Welcome back, everyone. I'm Gianluca Fiorelli, and my guest today at The Search Session is Aimee Jurenka, an AI visibility strategist from the USA.
We discuss how SEO is evolving into AI visibility strategy, including brand alignment, informational content, topic entities, and agent-ready websites.
We also look at how to measure AI visibility, why human strategy still matters, and how SEO, content, PR, and social need to work together as AI search continues to change.
What You’ll Get from this Episode
What AI search strategy really requires: visibility depends on aligning brand signals across your site, third-party sources, and every channel because AI pulls from everywhere.
Why informational content still matters in AI search: generic traffic-driven content is fading, but brand-specific content helps AI systems understand your products, differentiators, and value.
Why content and data structure matter for AI visibility: topic entities, internal links, schema, ontology, and OWL can help AI systems better understand your site and product catalog.
How smaller brands can still build AI visibility: Aimee helped a small SaaS improve brand visibility through focused blog categories, internal links, and a simple press release.
Why AI visibility needs better measurement: without a static SERP in AI search, Aimee’s Mention Rate tool uses repeated prompts and statistical sampling to estimate brand visibility.
Why entity analysis still needs human judgment: tools like Waikay and AWR reveal what AI knows about a brand and where the topic gaps are, but strategists decide which gaps actually fit the brand and business.
Watch the full conversation to learn what brands can do now to stay visible as AI search changes.
Topics covered: AI visibility · topic entities · brand alignment · informational content · agentic search · mention rate tool · entity analysis · knowledge graphs · cross-channel synergy
About the Guest
Aimee Jurenka
AI Visibility Strategist at seo SUSTAINABLE and SEO Strategist at RicketyRoo Inc.
Aimee has more than 10 years of experience in SEO and has been running her own SEO consulting practice since 2018, with a strong focus on AI search strategy, entity SEO, topical authority, and helping brands understand how they appear across AI-driven search experiences.
She previously worked at Rocketship, where she held multiple SEO positions, including Director of SEO, and recently joined RicketyRoo Inc, a US-based boutique SEO agency specializing in local search and multi-location strategy, as an SEO Strategist.
Aimee is the creator of theMention Rate tool, which uses repeated prompts and statistical sampling to measure AI visibility, and the Topic Entity Schema Generator, a free tool that produces topic-entity schema markup for AI search.
Video Chapters
The Death of "Skyscraper" Content and Generalized Informational SEO
Case Study: Boosting Visibility Through Topic Entity Organization
Overcoming the "Yeti Problem": Branding in a Crowded AI Space
Measuring Success: The Mention Rate Tool and Prompt Tracking
Personal Passions: From AI Ecosystems to 100-Year-Old Houses
Transcript
Full conversation between Gianluca Fiorelli and Aimee Jurenka.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I am Gianluca Fiorelli, and welcome back to The Search Session. Today we are going to have a guest who defines herself as “engineering SEO ecosystems for the AI era”. This is her tagline on LinkedIn. It's a cool one. And if you know her, you already know who she is from the laughing in the background.
She's currently been, for nine months or so, the SEO strategist at RicketyRoo. Coincidence, but just a couple of episodes ago, we also had an episode with another RicketyRoo-er, who was Celeste Gonzalez. Total coincidence.
Our guest is also proposing herself in the market as an AI visibility strategy consultant, and we have a word in Spanish, which I don't know how to translate into English, which is "manita." She's someone who likes to create stuff, and on her personal website, she has a lot of tools that surely can be interesting for many of you and also for me. We are going to talk about one specific area later.
Our guest is Aimee Jurenka. Hey, Aimee. How are you doing?
Aimee Jurenka: I’m good. How are you?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I'm fine, I'm fine. Today, the day that we are recording this, it's already Friday; it's evening because you are in Seattle. I am in Spain, where there is a nine-hour difference. So yes, I'm fine. And really, really looking forward to our conversation.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, yes. I'm so happy to be here.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And to start it, I want to ask you the same question I always ask all my guests. How is SEO treating you lately with all these frenzied events happening?
Aimee Jurenka: Well, it's been treating me great, fantastic, in my position. So, you know, I really got inspired, intrigued, and excited when AI search came out. So this is a great time for me to just be experimenting and getting new ideas and making new friends and learning together.
So it's been just treating me absolutely wonderfully. There's just been such a great community that I've been able to reach out to and establish after being in the industry for 10 years, you know, this last couple of years. And so it's just been fantastic as far as I'm concerned.
What Does AI Search Look Like in 12 Months?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool. Cool. And as I was saying before, apart from being an SEO strategist for RicketyRoo, you also define yourself as an AI search strategist, which is a wonderful definition. I mean, I tend to define myself also as an AI strategist.
And I have a question. Did you have the opportunity to watch the interview that Sundar Pichai did, a very long interview?
Aimee Jurenka: No, I didn't. I haven't got that one yet.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I suggest you do it because, between the things that he says and the things that he doesn't say, you can understand many things.
So, okay, let's talk about AI. And it was a strange, a bit of a shock, AI last year because, I mean, since 2022, we knew that we were going in that direction, but all of a sudden, because AI entering into the Google world became ha, ha. A sort of, you know, the scary monster of Monsters, Inc. So now things are different. People seem to be less scared because we have started to do all our research, which we do best: reverse engineering and trying to understand things.
