather than obsessing over keywords.
Why Google Discover is still SEO and a crucial training ground for building topical authority.
Avoiding “AI slop” by creating content that adds real value and reinforces brand salience.
And finally, a reminder that data should inform, not drive every decision.
If you’re feeling stuck between old SEO habits and new AI challenges, this episode is for you.
Video Chapters
Reframing SEO Strategy: From Keywords to Category Entry Points
Learning from Google Discover: Using Topical Authority to Win Visibility
Chunks vs. Cohesive Content: Balancing Readability for LLMs and Real Human Users
Rethinking SEO Metrics: Using Share of Voice and Prompt Tracking to Measure Visibility
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, and welcome back to a new episode of The Search Session. Today’s guest is what I’d call a true globetrotter of SEO. We can define it like this.
She’s originally from Australia, spent 15 years living in Germany, and has worked with companies across nearly every continent—except South America and Antarctica. But what really makes her stand out in the SEO world is her ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity. Whether you're a beginner or an advanced practitioner, she has a way of making SEO understandable and actionable—which is something I really appreciate.
On LinkedIn, she describes herself as a marketing consultant, SEO futurist, and keynote speaker. She spent many years at Ringier AG, and since July 2023, she’s been running her own consultancy agency. So, who is this guest, you may ask? This person is Jes Scholz. Hi Jes, how are you doing?
Jes Scholz: I’m doing well—how are you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I’m good! It’s quite hot here in Valencia, but hey, it’s summer, so let’s enjoy it.
Jes Scholz: It’s better than it being winter! It’s hot here in Switzerland too, and I wasn’t quite expecting this kind of weather—but hey, it’s not raining, it’s not overcast, and the sun is out. You’ve got to enjoy it.
Jes's Advice on Navigating Uncertainty in the AI-Driven Era
Gianluca Fiorelli: Absolutely. So, Jes, let me start with a question I ask every guest on The Search Session. How has SEO been treating you these past months?
Jes Scholz: SEO has been treating me really well lately. I think we’re at a point where things are getting truly interesting again.
There was a period where, if you were an experienced SEO, you’d kind of seen it all, done it all—you had your playbook, and things were starting to feel a little boring. And then OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, and suddenly everything changed. It got really exciting and fun again.
Now there are so many questions: How do we approach this? What strategies work? What tactics can we apply here? We’re all learning new things, and I find that really exciting and fun.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, exactly. I somehow feel the same way. SEO has always been interesting—especially depending on the depth and level you're working at. And in my case, as an international SEO, there’s always that excitement of discovering new markets, new audiences, new countries.
But yes, it had become a bit commoditized—it was almost the same process every time. And then came OpenAI and ChatGPT… followed by everything else. And it felt like going back to the early years of SEO. I think you had that same kind of feeling too—when everything was new, and experimentation was the norm.
But it’s also a moment where everything feels very fluid and uncertain. So, what do you say to yourself—and to your clients—to navigate this situation of uncertainty? This revolution that AI is bringing into search right now?
Jes Scholz: I think it really depends on the scope through which you're viewing things. When I think about SEO, I see it as just one part of a larger marketing mix. And marketing itself is just one part of your brand’s presence.
There are certain constants in branding that don’t change—no matter what’s happening with technical shifts, AI, or other changes in the digital space. The way humans interact with brands, the fundamentals of growing market share, reaching and engaging audiences, and building brand salience—those principles stay the same.
So what we need to do is adapt how SEO supports those broader goals—how it contributes to the revenue goals and attribution goals of the business. Yes, a lot is changing in the SEO space, but many of those changes are surface-level or tactical. They don’t actually change the fundamental marketing strategies of the brand.
And for me, that’s actually comforting. Even when everything seems very tumultuous, there’s still this fundamental, steady need for brand presence—and you’re just adapting the way that you’re building that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I totally agree. In fact, it’s no coincidence that everything related to brand has suddenly returned as a key topic in SEO—especially over the past 10 to 12 months.
But sometimes I think there's a recurring mistake that many SEOs tend to make: trying to own the entire narrative. Suddenly, branding becomes important for SEO, so some SEOs start claiming that SEO should guide branding—which is absurd. As you were saying earlier, SEO is just a small piece of a much larger marketing strategy.
