The Edward Show

E1184: Jacky Chou and David Quaid sit down for a wide-ranging conversation about where SEO still makes money in 2026, what Jacky would build today, and why he thinks most indie hackers leave huge opportunities on the table.
Jacky's opening argument is simple: find SaaS products already making money, build a competing product, then use SEO and paid distribution to beat founders who know how to code but do not know how to market.
From there, the conversation goes deep into SaaS, affiliate SEO, parasite SEO, Reddit, ChatGPT, listicles, backlinks, partial-match domains, offsite SEO, and what Jacky would do if he had to start from zero again.
In this episode:
- Why Jacky says SaaS is the biggest SEO opportunity right now
- How he finds indie hacker apps with proven revenue, rebuilds the idea, and attacks the search demand around it
- Why marketers now have an advantage when AI makes software much easier to build
- How Jacky replaced a $600/month rank tracker with his own tool and sold it as a lifetime deal
- Why he launches constantly instead of betting everything on one business
- How some of his older income streams fell roughly 90%, and why that changed how he thinks about diversification
- Why he believes traditional SEO display-ad sites have largely disappeared while affiliate SEO still works
- Why "best X" and other buyer-intent searches still produce revenue even with AI Overviews
- Why Jacky barely checks Google Search Console unless revenue drops
- How he validates new products with paid ads instead of waiting for SEO
- Why he thinks many AI SEO tools fail because their creators do not actually understand SEO
- Why he says Reddit spam became much harder, and why buying established subreddits entered the playbook
- How Jacky thinks Google's preference for high-authority sites creates more opportunities for parasite SEO
- Why he believes listicles remain one of the strongest ways to influence what ChatGPT cites and recommends
- Why he thinks ChatGPT and Google are becoming less dependent on the same underlying results
- Why Jacky prefers partial-match domains and puts more energy into offsite SEO than onsite SEO
- How David thinks about expired domains, backlinks, clicks, and authority
- Why both of them think SEOs overcomplicate Google
- What Jacky would do if he had to start over today
- How he took a new iOS app from $0 to about $1,000/month in its first month through search
- Why Jacky says the fastest way to learn SEO is to stop reading, start testing, and keep launching
Jacky and David also get into the economics behind SEO software, Meta retargeting, programmatic SEO, site reputation abuse, Forbes, buyer's guides, and why execution beats waiting for the perfect idea.
If you work in SEO, build software, run affiliate sites, or want to use search to launch your own products, this episode gives you a direct look at how Jacky Chou and David Quaid approach SEO in 2026.
⭐️ Jacky Chou on 𝕏 - https://x.com/indexsy 
⭐️ Jack Chou's website - https://jackychou.com/ 
⭐️ Jacky Chou on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@indexsy 
⭐️ David Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ David Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Jackie and David Join
01:17 Biggest SEO Opportunity SaaS
05:35 Affiliate and Ads Reality
08:27 From Consulting to SaaS
13:08 AI Tools and Indie Hackers
17:28 Sprint Before AI Loop
24:15 Launch Fast and Iterate
26:18 Replacing Tools and Paid Ads
32:05 Google Spam and Parasites
34:43 Reddit Spam and Sub Markets
39:46 Buying Subreddits Pricing
42:39 Build vs Buy Communities
43:20 Buyer Guides vs Listicles
44:38 LLMs Splitting from Google
45:56 Spamming ChatGPT Citations
47:29 Forbes and Reputation Abuse
49:59 Entrepreneur Paths for Engineers
52:17 SEO Learn by Doing
54:22 Modern SEO Frameworks
56:12 Parasite SEO and Offsite Focus
01:00:22 Indexers and User Signals
01:04:39 Parasite Deals and Economics
01:09:07 Building Multiple Brands
01:13:04 Viral Growth and Fraud
01:19:04 Nord Tactic and Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#searchengineoptimization #seo #indiehackers #buildinpublic