As a strategist and as someone who is always thinking ahead, what do you think is the most realistic evolution of AI search for this year and the next?
I'm asking this question because AI is not something that can be easily optimized for. Yes, you can optimize a few things relatively fast, but the substance of the optimization can take quite a long time.
So, it needs preparation. And obviously, you cannot optimize for something that maybe, knowing how fast this landscape is evolving, is not going to be the reality in 12 months. What do you foresee in 12 months?
Aimee Jurenka: So, it's funny you brought that up because when I started thinking about AI, I was a very early adopter. The company I was at was a really early adopter. And so, as I said, I kind of had a bug. I was excited about it.
And you know, when you start thinking about what's different between SEO and AI and what we are going to need to change and how this is going to work, I had to really land on, originally, like, we have to pull this way back. We have to pull our view way back and start thinking about what's going to matter in the long run, right?
Like, what's going to be valuable for us to start shifting? And what I really think is going to be important is brand, the way you make informational content, and your blog on your website, updating that content, and getting all the signals out there in their ecosystem—that's like my favorite buzzword, so that's why I still have it on my thing—by getting everything aligned, right?
So exactly who is my brand, what are my products, what topics do I want to be associated with those, and who is my target market? And then updating all of your website and then trying to update those third-party sources to all be aligned with that same message.
So that's where I really think it is going, as far as strategy goes. The next big tech shift, I think, is going to be agentic. So I think we're going to be making basically two different websites. You know, they'll be the same, but one's going to be for humans, and one's going to be for agents.
We're going to make sure that the human website is accessible so the agents can get in there. And so we're really going to be looking at what the agents are going to need and what they are going to be helping when they are agentic. Because right now we're looking at it: what do the agents need for when people are using the LLM, right? So, when humans are using it, is that what those bots need?
You know, what are they pulling into the LLM? So I think we're also going to have to look at exactly what those agents are going to need and how that's going to work. What technology stack are we going to need for that?
And then, of course, you know, it's always reverse engineering, poke it with a stick, poke it with a stick time.
The Death of "Skyscraper" Content and Generalized Informational SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I totally agree with this view. In fact, I also agree with one thing you said at the beginning of your answer, talking about informational content. Because there is, you know, the reason is AI Overview, AI Mode, and all the LLMs are substantially giving out the answer.
Traffic is not generated anymore from informational content that we can eventually create. So why should we create information, spend time, effort, and money on creating informational content? I think we agree, you and I, on saying that this way of thinking is very myopic, don't you think?
Aimee Jurenka: I believe so. I feel we just need to shift the way that we're making informational content. Because now we're making it for an AI, because we want the AI to pull that into the conversation. We want the AI to know all about us. We want the system to be able to see what our differentiators are, or our case studies, right?
We want them to know more about the brand and the products. So there’s going to be much more of the age of generalized content for inbound marketing, like “10 reasons for X, Y, and Z”, skyscraper content, that we all did in one form or another, I feel like, you know, we beat that to death with a stick.
So it’s like, I feel like all that’s going away. That’s literally what the AI does. It’s literally what the AI is trained to do. And yes, that traffic’s not going to be there. So it’s about what informational content the AI wants that's going to be able to pull into their systems to get the information when somebody does ask about you, your product, or your topic, right?
And then that’s not elsewhere. They can’t find it elsewhere. Not again, “10 reasons for X, Y, and Z," but more like, “How do we compare to brand A, to brand B? Here’s a comparison chart.” And those are the type of things that are going to be valuable now.
I don’t think it’s going to bring a whole bunch of traffic. I mean, if it does, I'll be shocked. I really think the idea of traffic and inbound marketing is gone, and I think that it's just not going to be a thing anymore. We're really going to be moving over to visibility and being able to track that. With visibility, and then correlating branded traffic and conversions from organic and direct.
Because right now, what we're seeing is people going to AI, they do the research, and then they're leaving that, and they're making their purchase directly. They're going to the site directly. Whether that starts to move into the AI or not, with all the shopping, we'll see. But yes, that's what we're seeing right now. So that's what I feel we're making.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Why I think that discarding completely informational content is, one, not knowing the many nuances of what "informational content" is. I agree with you that the classic “top 10 things to see in Seattle,” if you are not making it totally unconventional, it is not going to be pulled up because, I mean, there is consensus.
Aimee Jurenka: I don’t need it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Consensus is already there. But, and I'm particularly happy that the concept of skyscraper has totally died, because it was something that I hated from the very beginning. Yes, it was substantially copycatting something done by others and maybe making it “better”.
Aimee Jurenka: Add one thing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Mostly it was promoting it better. And yes, I think that informational content is more related to how people search because, okay, we are targeting AI, optimizing for AI search. But actually, we are optimizing for the searcher using AI search.
So if we don't have informational content of any type, like the one that you said, but it can also be informational, practical content about products we have, we are substantially invisible in the exploration phase.
Aimee Jurenka: And we can't control the story. You know, we can't control what's out there, so.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly, we are dependent on third-party sources.
Aimee Jurenka: Third-party sources may be talking about us. So, you know, that informational content is the very first way that we can really get rid of those hallucinations and start putting out the content and making sure it's aligned with exactly what we want the AI tool to say about us.