Reframing SEO Strategy: From Keywords to Category Entry Points
Gianluca Fiorelli: That said, if the brand is becoming more important within SEO—especially because AI in search is pushing things in that direction—we also need to rethink how we position our work.
Another classic shift we’re seeing is the move from click-centric to visibility-centric search result pages. So, how can SEO now play a meaningful role in building brand awareness—not just driving traffic, but contributing to broader marketing goals on search surfaces—not just traditional Google Search?
Jes Scholz: I think it comes down to two things. You need to really understand what are my category entry points.
A category entry point is a situation where somebody will think of your type of product. For example, I wake up in the morning feeling tired—what do I think of? Coffee. Then I make a decision: am I going to make it at home? If so, what brand do I have? Or am I going to a nearby coffee shop? If so, which one?
And so this morning routine of having a coffee—that is my category entry point, either for a local search or for an e-commerce purchase. So, how do you build up brand salience? That is what your CMO is concerned about. They're thinking: how do I become the brand of choice at that category entry point?
And SEOs have a really important job to play in that. Because if I don't know what cafes are near me right now, I'm gonna go to Google Maps and I'm gonna search.
And how do you make sure that you’re the match for that category entry point? So it’s really about understanding positioning—what are these kinds of entry points that are important? Because you can't do all of them. You can do a lot, but you can't be everything to everybody. So, which ones are you really going to target?
Not keywords—but user intents, category entry points. Which ones are you going to make sure your brand is really present on, really visible on?
And then, when you have that visibility, it's ensuring that visibility is tied back to the brand. Because you spend every single workday looking at your branding. You know your logo. You know your avatar, your catchphrase, your colors, your characters, your symbols, and your styling. But do you know who doesn’t know all of that? Everybody else.
Most of your customers—the vast majority of the market—are not looking at those things every day, and honestly, they don’t care about them at all. So when you’re showing up on these surfaces, it’s not enough to say, “Okay, I got the visibility.” An impression is inherently of no value.
An impression only becomes valuable when, in the user's mind, they see the branding, they connect those brand assets to the category entry point, and that connection builds brand salience.
As SEOs, we need to think not just about where we can get visibility, but also: by having that visibility, am I supporting the brand? Am I reinforcing its positioning? Am I helping build brand salience?
And what does that mean for things like the site name? Have you actually optimized your site name to match how the rest of marketing describes your brand? This applies to apps too—people sometimes name their app something like “Best Jobs App,” but what’s the actual brand name? It’s missing.
Or they have logos across a wide variety of links that they built five years ago, and those logos are all outdated because there was a brand update. When are you going to update that branding to make sure that all of those mentions that may come back into vogue? Especially now that LLMs are starting to cite historical references and a wider range of sources.
When’s the last time you checked your Crunchbase profile? Is the logo up to date? That’s SEO. That’s a mention that could come through in citations.
So with all of these touchpoints—ones that are SEO-relevant—you need to be on top of your branding. On top of your positioning. And you need to be thinking about how to build that visibility through the lens of category entry points.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, indeed—I completely agree. I often say that visibility, when it comes to awareness, is just noise if it doesn’t help you stand out. You can be present in every SERP, for every search intent, but if your brand doesn’t make an impression, what’s the point?
I recently saw a poster that summed it up perfectly: in a single SERP, considering AI Overviews, ads, SERP features, and everything else, each result is competing with at least 25 other links. So if you can’t stand out, you’re just part of the clutter.
That’s why, for instance—and I know this might sound like a silly example—in a classic search snippet, I don’t care that Google rewrites the title tag or the meta description. I’m fully aware of it. But I still always ask to craft that first snippet of content like it’s your most important piece. Because that microcopy? It’s the first thing the potential customers are going to see about you and your brand.
If you’re not doing that, you’re just another search result—with the same title as 10 others, and the same meta description, which is often so poor that Google decides to rewrite it itself.
The real issue, I think, is that the keyword-centric mindset has become so deeply ingrained in SEO mentality that shifting away from it is hard. But like you were saying, we need to start with what truly defines the brand—what I call its ontology. What are the core entities related to your brand that you need to own?
