Business
Jason Berkowitz, SEO Director & Founder of Break The Web, joins Austin Willman on E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what's actually working in SEO and AI visibility right now, and what most brands are completely missing.
Jason shares how his agency built Hugen, an in-house AI LLM visibility tracker that monitors brand mentions and sentiment across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. He breaks down why brand sentiment in AI platforms is becoming one of the most important signals to track, and how his team uses an open source model to score responses at scale across thousands of daily prompts.
The conversation covers the real state of off-page SEO and digital PR in the AI era, why certain content formats are now being cited as sources by LLMs, and how e-commerce brands should be thinking about product data, Google Merchant Center, and agentic commerce following Google IO.
Jason also opens up about agency operations, how he uses AI as an assistant rather than an advisor, why he tells some prospects to spend their budget on paid ads instead of SEO, and how thought leadership and community have been his most reliable growth channels.
If you work in-house at a brand or run an agency, this episode is packed with practical perspective on where SEO is heading and how to stay ahead.
Get Your Exclusive AIO Growth Plan - We’ll kick off with a Live AIO Audit to see how shoppers find you, followed by Competitor Research to steal their spotlight: https://lunacal.ai/team/dws/dws-meetings
In this episode, we discuss:
00:00 - 00:46 Introduction
00:46 - 02:33 Off-Page SEO & Digital PR Strategy
02:33 - 04:35 Building Hugen: The AI Visibility Tracker
04:35 - 06:36 Tracking Brand Sentiment in LLMs
06:36 - 09:51 What Actually Influences AI Sentiment
09:51 - 12:06 AI Over-Reliance & Finding the Balance
12:06 - 15:53 E-Commerce SEO After Google IO
15:53 - 18:23 Optimizing for Humans vs. Algorithms
18:23 - 22:16 Writing Copy That Speaks to Your ICP
22:16 - 25:01 How the Agency Uses AI Internally
25:01 - 27:12 When SEO Works and When It Doesn't
27:12 - 30:27 Managing Client Expectations & Resources
30:27 - 33:21 How Break The Web Finds New Clients
33:21 - 35:05 Thought Leadership & Closing Thoughts
Connect with Jason Berkowitz
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonberkowitzseo/
https://breaktheweb.agency
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