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Case Study: Boosting Visibility Through Topic Entity Organization
Aimee Jurenka: Funny thing, too, though. My topic entity and that whole thing that I've been working on, of course, being me, I was like, "Well, we're going to need topic entities, and then you have to do a site structure, and then we're going to need a big content push, and we're going to need this, and we're going to need that."
And Celeste, actually, from what we call the Roo Crew, which is what we call ourselves at Roo Labs, worked with me to do a topic entity test. And it was a very small site, and they weren't able to do a content push, and they already had a lot of visibility, so all we were able to do and test was just reorganizing the content for topic entity they wanted their product to be known for, what they wanted AI to relate their product to. And that's all we did. We updated the internal links to all go to that product page that represents that.
And we actually did see visibility increase. So it was my first official test that I was able to do. It wasn't a closed test; it was a small test. You know, I'm not going to say it was this big, massive thing, but it was the first official test that I was able to do, to be like, wow. I couldn't believe it.
I really was like, "I don't think this is going to work without the content push.” But just organizing the structure alone helped that topic entity visibility in AI.
And what was really cool about it is that all the old content we made is still useful. All the old content, we don't need to just throw away. You know? We can now, if we want to redo the site structure, we can actually get some AI visibility out of it.
And I think that's, I mean, a lot of C-levels I think are going to love to hear that, that everything wasn't lost.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. And your test, I read the case study, reminded me of things that I was doing with a few clients too, not as a test, but as a strategy also commanded by some budget restraints of the client.
So we couldn't do substantially any kind of campaigns in terms of PR, link building, relying only on natural link building. It's a B2B website, so you can rely on classic link building. When the company goes to a trade fair, let's earn a link from the trade fair website because we are sponsoring it, and so on.
So the strategy was all about content, specifically multi-intent targeting content. And so it is the strategy of creating very well-built content hubs, topical content hubs.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: To push then, obviously, the catalog of a product, more the product list than the specific products. And it worked like a charm because it was something that we were doing even before AI Overview. And when AI Overview came out in the UK, because this is a British company, all of a sudden, it was everywhere in AIO.
Aimee Jurenka: That's amazing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: We didn't do anything for AI. It was just this kind of strategy. So yes, I totally agree with you that if you really do a well-done work of ontology, entity search, connection between the entities, individuating the micro-moments where this entity should be present, and so orchestrating the content this way around your main entity, you are going to pop up, even if you are, let's say, not a big brand or if you're not super famous and so on. It's a way of creating the kind of visibility that starts creating a positive flywheel.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes. And the idea behind this one, too, is that it did start out like a topic authority for traditional SEO, you know, and I was working on it that way.
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Overcoming the "Yeti Problem": Branding in a Crowded AI Space
Aimee Jurenka: I had a really small startup SaaS, EDU tool for middle school, for STEM, and their name, unfortunately, was Yeti. And there’s the academy, and there is a sports company or sports store called Academy Sports, and they carry Yeti coolers with an amazing SEO program. Amazing.
And I couldn't get, you know, they’re a service-area business, so you don't have that sort of thing. They're brand new. They were this tiny site, nobody knew who they were. And now they have a name where they couldn't even rank for their own brand name.
So they couldn't even rank for Yeti Academy because Academy Sports that carries Yeti coolers dominated it. And I was like, what am I going to do here? Like, how am I going to figure this out?
And this is where this all started, and now it’s evolved, you know, moved over the whole “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” This evolved over to the AI. It was like, okay, how am I going to get Google to understand who they are and what they do? How am I going to get on the radar and get their eyeballs and also have Googlebot understand?
And that’s where this sort of came from. I was like, what are their target audiences? What are their core topics? What are they doing? Make those into blog category pages that we could index, optimize those, and then start creating content in all of those blog categories.
And we got to where each category maybe had four or five blog posts in it, so not a whole lot. We had the internal linking going. We had the category pages optimized, indexed, and I just did a basic press release, just a basic press release that had some internal links into that site that got those 87 links, those 87 eyeballs, onto the site.
It got it ranked, got it crawled, and then bam. Two to three weeks later, we're finally ranking for our name. And that was like one of my best SEO moments ever, you know, because it was a huge problem and I fixed it.
And I was like, I'm onto something here, that these small sites can do this. You know, when I'm working with these smaller clients, we're going to be able to figure out and really target what we want.
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Combatting "AI Slop" and the Mad Cow Syndrome of the Web
Aimee Jurenka: When it comes to AI, the evolution of that, I guess, is after HCU. We were early adopters of AI in my company. I'd created all these custom ChatGPTs. We were trying to automate our content, and we were doing a bunch of different stuff that was fun.
And HCU came out, and everybody was talking about affiliates, but in my circle, it was everybody who had been auto-generating stuff with ChatGPT. Everything from, “Hey, I've got it pushing out live without any changes, and I'm publishing 50 pages a minute,” you know, they're like, “I'm publishing 50 blog posts a day,” down to people who, like, a guy that had just spun up eight quick pages because he had to launch a site. It was like a site; you wanted to get it up really quickly, you didn't want to hire a writer.
And everybody got manual penalties. It was like manual penalties. Everybody's hair was on fire. Everybody was losing it. And that's what it kind of started with me on this idea that now is the topic entity structure.
And it was like, okay, well, the basic content, informational content isn’t going to work anymore because ChatGPT can make that. And we’ve already flooded it as marketers, we’ve already made it a mess, right? We’ve already abused it.