From there, you build your information architecture and taxonomy, aligned with how people search around those entities. Then you eventually reach the keyword level—but from the top down, not the other way around.
It's a completely different approach, because you start from something very broad—more conceptual or strategic—and only later drill down to the keyword level.
Personally, I’ve always found it better this way. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, but I’d rather not work with 2,000 keywords and try to build my way up from there. I’d rather start from the essence and drill down.
Of course, this shift in thinking is difficult. It requires SEOs to let go of years of deeply embedded habits. And it’s even more complicated now, because we know that a single query can mean completely different things depending on the personal context of the user.
This can be even more risky and complicated—especially with Google’s recent announcements that they’ll be pushing even harder the personalization in the SERPs.
How Hyper-Personalized Search Reshapes Optimization
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, I’m curious—how are you approaching this hyper-personalized evolution of the SERP?
Jes Scholz: I think what we’re seeing now is really just making more concrete something that’s been happening for years. Not forever, but for a very long time, we’ve had quite advanced personalization of SERPs—not necessarily at the individual user profile level, because Google didn’t have as strong data in the past as they will moving forward—but it’s always been there. Based on location, device, and past search history.
Now we’re just adding in additional dimensions, which are very, very powerful ones, especially from the perspective of the person using LLMs search or AI search. It’s going to be a significantly better search experience, I believe. But it’s not that this is brand new to SEO. It’s not like we haven’t had the information—about the importance of entities, the role of the knowledge graph, the impact of personalization, and the need to stop optimizing for just keywords and instead focus on topics, solutions, and category entry points.
This is all the information we’ve had for many years. We’ve simply passed that tipping point where it’s now impossible to ignore it. If you’re still relying solely on traditional keyword strategies, you’re getting to a point where you’re guaranteed to fail. You have to evolve and adapt.
And I think this is what’s creating friction for a lot of people who’ve been in the industry for a while—because they have ingrained ways of thinking. But now, we need to fundamentally change.
Learning from Google Discover: Using Topical Authority to Win Visibility
Jes Scholz: For me, one of the most valuable experiences for adapting my thinking has been working with media publishers. For many of them, the vast majority of their traffic isn’t coming from search, it’s coming from Google Discover. And Discover is still SEO. It’s still about establishing topical authority.
It’s still about making sure you’re gaining visibility on the surface and aligning with what the algorithm is looking for. But, there are no keywords involved. There’s never a keyword in Discover. There are a certain number of slots available for certain people, and everyone will have a fundamentally different Discover feed based on their interests and browsing behavior.
Because I’ve been optimizing for Discover for so many years, this shift toward the same core principles—topic-based interest and highly personalized user profiles—doesn’t feel so foreign or intimidating. If you’re a brand and you haven’t mastered how to get your content into Discover, that should absolutely be where you're focusing right now.
When you can do that as an SEO, it means you understand how the knowledge graph works, and you understand topical authority. And obviously, in that case, you're only applying it—in the vast majority of cases—to articles and videos or social posts that are getting into Discover. It’s rare—not impossible, but rarer—for product content to appear there. Generally, product content starts showing up only after you’ve built a strong content reputation in Discover with Google through article content.
So, whether you’re doing that through your own domain and getting your own content on your domain featured in Discover—or if that’s not feasible because your site isn’t big enough to break into that threshold, then do it through digital PR. Build partnerships with media houses or with creators who have stronger topical blogs than you would have on your own domain.
How are you connecting your brand to those topics, and those people who have visibility in Discover, and mastering that process?
For me, once I fully understood that, it really solidified everything for me. From there, it becomes much easier to take those same principles—and the domain that’s already been optimized around them—and apply them to your product detail pages, category pages, homepage, or any other page type that matters to your business.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, exactly. In fact, I see Discover as a sort of training ground for Google—almost like a test bed for everything it's doing now. I remember, and I think it’s still possible to do this on the SERP, when there was that little bell icon with the “+ Follow this brand” or “Follow this publication” option.
Jes Scholz: It’s coming back. They’ve just brought it back into Google News.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, yes—that's right. It allows you to say, “Okay, I want more content from this news website.” But the risk is that people could start building their own echo chambers. And that’s a real concern.
Because echo chambers already exist on every digital platform. Social media is basically built around them. Search, until now, was one of the last remaining spaces where the echo chamber effect was limited—you still had exposure to a wider range of sources and perspectives.
