The SEO move that used to get your link stripped out is now the exact thing AI search engines reward most. An SEO lead breaks down why zero-data tracking hasn't stopped smart teams from measuring their AI visibility anyway.
Backlinks were supposed to matter less once AI started answering search questions directly. Harley Helmer says something closer to the opposite is happening: brand mentions that never earned a link at all are becoming one of the strongest signals a company can send to ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Mode.
Harley leads SEO at Americaneagle.com, where his team is building AI-search tracking from scratch, since no platform currently reports how often a given prompt gets asked.
In this episode, Harley details a four-quadrant framework for tracking branded and non-branded AI prompts, explains why repeating the same brand message across social, Wikipedia, and third-party sites now outweighs saying it once on your own site, and covers Google's new crackdown on exact-match anchor text backlinks. He also makes a call: Gemini and AI Mode will out-use ChatGPT by year's end.
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3 Takeaways:
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:16) Why Prompt Tracking Matters Now
(03:06) A Framework for Tracking Prompts
(05:17) Offsite Signals for LLMs
(06:43) How to Make Your Site Agent-Friendly
(08:10) Backlinks Still Win
(09:14) Google's Crackdown on Link Spam
(10:42) Gemini vs. ChatGPT: Who's Winning?
(11:35) Who to Follow in MarTech Right Now
About the Guest:
Harley Helmer's path into SEO wasn't a straight line — he trained as a pastry chef and ran the pastry program at a well-known Chicago-suburb restaurant before deciding kitchen life wasn't the long-term fit. He moved into internet marketing and built a career on the same standard: prove real value for the people he's working for, not just theory. Today he works as a SEO Team Lead, AmericanEagle.com, where he helps clients define what their marketing strategy should actually look like and backs it up with hands-on execution experience.
Connect:
Harley Helmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harley-helmer/
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Americaneagle.com: http://www.americaneagle.com
Sara: [00:00:00] I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
Harley: Backlinks are still as relevant as ever, and the reason for that is because Google is still, by and large, where product discovery happens. All that we know is Google has spent billions and billions and billions of dollars to develop this system. It makes sense that they're gonna recycle some great technology. The message there is don't bet against Google.
Sara: That's Harley Helmer, SEO team lead at Americaneagle.com. Let's get started.
All right, Harley, I am so excited to talk to you today. I've been really looking forward to this episode because the last time you and I met, you were doing a session about AEO, SEO, GEO, any kind of acronym you want, but in the SEO world, and I know that this is a topic that's really gonna resonate with our audience, and you have so many interesting things to say.
[00:01:00] I don't even know where to start. I guess my question to you is, if somebody is looking today, they've been doing a lot of work from an SEO perspective, but they're thinking, "I probably should think about SEO, EEO, AEO, GEO," what would you tell them just to start with?
Harley: Tracking is a great place to start. If you don't measure something, you can't improve on it. The other area that I would say — and I would also caveat this, there's a lot of "is it beneficial, is it not beneficial" debate — but some form of prompt tracking. There are a litany of tools out there now that do some form of prompt tracking.
All of it boils down to: if it's not measured, it can't be improved in any way, shape, or form. What we've found so far is the best way to get a sense for how you're doing with the prompt tracking in particular is to try to understand a share of voice between competitors.
So, as we know, a prompt could [00:02:00] be said in a million different ways, and even if you do happen to get the same prompt twice, the answer is different every time, and there's all kinds [Sara: Right.] of studies on how AI systems are even designed to do that. But the fact of the matter is, if you start tracking something now, four months, six months, eight months down the road, you will have trend data on at least some sort of data set that you can begin to look at.
And so that's where I think from an agency perspective, that's where we're leaning: anyone that even says that they may have an interest or are concerned with AI and LLM tracking, they say, "Okay, let's figure out something to track so we can track it now. And maybe the SEO work that we're doing will have a positive impact on that, or maybe we will need to define specific tactics that are for addressing the things that we're tracking within the tracking software."
Sara: I think everybody should be doing just as you've said, but how would a company make sure [00:03:00] that they're not just looking in a mirror saying, "I think this is the prompt my customer uses"?
Harley: The way that we kind of approach prompt tracking is trying to understand branded versus non-branded, and then kind of like an awareness versus non-awareness of the product.
So non-branded, not aware would be a prompt or question about a particular topic. Maybe we're talking about Sitefinity — it's people who are not aware of what Sitefinity is, and so they're doing a general prompt on a CMS, or one of the great things that Sitefinity does, and it's unbranded, so there's no brand. But then there might be a branded version of that question: Is Sitefinity a good CMS for X? And then you can get into some competitor — would Sitefinity be considered an alternative to another brand? And so we try to kind of [00:04:00] break it up into those four quadrants — branded, unaware, non-branded, aware — and mix and match those, and then you can take a handful of questions and iterate that question through each of those four groups.
And then again, there's that trend data of: okay, at the beginning of the year, you weren't showing up at all. [Sara: Right.] And now midyear, you're showing up 50% of the time, but you're consistently showing up below these other websites.
Sara: Right.
Harley: And so then you can start to understand, okay, now we're seeing some trend data — we have an understanding of when we type this general type of question of "who is the best implementation partner," we can start to see consistency, and then you can test for: okay, maybe now we wanna put content on our website about it, or maybe there's one website that's a third-party data aggregator that we could potentially influence by getting content on their website about it. We could put a [00:05:00] press release about it. So you have the ability to sort of isolate, but again, this is much more — I mean, we always say SEO is a long-term play, but I think even this is even longer term, because you gotta have that time to understand trends.