And I feel that was Google’s first update that really affected that. I feel like this last core update was just an addition of that, of really fighting that low-quality AI slop that we see come out, you know?
So I think with that, it was kind of like, okay, well, not only are we going to have to up our game. The generalized content isn’t going to work, skyscraper’s not going to work any longer because that’s the slop that everybody’s posting. They’re just basing it off of that, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Aimee Jurenka: Exactly, exactly. Yes. So, you know, not only are we going to have to change it, but then also, what are the differences between AI and traditional SEO that I’m going to need to think about in order to basically transfer the strategy over, to have a strategy that transfers over?
And so you have to be a lot more niche and a little bit tighter. You have to be a lot more selective. But it does, I am seeing, like I said, with that official test and different things; I’m seeing it really work, and I’m like, "This is fantastic." Like, it’s fun. Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, it is also...
Aimee Jurenka: Sustainable. It's like a solid foundation.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, it’s more sustainable, but also, I'm thinking, I mean, we spend many hours working. It's also more rewarding and more entertaining as a work to do.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Instead of doing sort of scalable industrial things that we were doing before.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: However, I open a short parenthesis. Yes, I agree, but the latest update can be related to AI slop. The problem is that, for how Google works, when these pages are demoted, they are not eliminated from the index. They are just going very deep in the index, so nobody in classic search can find them.
The problem is that query fan-out can be so specific that this kind of AI slop can still resurface in AI answers.
Aimee Jurenka: Well, yes, and that's where we get into the fun problems that, once you solve it, you're like, "This is great."
Gianluca Fiorelli: Also, the problem is that there is already so much AI slop polluting the web that even people creating new honest content, not AI slop, are referring to sources that are themselves AI slop, or that have been referred to by AI-generated sources. So we are substantially creating content based on AI slop, which is what I call the Mad Cow syndrome.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, system collapse is also something that I've heard about. And when you don't get enough new knowledge into an LLM, it will collapse. And so, you know, the fact that marketers in general are using LLMs to create this AI slop, then publishing the AI slop, and now the AI slop is being used to create more AI slop.
Mad Cow is going to happen. It's going to be a system collapse. It does need net new information. And I know that's something we've always tried to provide ever since Penguin and Panda, right? So we've always tried to have good E-E-A-T.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Aimee Jurenka: You know, we've always tried to have it. It's just that now it's even more important. Now I feel like it's mandatory, you know, that is going to get what's pulled in because I just feel like the algorithms are going to catch up to that.
Measuring Success: The Mention Rate Tool and Prompt Tracking
Gianluca Fiorelli: So if AI search is substantially optimizing for AI search, let's call it SEO for AI search, becoming a sort of brand management optimization for many things. And obviously, if clicks are disappearing as a main metric, if even impressions, let's call them so, are not so reliable, especially considering all the mess Google is doing with impression in this last year...
Aimee Jurenka: Right. Well, and they're not separating out the data, and they're taking all of the prompt queries out of the information, so we don't even have that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So there is a sort of, how can we measure things? I'm not a really big fan of prompt tracking. I mean, I think it can be useful to do prompt tracking if you can really track thousands of potential prompts, which is not so sustainable economically.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I mean, only the big brands can do it, so we must be honest. As I said before, you also love to create stuff.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You created a tool, the Mention Rate tool, that somehow aims to measure AI visibility.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: How does it work, and how did you come up with this idea?
Aimee Jurenka: Well, it started with the problem. So, you know, again, when Google said, "Hey, we're going to do AI Mode," then it was on like Donkey Kong, you know, because before that it was like, "Oh, is it going to be Google or is ChatGPT going to take the traffic?"
And then it was like, "AI Mode's coming, this conversation's over, this is going to be this way. We just know it's coming.”
And so, you try to move and organize things. And I was like, “Okay, so we have rank tracking in SEO, so for AI we're going to do prompt tracking, and we're just going to do it the same way, and it's going to work.”
And something was not quite right. It was just like a tickle in my brain, and it just wasn't quite right. And I knew that there was something that was off.
And finally, I came to the realization that it's because AI doesn't have a static SERP, right? So we don't have a shared reality. We don't have a way to be able to pull in all the information that, at 10:30 in San Francisco, if you put in this keyword or this phrase, roughly everyone sees this result that we can base it on every day.
And so, without that, then how do we recreate a SERP? How do we do that? And I remember being like, there's got to be a dataset that's large enough. There's got to be somebody who's already done this. You know, somebody that's already kind of figured this out somewhere else for another use case of how much data do we need? How big a sample group do we need in order to get a statistically valid number?
And I did a million different things. I was all over ChatGPT, and it was taking me down this whole weird path. And I did a bunch of weird stuff that didn't make any sense the next morning when I woke up, you know, and then all sorts of different things, and finally landed on it.
That it's basic 101 statistics. It's the Cochran 1977 sampling method. It's like the first page of every statistics book in the world, you know, when you start the class. And it's what they use to sample voters, right? So it's almost like when they're coming to those exit polls, when we're doing those things with voting, that's the formula behind it.
