Neil Patel: SEO Is Dead — Here's What's Actually Driving Revenue Now

🎧 Listen now to hear how Neil thinks about personal brand versus corporate brand, when to expand versus when you’re just creating feature creep, and why he believes the only real moat left in business is brand.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np9uJ_EMPS4

Before Neil Patel was running a thousand person agency doing $100M a year, he was a young consultant sitting across from General Motors telling them their ad budget had no ROI.

They told him to spend it anyway.

If you don’t use the quarterly budget, you lose it next quarter. That’s just how it works. Spend it or lose it.

He pushed back. Said he couldn’t in good conscience recommend spending money that wasn’t returning anything. Lost the account. Then lost a few more for saying the same thing.

Most people would have learned to keep their mouth shut. Neil decided the clients were wrong.

That stubbornness is what built everything that came after. And it’s the same lens he brought to our conversation when I asked him about SEO.

His take was blunt. Most of the SEO traffic that AI is killing right now never drove any revenue in the first place. The blog post ranking for banana nutrition facts. The how-to guide getting half a million visits a month. Beautiful numbers in a report. Nearly zero dollars in the bank. The person who needed that answer got it and left. They were never going to buy anything. AI just made it free and instant and now they don’t even visit the website.

What agencies were selling for years was traffic. Not customers. Those are very different things and the bill is finally coming due.

Here’s what hasn’t died and won’t.

When someone types “who is the best investor-friendly real estate agent in Houston” into any platform, that person is not browsing. They are about to make a decision and write a check. That search is happening on Google, on ChatGPT, on Gemini, on Perplexity, on Yelp. All at once. The question is whether you show up when they go looking.

Neil broke down exactly how you get there.

It starts with specificity on your own website. Not “real estate agent in Houston.” Something closer to “I specialize in finding cash-flow positive investment properties for out-of-state buyers, I’ve closed 40 deals in the last 18 months, and here is what my clients typically look for and why I’m the right fit for them.” LLMs scrape the web looking for context. The more precisely you describe who you serve and what you deliver, the more there is to pull from when someone asks a relevant question.

Then you get that same specificity mentioned everywhere else. Guest articles on local and industry publications. Reviews on Yelp, Google, G2 if you’re B2B. Digital PR. Getting quoted. Every third party mention that describes you with that same level of detail feeds the same machine.

And here’s the one that surprised me most. Ranking on page one of Google still matters, not because of the click, but because ChatGPT scrapes Google’s top results more aggressively than any other source. The correlation between a page one Google ranking and a ChatGPT mention is stronger than almost anything else Neil has tested.

The old game and the new game are more connected than most people realize.

The through line across all of it is the same question Neil has been asking since he walked out of that General Motors meeting. Is this actually driving revenue? Not traffic. Not impressions. Not a beautiful dashboard. Revenue. Everything else is a story you’re telling yourself.

Here’s to marketing that closes deals,

Leo

P.S. We also got into the year Neil burned millions trying to build cloud infrastructure before AWS existed, the investor who replaced him with a CEO that hired his girlfriend for $50K to redo a logo, and why he turned down a $100K speaking fee to teach his son how to ride a bike instead.