Sara: One of the things that you kind of touched on were some of the — placing some of that content offsite, off of your own domain. Can you talk a little bit about what those signals are for offsite brand versus onsite, and how that kind of varies between traditional SEO and how we think about SEO today with AI involved?
Harley: What's interesting is it seems as though AI systems are much more aggressive about general population sentiment, and overall repetition almost. And so while your website is one place where you can get this particular message out, [00:06:00] it's — in contrast, it's bad for SEO to repeat the same message over and over and over again on your website from a cannibalization perspective. Whereas LLMs, they're looking at social media, they're looking at data aggregators, they're looking at Wikipedia, they're looking at your website, they're looking at all of these different places. So if you have the opportunity, take one message on your website and tweak it for social, and tweak it again for maybe your data aggregator, and tweak it again for a different platform. And then you're getting the same message, the same repetition, but across multiple surfaces, which is attractive to LLMs.
Sara: How do you think about agentic searches — meaning, if in one area we are optimizing content for humans and human ingestion, and then in the next we have to think about what the agent's going to want to [00:07:00] read or what it will pick up on, and that would be more on your own site. What are your thoughts on that? How do you create a presence that's very innately human, but also accessible to agents?
Harley: So I would say from that perspective, there is a massive technical gap that I think web designers and web developers are going to have to understand — how agents, what agents need in order to interact with websites. I would say where the misconception comes in is it's not anything necessarily new. If you actually look at the WCAG standards for accessibility, they're very similar. So I would say if you are concerned about agentic navigation — how agents interact with your websites — go look at ADA compliance and the WCAG standards and pay attention there, because it's very similar to what I've started to [00:08:00] understand about how some of these agents are working, and how it compares to that particular aspect of website design and development.
Sara: When you think about, back in the early days of SEO, everybody needed backlinks, and you didn't necessarily know how many you needed or where you needed them to be, but you knew you needed a lot of them — maybe some people had it more dialed in than that — but with LLM discoverability, or being surfaced in your favorite AI-powered answer engine, does that strategy change?
Harley: I would say backlinks are still as relevant as ever. And the reason for that is because Google is still, by and large, where product discovery happens. That's a lot of how Google uses, or how Google determines, quality — or at the very least, popularity. And in conjunction with that, AI Mode and Gemini both use some of Google's ranking [00:09:00] systems. Now, obviously, they don't say which ones, otherwise we would figure out how to exploit them. All that we know is Google has spent billions and billions and billions of dollars to develop this system. It makes sense that they're gonna recycle some great technology.
And then there's one thing that I will add to that. Interestingly enough, Google has officially updated their — I don't remember offhand if it's their spam documentation or exactly where they put it — but when they are analyzing for link spam, so backlink spam, now they are looking for websites that have a high ratio of specific anchor text links. So if every time I have a backlink it's "SEO services" or "best SEO services" on another website [Sara: Right.] and it's linked to Americaneagle.com, they're saying, "Okay, why do you have 27,000 backlinks that only say SEO services?" A more [Sara: Right.] natural backlink would be, "Get your SEO services at Americaneagle.com," website link.
Sara: Right. Right, right, right. Or the brand name is linked.
Harley: [Sara: Yeah.] And so we're actually even seeing Google slowly start to cinch down on all the SEOs who are like, "Oh, we need exact match anchor text for all of these different keyword phrases linking to our key pages." Well, a normal person that's not thinking about SEO would say, "Americaneagle.com link did great SEO work." [00:10:00]
When we're talking about content and context with LLMs, they read the whole picture of: okay, this is an email about this thing, and we're talking about this brand, and it's in this context with this particular implementation of Sitefinity. So it kind of goes a step beyond — we're seeing a shift in both spaces.
Sara: That is great. That's great insight. Would you have a hot take right now in this space?
Harley: Maybe not a hot take, but at the beginning [Sara: Okay.] of the year, I was approached by — oh my goodness — WarpStream, the major PPC company, and they were doing a kind of expert roundup of predictions.
Sara: Yeah.
Harley: And I predicted that Gemini would match or overtake ChatGPT by the end of this year. And it just came out in the last month that Gemini and AI Mode have both matched ChatGPT's usage. [00:11:00] And so my guess would be by the end of the year, both AI Mode and Gemini usage will surpass ChatGPT. So the message there is: don't bet against Google.
Sara: There you go. Well, that is a hot take. That's a good one, and I will actually follow up with you in another four months and see if your prognosis is correct. One last question: Who do you follow for inspiration or information?
Harley: I am a huge fan of Will Reynolds with Seer Interactive. They're an SEO agency, but Will is very forward-thinking on AI and LLMs. I love the fact that Will is also straightforward. I was at a conference that he spoke at last year, and kind of his opening line was, "Don't do [00:12:00] crappy marketing for the sake of SEO. Do great marketing first." I'm very much aligned with that — that's the one that sticks out to me. There are so many great people that I follow constantly — Lily Ray and a handful of others — that are great for just sharing what's going on and how to be thinking about this into the future.
Sara: Well, Harley, it is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time today.
Harley: Yeah, absolutely. Super, super fun.
Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.