I have three different tiers that I found based on that formula that gives you a margin of error. And so there's one that's, you know, tier one is pretty good at poking it. Tier two is what you'd really want to use. And then tier three is if you really need a lot of data, if you're enterprise level, or if you're trying to get VC funding. You have a board of directors, and you want to really make sure that it's almost defendable in a court-type thing.
And with those different datasets, you know, like the first one that I've been using a lot, it's 20 prompts on one topic, right? Or one product. Your brand is 20 prompts. You run those 20 prompts five times, and you aggregate all of those mentions, all of those times. And you end up with a large enough dataset to be able to get a mention rate, with a 10% error margin.
And I was like, “There we go. We got it. We got it. That's great.” I was able to write it up. It made sense. It's literally been holding up. I've been checking it out. I've been doing some different things with it.
And then, of course, what’s next? Jump on Claude and see if we can automate this. Like, let's see if I can build this.
So originally, I was looking at tools, like, what tools out there could I set up to do this for me, to get this automated, and what tool has this? None of the tools has that yet. None of the tools have it set up and automated for me.
So I did. I jumped on Claude and started, you know, my very first Claude Code, to figure out how to get that Mention Rate tool up and running. And it was amazingly easy, incredibly fun. And they sent me over to Netlify, which is so easy to use. And I was able to just publish it up on my website and get that Mention Rate tool up there.
Of course, I want to get sentiment in there. I want to get accuracy in there. I want to be able to really maybe do large spreadsheets, something of that sort. But it's the basic framework of that tool, and it's like, I just can't believe how much we can create these days so quickly.
It's almost like if you can dream it, you can be it. So yes, that's what's going on with me with the Mention Rate. Single-shot prompts don't work. If you're just prompting one thing and you're getting a result back every day, that doesn't mean anything. Because of that one thing and one prompt, you're never going to get that same answer again.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Aimee Jurenka: You need a large dataset. You need to do multiple runs, and then you need to average out that metric.
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Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, and as a beta tester of Gumshoe back in the days, I’m glad that at least trackers are starting to consider the persona segmentation adaptation of a prompt. Because this is at least something that can resemble reality, even if it's not reality.
But in this case, no tool can really reasonably reproduce reality. Also, classic rank trackers. And I'm saying this with Advanced Web Ranking as our host, which is a wonderful tool, but we know that also the classic rank trackers were more an approximation of reality than a real photo of reality. Useful for many things with all the aggregated data.
But I know, talking about tools, and even Dixon Jones was my guest…
Aimee Jurenka: Oh, yes. I watched that one. I love him.
Want to go deeper on entity SEO?
Check out the episode with Dixon Jones, where he and Gianluca Fiorelli unpack how entities, internal links, and topic hubs are reshaping SEO in the age of AI search.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I know that you are also a good proponent of Waikay, like me. And what do you think about the totally different type of approach by Waikay, which is more about the topic? It was the thing we were talking about in the beginning.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Instead of a prompt, it's a different philosophy of attacking, of creating a strategy for AI.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, and Waikay is my favorite tool because it already follows the strategy that I have. So, you know, it's entity SEO that they're doing. I'm basically doing the same thing, just for AI. They're working on it.
So that tool is basically the closest I found for a tool that I can use and just apply it to my strategy. They have their own strategy in there. They have their own reports. It's great. But it's that same idea, right?
So you put it in, you put in your two competitors, and then you start to see those ideas or topic gaps. And again, this is something I really think about when I thought about, you know, how do we track AI? How are we going to optimize for AI? What are we going to do for AI? You really have to take it back.
We're not going to have one prompt with one page and then try to get one conversion off that traffic or impressions, right? We're not going to have that any longer. That's not going to be a possibility.
So everything is going to have to be pulled back to topics, ideas, brand, products, what do we want to be known for, and then doing a bulk of content to try to see an overall lift.
So that idea of getting at that direct one-to-one cause and effect is, I feel, going to be gone and going away.
And so Waikay is right there with that. They're like, “Hey, it's all about topics. It's all about seeing what your competitors and what AI knows about you.” You know the name of the tool from the acronym. Being able to see what they know about you and your competitors.
And those report cards that come back, that score, and that topic graph that comes back say, "What doesn't it know about us that we want to make sure they know about us?" Let's create that. Let's make sure that we get that spoke and hub page out, or let's make sure that we make that blog category for that, or however we decide to do that.
So I just absolutely love that tool because they agree with everything I say, and I agree with it. I joke. But yes, I absolutely love it because we're very aligned on how we think about things, though.
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Building Entity Recognition Tools and Knowledge Graphs
Gianluca Fiorelli: And, obviously, when you do an entity gap analysis, for instance, apart from using Waikay, what are the things that... And this is something that I have struggled with, because I have always had this struggle even before AI.
No tool, in reality, does entity analysis. There is no tool. It's something that you always have to do manually, or create your own tool with Python and something. Thank God, there is Claude Code now.
Aimee Jurenka: I know.
Gianluca Fiorelli: ChatGPT Codex, or Google Antigravity. So we can do something that, for me, was—I always say, I studied Latin in the past. I didn't study computer information. I'm totally inefficient in terms of coding, so thank God something like vibe coding exists now.
But, as nobody's listening to us, so between us, what do you do apart from using this tool to really create the kind of entity analysis that you like?
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, so this is, again, where it comes back to AI is not going to take my job. AI is not going to take any of our strategist jobs. It's like using ChatGPT, and people say, "Well, it's not accurate." You still have to have a brain.