So, the fear is we might be heading toward much larger echo chambers. And I’m not sure yet what kind of consequences that could bring.
I don’t know if—with all the time it usually takes—the European Commission will eventually realize this situation and ask Google and other search engines to try to avoid it by using their soft power.
Why Content isn’t Just Text Anymore and What SEOs Must Do
Gianluca Fiorelli: But speaking of branding, this is another pet peeve of mine. Many people working in SEO still tend to think of content purely as textual content. And I know—because I’ve followed your work for a long time—that you agree that this view is outdated, even a bit silly. Especially now, with AI Mode, AI Overviews and the increasing presence of multimodal SERPs, we need to think differently.
If we really want to optimize a brand’s visibility—especially across all the potential multimodal options we have, from image to video, audio, and so on—it’s a lot more complex than simply creating written content.
So what would you say to people in the SEO community—and to businesses—who still think content equals text only? How do we help them understand that we need to give just as much strategic attention to video optimization, visual search, voice search, which, as SEOs have always neglected—because voice search was always said to be coming, then it wasn’t… but now we know it’s really coming? So, what is your process for deciding how to prioritize and combine these multimodal ways of creating content?
Jes Scholz: I think it’s important to understand that a piece of text—or content—is not even the webpage or the URL. Whenever I think of content, I think of it as sitting in a database. And actually, that database is where my brand value lives. The website is just one instance of that database. The app is another way of accessing it. I can take that same database and export it elsewhere—through an RSS feed, an XML sitemap, to YouTube, to social media platforms, to a news aggregator, or even through an indexing API.
Because it’s all just sitting in a structured database, I have the flexibility to take these fields and place them here, take other fields and place them there.
A lot of people are scared of formats like video because they think it’s too much work. They think, “I have to sit down and record it, I don’t have someone to help, how do I edit it, how do I put it all together?” But one of the big benefits of AI is that it can assist significantly in translating these database structures into a variety of different formats.
Now, the challenge is doing that without creating AI slop. Just because we can produce a whole bunch of videos, or podcasts, or audio content doesn’t mean we should. If you’re producing content that isn’t helping build brand salience—if it’s not helping you win the hearts and minds of your audience so that they choose your brand when it matters—then don’t make that content. It’s not helping your brand.
And when your CEO comes and says, “You’ve made 50 videos—where’s the ROI?” you won’t have a clear answer, because there wasn’t a real strategy behind it.
We need to make sure we’re leveraging AI in ways that streamline content creation while still supporting the actual goals of the business. And ultimately, it all comes back to the quality of what’s in your database.
For example, I can write an article, turn it into a long-form video, and then chop that into seven short-form clips on stock tips. But I know absolutely nothing about the stock market—I’m a property girl.
I buy property—I don’t invest in stocks. My husband does all of that. I’m useless when it comes to the stock market. And yet, with AI, I could easily make seven videos about stock tips in an hour. I could write articles and publish them on a financial brand’s website, but would that actually help the brand? Absolutely not—because it would just be parroting back what already exists.
And the key to building a strong brand is contributing something meaningful to the conversation.
That might mean offering more information because you have access to expertise others don’t. Or it might be adding to the conversation by access to data and analysis that other people don’t have. That could mean adding to the conversation simply by making something that was previously seen as really academic or inaccessible more understandable to your end users. We see this all the time with people who go viral on social media—it’s not that they’re saying brand new things. They’re communicating things that are already known, but in a more accessible and understandable way.
And that is itself a value.
Just having an opinion—if it’s a well-informed, well-researched opinion—can be valuable. Aggregating content in a unique or insightful way can also be valuable. But it has to have actual value.
It can’t just be, “This got spat out of an LLM, so now I’ll put it into an article, turn it into a video, and off I go—I’ve made seven pieces of content.”
If you’ve just produced seven pieces of slop, you’re not helping yourself, your brand, or the industry.
You need to make sure you understand what value you're adding to the ecosystem—and whether that value will be meaningfully attributed back to your brand by creating that piece of content.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and what we’re saying here really reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine—Giorgio Taverniti, who is an SEO too, but much more focused on the educational side. He runs his own agency, of course, but he dedicates most of his time to organizing events and educating people about SEO in Italy. He’s very active, and his biggest asset is actually his YouTube channel.
