FULL - SEO Didn’t Die. The Machines Changed. | Andrew Shotland on AI Visibility

SEO is not disappearing. The systems doing the discovering, interpreting, and recommending are changing. Andrew Shotland, founder and CEO of Local SEO Guide, joins Jason AI Wade for a practical conversation about what happens when traditional SEO collides with ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, local search, citations, entity signals, and agentic automation. Andrew’s core framing is simple: SEO has always been about making it easy for a machine to understand what a business does and when it should be recommended. That part has not changed. The machines have. The conversation moves quickly into what that means in practice. For local businesses, Andrew argues that merely repeating “we are a plumber” is not enough. The stronger opportunity is to distribute specific attributes—water heater replacement, storm drains, service areas, specialties—across the business’s own site and the third-party pages that AI systems may use as evidence. He shares a particularly useful experiment involving a 160-location company. His team identified a search-intent gap around construction job-site bathrooms, added that concept to the Google Business Profiles and citation ecosystem for 20 test locations, and saw visibility move in Google AI Mode within days. Later, the same test group began gaining visibility in ChatGPT, while the untouched locations initially remained flat. Then something more interesting happened: roughly a month later, visibility began increasing across the wider location network as well. Andrew’s working theory was that enough pages had associated the brand with the concept that the relationship began applying more broadly to the entity. The episode also covers competitor-adjacent content, conversational search paths, local citations, corroboration, automation, content gaps, and why the right operating model for AI-era search is not a perfect master plan. It is testing. Andrew compares it to baseball: even elite hitters fail most of the time. The advantage comes from taking enough intelligent swings to discover what actually moves visibility. Andrew Shotland Founder and CEO of Local SEO Guide. Andrew has worked in search for roughly two decades and focuses on local SEO, AEO, multi-location search, and how Google and AI systems understand and recommend businesses. He describes the current moment as one of the most interesting periods in search in at least a decade, driven by the rapid shift from traditional search-result ranking toward AI-mediated discovery and recommendation. The current state of SEO SEO vs. AI Visibility Local SEO in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode Entity understanding and corroboration Local citations as AI signals Service and attribute distribution Content-gap analysis Competitor-adjacent content Agentic SEO and automation Multi-location experimentation Why AI visibility requires testing How search behavior is becoming conversational Local SEO Guide https://www.localseoguide.com/ Andrew Shotland on LinkedIn Search Andrew Shotland on LinkedIn — he identifies it as his primary social platform and the place where he publishes most frequently. AI Visibility Podcast BackTier