So, you know, when you use that entity tool, it's very directional. You know, it's a great place to start, or maybe get some ideas, or kind of see where your competitors are at.
But if your number one competitor offers a different product than you do, like they offer one additional product that you don't offer, Waikay is going to tell you to make pages all for that product you don't offer because they're going to see that gap, right?
So you're going to have to still know your site well enough to know what you offer and what you do, and have that information, and take that time to get to know your client, get to know the product, get to know the brand.
You're still going to have to do all that same amount of research and strategy. You're just now going to have AI to help you with these tools. So when I get that gap analysis back from them, you still have to look at that information, know it's directional, and see what directions it's giving you that you think are going to be worthwhile for your client.
And that's, again, where the strategist comes in. That's where the humans are still going to be able to make a paycheck. So that's where I really see with that, you know, when you're doing those groupings, when you're doing large tools, how are we going to do that now?
It's funny you mentioned Celeste, because me and her have been talking a lot about how, with really large sites, like B2B SaaS or enterprise sites, we would go about making a tool? How would she go about making a tool that would be able to categorize those entities? It would be able to tell me what Google already thinks those entities are and if they're correct.
Gianluca Fiorelli: This is something that I'm actually vibe coding and testing, which...
Aimee Jurenka: Oh, send it to me.
Gianluca Fiorelli: …is substantially taking the catalog of an eCommerce site and pre-cooking the ontology to feed Claude to make the named entity recognition for entities. Then, from there, creating all the relationships in terms of schema and OWL for the knowledge graph.
Aimee Jurenka: Are you doing an internal knowledge graph on the website?
Gianluca Fiorelli: At least for informational, for working.
Aimee Jurenka: Oh my gosh. Okay. I would love to, tell me all about it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: This is something you can do with, I'm sure you know, WordLift. WordLift offers this kind of solution. Agent WordLift can do these kinds of things, but you can also do it by yourself.
The problem is that tools for creating knowledge graphs have always been super mega enterprise, super, super expensive.
So I'm trying to do it with a small catalog, and the classic Star Wars eCommerce catalog that I use for everything in my talks as an example. And I'm using it also because this is a field that I feel that I know extremely well. I think I know more than the producer of the game.
So I know if Claude or any other tool, because I'm going to test it with the possibility of Claude, of Codex, and Antigravity, to compare them, and from the results, to create a master.
I know I can spot a mistake immediately because I know the catalog very well. And I think that this can be the way, because so we can have a knowledge graph of a product, and we can relate it to extend the knowledge graph and create another knowledge graph for the informational content that is touching the topic.
Aimee Jurenka: Same as an ID.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, or that's why I also use the OWL with triples, classic triples, because triples are better for distinguishing between “sameAs”. It’s identical, but sometimes, for instance, as a silly example, Anakin Skywalker with a minifigure of Star Wars Legends is not exactly the same as Anakin Skywalker the character. “Is a representation of” which is a more typical knowledge graph definition.
So that's why I use both the schema, because I can create the schema for a website to be read by search engines, and AI models; and creating the knowledge graph is also a relatively easy way to then develop, I don't know, things like a branded GPT for selling things using a GPT on ChatGPT, or if you add on something like a Universal Commerce Protocol, you already have the eCommerce ready for agentic commerce.
Beyond LLMs: Preparing for the Future of AI Agents
Aimee Jurenka: Yes. You just brought up MCPs and UCPs. The idea of those just blows my mind, of just so much stuff we can import and move around.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And that’s why, returning to the interview with Sundar, which I really suggest you watch because it's giving us a date.
Aimee Jurenka: What?
Gianluca Fiorelli: It's giving us a date.
Aimee Jurenka: Okay.
Gianluca Fiorelli: 2026 is still going to be, you know, sort of mixed between classic search and AI search. 2027, not clear in which moment, in which quarter, it’s going to be the definitive passage of Google to agentic.
Aimee Jurenka: Oh, wow.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And classic search will be a fallback.
Aimee Jurenka: There you go.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It won't disappear, but it will be... I don't think it's going to be AI Mode. I don't think it's going to be AI Overview. It's going to be something else.
Aimee Jurenka: Really?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Aimee Jurenka: Okay.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I think that we should really watch what's happening with Chrome.
Aimee Jurenka: Okay. I like this idea.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You know, you see this experiment that in AI Mode, clicking on a source opens it. You know that already, with Chrome, you can open two pages in parallel.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So you can compare. In AI Mode, the same mechanism. You are still in AI Mode. You click on a resource, and you see, in parallel, sharing the same screen on Chrome, the page that you clicked.
So you can read it, and you can ask AI Mode, which is Gemini Flash, questions about the webpage you are viewing.
So I think that what is going to be more interesting—more than just watching, in terms of AI Mode, AI Overview—is the container. Chrome is going to be more interesting to watch for things like transactions and commercial stuff in the future, something like booking travel.
Aimee Jurenka: Oh, yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Tickets and so on, or a recurring subscription to a newspaper.
Aimee Jurenka: Hmm. I could see that. That's really cool with the side-by-side. You know, I immediately always want to start with like, okay, how do they see that information? And then how do they organize it?