He was telling me that now, as everything is changing and content creation becomes more essential, it’s more important than ever to produce content that is meaningful and relevant. He especially emphasized this for bigger publishers or independent publishers. Maybe, he said, they should start looking at how the creator economy works and learn from successful creators—exactly like you were saying earlier.
And if a brand doesn’t yet have the resources or know-how to create meaningful, multi-format content themselves, they should consider partnering with creators and influencers who do. It becomes a win-win: the brand lends credibility and trusted presence to the creator, in case you’re a trusted brand and in turn you are also learning from creators—and collaborating with them—can really help brands expand to a community of potential users and customers that, until that point, may have been out of reach. Co-marketing experiences with creators might be a much better idea than simply sponsoring them with a link in a video description or a 40-second block in the middle of their video. Actually creating things together could be the smarter move.
And I completely agree that what makes content successful isn’t always the content itself—it’s how you express it in a divulgative way.
Chunks vs. Cohesive Content: Balancing Readability for LLMs and Real Human Users
Gianluca Fiorelli: Now let’s try to bring the conversation back to the text side of content. With all this current frenzy around query fan-out and chunks, I wonder: are we at risk of making the same mistake we’ve made so many times in the past? If we treat everything like a chunk, do we risk focusing so much on micro-level optimization that we completely forget about macro-level optimization—which is just as important?
Jes Scholz: I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to repeat past mistakes—because we’re human, and that’s just what we do, and have done for centuries. I would hope that some people listening to this conversation might avoid that, but I know that as an industry, we’re probably about to make a very big mistake.
And that mistake is: we’re listening to these tech bros. These tech bros from the States are coming out and saying, “The vast majority of visitors to websites are going to be AI agents, and AI agents just want those chunks. So, just write in really, really clear chunks, and that’s how you’ll get cited in LLMs.” And I’m like, “Bro, you’re missing the point.”
If I’m creating content, I need to understand the use of that content. Take product pages, for example. What’s their purpose? To drive a conversion. They don’t need to be flowery or fancy or have editorial cadence—they need to very clearly, quickly, and efficiently communicate: “These are the benefits of this product for you.”
Then you have articles—and articles are a whole different thing. They’re divided into all sorts of subtypes: opinion pieces, editorials, how-tos, or just straight-up factual definitions. And we need to ask: which of these are meant purely to be cited?
If it’s purely for a citation, I don’t even really see that much as SEO. Because when the LLM—whether it's AI Overviews, AI Mode, or ChatGPT—gives an answer like “What’s the definition of SEO?” it just answers. End of interaction. From the user’s point of view, there’s no click. No opportunity to build brand salience.
They don’t care as users where that citation came from. They got their answer. Chances are, that answer was spoken out loud by their device—so they never even saw your brand.
But when it comes to something like “how do I invest in stocks as a beginner?”, sure, I can get that AI-generated content. I can read the little five-paragraph summary of chunks. Is that actually going to help me understand how to invest? No—100% it’s not. That’s just a starting point to continue research.
Those types of queries are where I will look at the citations. I’ll say, “Okay, this is a brand I know, that I trust, that I’ve heard of before.” So out of the four citations in an AI Mode page, I’m going to choose the one I recognize. I’ll go read that content—as a human.
And that comes back to this: if all your content is just optimized for chunking—“Here’s an FAQ, here’s my exact two-sentence answer that always starts with the question just above it because I have to include it for a well-optimized chunk”—then, as a human, you don’t want to read that. I’m not going to engage with that brand again. That’s a bad experience.
You still need content that is well written, editorially relevant, and has a natural flow—something you actually want to read.
Now, I’m not saying don’t structure your content. Because sometimes people swing too far in the other direction—where it’s too flowery, too unstructured, and ends up with no real flow either. We need to find the right balance in the middle.
That applies to video content, too. It’s about striking the right balance. Yes, we need to understand that a key audience now includes LLMs—so yes, you do need to write in a way that allows them to extract entities, build them into their knowledge graphs, and break out chunks to feed into their databases so you can win those citations.