Because that's kind of how I always think, like the big stuff first, you know? And we're looking at the side of a webpage, and we're looking at the AI, like how do they organize that? Because if we can figure out, it's kind of like the index, how they're organizing stuff, then we can start to really do stuff. You got me excited.
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Breaking the SEO Silo: Collaborating for Growth
Gianluca Fiorelli: And one of the things that we know is that, also, as we were saying before, for brand visibility, a big part of the visibility of a brand is on LLMs or AI Overview, and it’s coming from a third-party site. And many of these third-party sites were historically the responsibility of a team that is not SEO. It is usually the social media team.
And one of the things that has always been a big problem and defect of SEO is that—even though we usually have a source, not all of us, but many of us, as a group, as a professional group, we are really proud of being SEO—we tend to have a sort of inferiority complex sometimes with other professionals in the digital marketing industry because they usually, historically, have the bigger attention. The guys in paid search, the guys on social media.
I mean, for instance, in the news, if something happens, even if they talk about Google, they say Google, as if it were social media. They don't talk about SEO. But on the other side, we are also very proud to be in our own sort of secret community, working and deciding all the things despite all the others.
So this is somehow, especially in the older generation of SEO, a sort of mindset, which made SEO something like, I don't want to use the word, but literally a sect.
This cannot be so anymore because if all the channels are influencing AI search, we cannot just be tearing ourselves apart from collaborating with these other channels.
Eventually, we can even create synergy. They can improve us, and we can improve them. How do you relate to this sort of, let's say, gothic narrative I just shared?
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, well, I mean, SEO wasn't supposed to be a marketing channel. The organic thing was never supposed to be a marketing channel. It's not like they had classes for it. It was never established; it was really rogue that SEOs figured out the puzzle and figured out the game, and then started doing it.
It really, really was undercover. You know, when I started 10 years ago, there were no college classes to take on SEO. It was not offered; it wasn't a thing. It was a profession, but it wasn't something that you could go to school for, right?
And of course, you know, I'm neurodivergent, so I don't have to tell anybody that I just don't like to go to school. I can just get in and get started, right? I know. And yes, come to find out we're all like that. Which explains how it came about, because we all like puzzles, and we all like doing stuff, and we all like getting together and learning.
So there's that side to it. Like when you're saying, "Oh yeah, it's kind of been an undercover thing, kind of almost like our own little community, that now is kind of going to go away." We can't operate in a silo anymore because I feel AI search, or AI surfaces, is a whole shift, a whole shift in users, like an entire dimensional shift. So some people are calling it search everywhere optimization.
But I think really, for me, I'm like a really heavy content SEO; it's going to be like, well, brand and product. Brand and products run what I do because everything I need to create needs to be in line with that.
You know, everything on the website needs to be in line with that. We're going to need to update all the webpages that are aligned with that, all the domains we own aligned with that. And that's where I think the big chunk of work is going to come from in the beginning, doing that for brand and product.
But yes, that synergy of like, “Hey, we need to work together", I think there's always the "hey" when you start, at least when I start with an enterprise or a larger company. I try to figure out what everybody else's bonus structure is, or what their goals are, or what their KPIs are.
And be able to tell them, “Hey, we collaborate on this project; I bring SEO in before you decide to launch this new site or do a migration with no redirects. Here's all the value I can offer. Here are the things that we'll offer if you do bring us into this project, if we do this collaboration together”, and we'll see how that works.
Because sometimes it's like, well, we get bonuses off of this X, Y, and Z. And if you're our competition and we collaborate with you, then how do we figure out who gets their bonuses at the end?
So I think it's going to be that sort of give and take, that sort of pull in those organizations when you're trying to figure out who gets credit for what and how we're going to share that credit, if we're going to share that credit. Because that's always been the thing: they want to know exactly what comes from what.
Well, that's not going to be the case anymore with AI search. They're going to pull from Reddit, and they're going to pull from Instagram, and you're going to have stuff pulled from YouTube and you're going to have stuff pulled from over here.
The social and that third-party and that PR is going to get pulled in the same way as our organic content that we make on site.
So, you know, how that's all going to play out, right? Who knows? Because we're talking about people's money, so we'll see. But I do believe we're going to see a massive restructuring of that. I do think at the end there's going to be a restructuring of that because we don't have separate channels any longer. We’re not going to have.
Gianluca Fiorelli: No, I think everything is going to be formalized in something that already exists, which is, if we think in organigrams, in organizational schema, something like we have the C-level stakeholders, the head of growth, and under growth, we are going to have, at the same level, all the other channels.
We probably still have something like a head of SEO and AI search, but the real orchestrator is going to be the growth manager, who is a figure that already exists and is more strategic.
And I think that maybe, yes, SEO didn't really start as a marketing discipline.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But I always considered it marketing. Because, I mean, if the SERPs are substantially a billboard, you have to communicate something. Even if it's just a search snippet, you have to communicate, and you have to be consistent with what you communicate and what people find.
That's why, many years ago, I was already talking about search experience optimization. But yes, maybe the biggest revolution is that all of a sudden, many, many, many people, also the ones who were more reluctant to this consideration, understood that SEO is also a marketing channel.
And for winning in SEO and AI search, because for me, they are substantially the same thing, or in the future, they are going to be the same thing…
Aimee Jurenka: It's all one pie. Yes
Gianluca Fiorelli: …you have to do good marketing, good technical marketing.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes. And I think, as SEOs, now with AI search, it's our time. Because it's so hot. It's the buzzword. Everybody wants AI, AI search, and everyone's talking about it. How are you going to do it? And all that sort of stuff.
I think it's our time to shine. You know? We could really go in and either pivot our career or transition our career, or if you're a junior, be able to get leveled up in your career by being a leader for C-levels, for leadership, because they don't know what to do, and they want somebody to come in and tell them what to do.
And so I think that's really our golden opportunity to do. And also now, it's all just SEO people. All those SEO dev tickets that got on the back burner all these years. Because my experience is, those do not get prioritized, right? They want something new and shiny. We're new and shiny right now.
Relabel all those tickets, relabel all those tickets, and resubmit them for AI search, and you'll get the whole technical backlog that you've been wanting for SEO taken care of. Just saying, it's a great opportunity for us.
Gianluca Fiorelli: There is a saying: if you put something on the second page, nobody's going to see it. But the person who invented that phrase didn't know Jira. Because if you put an SEO task at the bottom of all the tasks for the 15 days, it is immediately going to be another 15 days.
Aimee Jurenka: Yep.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Obviously, usually product and devs push the SEO task to the bottom.
Aimee Jurenka: Yep.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And so I remember a task that, because of this, took exactly one year to be solved. And when it was solved and I told them that I solved it my way.
Personal Passions: From AI Ecosystems to 100-Year-Old Houses
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, Aimee. Almost done. One hour. So let's stop talking about the AI future and present of search. Let's talk a little bit about you.
First of all, are people going to see you at some conferences in the next month?
Aimee Jurenka: Yes, I'm going to be in Women in Tech SEO in Portland. I'm going to be presenting my topic entity strategy and the site structure for that. So it's just a piece of the strategy and how people are able to basically just, you can go back and start applying this now. So that's going to be amazing.
Women in Tech SEO has just been fantastic for me over the last couple years, and I've really been able to make some great relationships out of that and really find a fantastic community there.
So that's the one that I'm scheduled to talk at. That's the one pitch that got accepted so far this year. You know, we will see as time goes on what other opportunities come up or what I can find. But so far, Women in Tech SEO Portland in May, that's where I'm going to be.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Perfect. And when you are not thinking about AI, when you are not thinking about vibe coding some new tool, what does Aimee love to do?
Aimee Jurenka: Work on my house. My husband and I have been remodeling our home since we started dating 17 years ago.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s like building a cathedral.
Aimee Jurenka: Yes. Well, yeah, you don't stop, right? So it's a house over a hundred years old in Seattle, one of those Craftsman houses.
So, you know, it had years and years and years of layers of plaster and knob-and-tube and everything like that. And as time's gone on, we've been able to, I'm trying to think, we've ripped out almost all the walls in here and redone them.
So down to the electrical, you know, we've put in the heating vents, we did all that stuff, but we really like to do a lot of the work ourselves. And we really like to do the decoration. We really like our things and our trinkets, and coming up with an idea and working on it.
Like some couples travel. Some couples go out to fancy restaurants. We go to estate sales and junkyards to be able to find cheap secondhand stuff that we can repurpose in our house.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Have you thought about creating a vlog with all these 17 years of work and maybe even 17 years more?
Aimee Jurenka: No, I haven't thought about it.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You can be a wonderful creator.
Aimee Jurenka: You know, it would be, because it's kind of a thing in our neighborhood. It's an older neighborhood, and until not too long ago, it was like the last affordable neighborhood in Seattle.
And so you could come in, and they were fixer-uppers, and a lot of us fixed up our house. So yes, there's a cool community around that, and we get a lot of help from them. We swap stories and trade what we have, like the tools that we can lend to each other, because a lot of that cuts down on the cost.
But yes, I could do a whole blog. The kitchen that we did a couple of years ago is, so far, our masterpiece. So every once in a while, like on a LinkedIn post or whatever, I'll put the kitchen in the background just because I want somebody to compliment me.
So yes, it's fun. It's our thing. So much so that we just bought a vacation property to basically start all over and do that up there as well. So that's what we're looking towards in our future.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay. Okay, so fingers crossed that you are not going to have too many years ahead of working on your house so you can enjoy it without thinking about what's next.
Aimee Jurenka: I always think about what's next. As soon as it's done, it's time to start over again. Because I just am like, what? Do we want to do the garden? Okay. That hedge needs to come out. Let's do a privacy screen.
This was my kid's room growing up, and as soon as he went to college, I'm like, we're switching rooms. I was down in the basement and got up here. What theme are we doing? What stuff are we going to do? Where are we going to go? What are we going to paint it? You know, let's redo the closet as a work desk for me.
It never ends. It's really, really my passion. It's really fun. And as I said, my husband loves to do it too, so that's our favorite thing to do on a Sunday.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You're lucky in that sense. Okay, Aimee, it was a huge, huge pleasure to have this conversation with you, and I'm sure all the people listening and watching you agree with me.
Aimee Jurenka: This was great. I'm so happy you invited me to come on the show. It's been amazing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you, and thanks to all of you who had the patience to listen to us until this moment. Let me do the classic YouTuber sales influencer, and remember to subscribe to the channel and help us make it grow. Ring the bell to be notified whenever a new episode pops up. Thank you and bye-bye.
Aimee Jurenka: Bye.
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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