But you still have humans in the equation. And your content still needs to be readable. So, find the right balance between those two things. Don’t over-optimize for chunking, as this can harm your brand.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, exactly. Because if not, it’s like what happened in the early days, when we were trying to teach journalists this horrible combo of “SEO copywriting.” And of course, they started to hate SEO from the very beginning—because we were essentially telling professionals in writing… how to write. It came across as quite arrogant on our part.
And now, we risk doing the same thing again.
In fact, what I usually focus on is not so much how to optimize the written content itself, but rather on how we optimize the structure of the page.
Take a product description page, for example. The goal is to present all the relevant information in a structured way—something that’s actually useful both for the user and for search engines. Because we know that, especially for technical B2B products, the potential customer wants to see detailed specs, like a technical data table.
Yes, you can make the meta description a bit longer—especially if you need to explain the product clearly. It’s not like writing, “these sneakers are wonderful” and calling it a day, even though you can do that for sneakers, too.
And then, yes, you might add a few FAQs because they could be useful for citations. Having your product page cited in an AI-generated answer—even during the informational phase of a search—could be quite powerful. So, including the right FAQs for each product is important. What I often see is the same generic FAQ block copied and pasted across product pages, and that’s really not useful.
Now, we have so many different surfaces where people can discover us. And sure, the first thing we ask is: “How much traffic is this actually bringing us?”
Rethinking SEO Metrics: Using Share of Voice and Prompt Tracking to Measure Visibility
Gianluca Fiorelli: But one of the biggest challenges marketers—and not just SEOs—are facing right now is: “How do we measure this?”
Because let’s be honest, Google Search Console is almost a joke right now—it just bundles everything together under “performance.” And while ChatGPT has recently started adding UTMs in all the links.
But still, in Google Analytics, you’ll often see ChatGPT traffic listed as a referral—two or three times, in fact, under different variations. Perplexity is almost the same, and DeepSeek sometimes appears, but far less often than it should.
Recently, you shared what I thought was a somewhat transgressive post: “How can you measure the impact of AI on your website?” I also like the graphics you used, especially the “When analytics fail, ask your users.” It’s such a simple idea, but so powerful in its simplicity. So, I’d kindly ask you: can you expand on that phrase?
Jes Scholz: Yeah, so I was posting about how you know where your users came from? And in my mind, it’s as simple as asking them—at the right point in the user journey. A simple dropdown that asks, “Did you hear about us from Google, ChatGPT, Instagram, word of mouth?” or whatever it may be.
I think we, as a digital marketing community, got a little spoiled with data. We deluded ourselves into thinking we knew everything about all of our customers and could target them perfectly. And then you can just focus on the high-value customers and ignore everyone else, because you believe you only need that percentage of the market that keeps coming back—loyal people who love your brand.
But honestly, that’s a complete illusion. That’s just not how marketing works in the real world.
I’m a big proponent of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the writings of Byron Sharp. If you haven’t read How Brands Grow, for me, it’s like the marketing bible. It’s a fantastic book. And it really drives home the point that it’s our job as marketers—and as SEOs, as a subset of marketing—to regularly reach the total addressable market in a way that builds brand salience.
We shouldn’t get lost in our data. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that, by targeting a specific keyword, we’ll always rank in position one. For many years, that’s been more of a wish than a reality. It’s a delusion.
Now, that’s not to say I don’t value data—I really like data. I use it a lot. But I would consider myself data-informed, not data-driven. Data informs my decisions, but then I use this thing in my head—a human brain—to interpret what that actually means.
Right now, a lot of people are asking: “How do I measure SEO now that Google Search Console data isn’t great, and Google Analytics data isn’t great?”
That’s why we can expect that the kind of search term reporting we’ve been enjoying in Google Search Console is going to disappear as we move into a world of Gemini fan-out queries.
We’re not going to get those fan-out queries in Google Search Console. That’s just not going to happen. ChatGPT isn’t going to share all of its fan-out queries in impression data either.
So, this data we’ve been used to getting from traditional search—it was always just a sample of a sample. And now, a lot of it is going to vanish as we move deeper into these AI-driven environments.
With the data we do have, you can use the AI tracking tools. You can input your prompts and check: for that prompt, in that specific circumstance, on that device, with logged-out queries—there are a lot of “if, if, if” conditions—how’s your visibility?
You can calculate your share of voice from that. I’m actually a fan of that kind of tracking, from a high-level funnel branding positioning perspective.
I’m not using that information to say, “For this specific query, I have the top citation,” because you may not. You really don’t know. Instead, I use this data for these types of prompts, for a general user, where I haven’t entered any ideal customer profile information.
Because I think ideal customer profiles in B2C are complete nonsense. In B2B, it’s questionable—I’d still focus on addressing the total addressable market, not just an ideal customer profile.
That’s how I look at these AI prompt tracking tools and the outputs from them, in terms of share of voice. I see it the same way I’d view insights from a human focus group. It gives me a sense of potential brand visibility. It’s not about having exact, precise data on my brand positioning across the entire market. I’m not out there surveying every single person in my total addressable market.
What I get is a feeling—an informed sense of my positioning—from a small, curated sample. I set up that sample carefully to answer specific questions I’m interested in, in as accurate a way as possible, so that I can be informed by that data.
So, for top-of-funnel purposes, I’m very much into AI prompt tracking tools that can also track traditional search. So you are using the one tool for all of that visibility.
Currently, I’m trialing DemandSphere. I’m pretty happy with them from that perspective. But there’s a lot out there—a myriad of tools that you can use for it.
And then I’m tying that back into everything: you have top-of-funnel share of voice, some GSC data, some GA data, and then you have real data—like how many transactions did I make, what was the revenue from those transactions, and how does that position me in terms of market share?
That’s where it all comes together. And that top-of-funnel—I don’t really like the concept of a funnel, but you all know what I mean by this.
The kind of top-of-funnel share of voice and bottom-of-funnel—here’s my actual revenue from that—and seeing how those two layers correlate over time. That correlation is actually what you’re trying to optimize as an SEO.
When I get more visibility from this sample of terms that I’m trying to target, or user intent prompts that I’m actively trying to target and measure, what does that translate to over time in terms of revenue? I find that really interesting and optimizable.
But it takes strategy. It takes alignment with many other teams. It takes alignment with general marketing. And it takes education—a re-education, really—especially for your executives, around what meaningful SEO KPIs are. Because it is not keywords and traffic. It never was.
Gianluca Fiorelli:Yeah, yeah. This correlation between visibility and conversion—or revenue—is something I’ve been suggesting as well. I even brought it up in an episode with Duane Forrester. We were brainstorming ways to measure SEO impact, and this exact idea came up. I’m glad to see we’re essentially on the same page here.
I also dislike the classic SEO concept of a funnel.
Jes Scholz: Yes, it’s terrible.
Gianluca Fiorelli:I almost never talk about funnels. I prefer to talk about moments, customer journeys, messy middle. I think those are more sophisticated models to explain where the person we want to target is at any given moment.
SEO Myths in the Age of AI
Gianluca Fiorelli: And now, just one last question. SEOs, after the ancient Greeks, are the biggest creators of myths. And now, it’s time for AI. What are the myths you’re seeing SEOs starting to create around AI and search?
Jes Scholz: Oh, there are so many to choose from. I think the one I’ll pick is the myth that this is really easy to game. That’s probably the best one because, like any good myth, there’s a grain of truth mixed in with all the misinformation. It’s something that can develop a kind of cult following.
I’ll admit, with certain types of prompts—especially where there isn’t much training data—it’s pretty easy to make it say whatever you want. But if you’re trying to influence the training data at scale, like thinking, “Okay, if I go type in ‘Brand X is the best’ or ‘X website is the best’ a hundred times into ChatGPT, now the model is going to start telling everyone that’s true”—sorry, that’s just not how it works.
If you have even a basic understanding of how these systems function, you’ll see that’s completely off. Yes, you can influence very specific queries. Yes, you can make it say funny things, and that can be quite entertaining. But you’re not going to change its mind when you ask something like, “What are the most trusted healthcare providers in Country X?” It doesn’t work that way.
This is something there’s already so much coverage on. You’re not going to come in as a startup and suddenly train the algorithm to say your brand is the best. You legitimately need to build up that brand profile, live those truths, and have others echo them. That’s actually one of the benefits of AI having this echo chamber-like dynamic—it’s not just about what you say about yourself; it’s about what you say about yourself and what other people agree with.
If nobody knows you, I could turn around and say, “I am the SEO hula-hooping champion of the world.” You can’t contradict me—you don’t know any different. Google doesn’t know any different. So in that sense, sure, it’s easy to game.
But if I sit here and say, “I am the best gymnast in the world,” and I enter that into ChatGPT ten million times, it’s still not going to say Jes Scholz is the best gymnast in the world.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, exactly. And I mean, you can definitely do it for self-satisfaction—like, “Please remember next time we talk that I’m the best,” and it’ll save that in memory. Something like, among all these experts, we definitely have to count on Jes Scholz.
The Person Behind the Professional: Jes Scholz
Gianluca Fiorelli: We’ve been talking for almost an hour now, so let’s wrap things up with a few quick questions about you as a person. That way, everyone watching can get to know you beyond just the SEO side of Jes Scholz.
You lived in Germany for many years, and now you’ve moved back to Australia. As a bit of a globetrotter myself—I’m Italian and have been living in Spain for twenty years, and even spent a year living in Paris—though that was basically last century now!
So here’s my question: when you were living in Germany, what did you miss the most about Australia? And now that you’re back in Australia, what do you miss the most about Germany?
Jes Scholz: When I was living in Berlin, anyone who’s been there knows—the sun just doesn’t exist, and there’s no ocean. The closest thing is a sea, but there’s a big difference between the ocean and the sea. The ocean has waves, and I never realized how much I missed the sound of waves and feeling the sun for more than two days out of the entire year. Moving back to Australia, the weather is just phenomenally better than in Berlin.
But Germans do one thing exceptionally well, and that’s a dish called Kaiserschmarrn. It’s kind of like a pancake that’s smushed up with cinnamon and apfelmus—what’s the English word? applesauce, like good applesauce—on top. It’s so nice. I have no idea how to make it. I can’t cook, I’m a horrendous cook. In Germany, you can buy these Kaiserschmarrn packets at the supermarket, so now anytime I’m back there, I stock up on these packets and bring them home to Australia. It’s become a special breakfast I share with my kids on special occasions.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool, yeah. It’s like when I’m here—what I miss is my little town in Italy. And when I’m in Italy, seeing my friends, my family, and what I end up missing about Spain is this certain kind of light Spain has. It’s different somehow from the Italian one, even though we’re on the same latitude on the map.
So, is there a book you always keep on your shelf—something you like to pick up now and then, even if it’s just to read a few lines or a page?
Jes Scholz: Hmm, not really. I don’t have many books I consistently go back to, to be honest. It’s more about genres for me. I really enjoy fantasy fiction and historical fiction, so I’ll often pick something up from those categories. But there isn’t one specific book I regularly reread.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And does that taste for historical novels and fantasy—does it also carry over to TV series and movies? Or maybe not?
Jes Scholz: I have two young kids, so there is no TV series or movie watching going on. It’s all about keeping the kids alive, running my business, and trying to squeeze in some health and fitness on top of that. So, I'm afraid there's no time for shows or movies.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You know what I do? Maybe this could be a tip for you. Sometimes, when I’m doing the more boring parts of our work—like typing into an Excel sheet late at night—I put on a series. But I don’t really watch it; I just listen, almost like it’s a radio drama. Since working on spreadsheets is kind of automatic, I can follow along with the story by ear. Maybe give it a try—it could work for you too.
Jes Scholz: I will.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It was really great to finally meet you, sincerely. I’ve read about you so many times, but we’ve never actually spoken in person. I really hope we get the chance to meet in real life sometime soon—maybe at one of the many conferences. You come to Europe quite often, visiting clients or speaking at events. So, let’s see. Hopefully, we’ll finally meet face-to-face.
Jes Scholz: I would love that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And maybe let’s make a promise—let’s wait a few months, or a year, and see what happened with all the things we were talking about today.
Jes Scholz: Sounds good.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, thank you.
And to everyone watching, you know this is the moment where I have to pretend to be an influencer. But seriously, remember to hit the bell, subscribe to the channel, and give this video a like, because honestly, this conversation has been wonderful. Thanks, and see you in the next episode of The Search Session!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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