E1183: ChatGPT is building more of its own search index, and that changes where SEO goes next.
David G. Quaid joins me to break down what OpenAI appears to be doing, how its cached web content starts to function like an index, and what SEOs need to understand if ChatGPT relies less on Google and Bing over time.
OpenAI has already discussed a long-term goal of serving most search traffic from its own first-party index. David explains why the change may already be happening: repeatedly fetching the same pages in real time costs too much, takes too long, and creates unnecessary dependence on traditional search engines.
We get into:
- Why ChatGPT's cache increasingly resembles its own search index
- OpenAI's stated goal of serving more searches from first-party indexed content
- Why the same small group of pages can receive tens of thousands of AI crawl requests
- How Common Crawl fits into ChatGPT's search infrastructure
- Why ranking #1 in Google does not automatically mean more visibility in ChatGPT
- How LLMs use query fan-out to retrieve multiple documents
- Why consensus across multiple sources matters more than being position #1
- How OpenAI could use Google for occasional quality checks instead of every search
- Why OpenAI does not need to recreate Google's exact ranking order
- Why Google's decades of spam-fighting experience still give it an advantage
- How quickly OpenAI could copy major search-engine concepts once SEOs expose weaknesses
- Why exact-match domains and separate satellite sites become interesting in AI search
- How fabricated awards, press releases, and repeated claims across multiple websites influence AI answers
- What the King of AEO experiments reveal about how easily AI systems accept manufactured consensus
- Why targeting less competitive query fan-outs creates more opportunities
- Why David still says doing strong Google SEO gives you the best foundation for AI visibility
We also discuss another major change happening in SEO: traditional rank tracking is getting less reliable.
Google's personalization and recent search changes increasingly create situations where rank trackers report positions that do not match what users actually see. David and I discuss why Google Search Console may become the real source of truth and why more SEOs may eventually build their own tracking systems around the Search Console API.
Other topics include:
- Whether traditional SERP trackers face an existential problem
- Why impressions can fall while clicks stay flat
- Google's increasing personalization of search results
- Why newer SEOs suffer most when ranking data becomes less reliable
- Why schema does not create authority simply because you declare an entity
- Why Google's Knowledge Graph does not require schema to understand a person or brand
- Why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity produce very different answers despite working from overlapping web information
- Why Google Images also prefers source diversity instead of showing one domain repeatedly
The biggest takeaway: even if ChatGPT builds its own index, the fundamentals do not suddenly disappear. It still needs to discover pages, decide which sources belong in its retrieval set, compare competing claims, and synthesize an answer. Optimize for Google and you land the most simultaneous high-value wins.
⭐️ David Quaid on 𝕏 - https://x.com/DavidGQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidquaid/ 
⭐️ David Quaid on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@DavidQuaid 
⭐️ David Quaid's agency - https://primaryposition.com/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 LLMs Building Indexes
00:51 Crawl Inefficiency Signals
02:37 Caching Becomes Index
03:20 King Of AEO Experiments
05:24 Common Crawl Shift
07:42 OpenAI Index Evidence
10:00 Schema And Knowledge Graph
13:23 Authority Without Browser Data
18:50 SEO Spam And Digg Moment
21:35 Preparing For LLM Indexing
26:20 Rank Trackers Breaking
32:01 Flying Blind On ROI
35:01 Why This Episode
35:52 Guest Debate Fallout
36:15 LLMs Building Indexes
37:39 Why Reddit YouTube Drop
42:17 Caching Over Live Fetch
44:25 Consensus Not Ranking
46:11 Early AI Spam Loopholes
48:05 Google vs Gemini Output
48:56 Fake Awards Gray Hat
51:50 Calling Out GEO Grifters
55:23 SEO Agency Horror Story
59:19 Variance Across Sources
01:00:54 Wrap Up Next Episode
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #seo

E1182: AEO companies keep presenting old SEO tactics as if AI search invented them.
Harpreet Singh joins me to break down what is actually different about AEO/GEO, what is simply traditional SEO with new terminology, and where companies are wasting time because they do not understand the history of search.
We start with the tactics now getting promoted on AI search conference stages: keywords in URLs, FAQs, meta descriptions, paragraphs, press releases, solution pages, listicles, and other concepts SEOs have used for years. Harpreet explains why removing the historical context around these tactics leads companies to overuse them and damage their search strategy.
Then we get into what is genuinely changing.
Harpreet walks through how he analyzes query fan-out, including ChatGPT searches that use site: operators to pull information from Gartner, G2, Capterra, and other third-party sources. For some brands, optimizing those profiles matters more than publishing another page on their own site.
We also talk about how difficult competitive AI visibility becomes when an LLM already associates established brands with a category. If a company spent 10 years being known as a mid-market product and suddenly wants to become an enterprise brand, changing a few pages will not rewrite that positioning. The company needs consistent signals across its own site, third-party profiles, reviews, media, creators, press, and search results.
In this episode:
- Why Harpreet says AEO companies are selling 2016 SEO
- Old SEO tactics getting repackaged as new AI search tactics
- Why SEO remains the foundation of AI visibility
- What query fan-out actually changes about keyword research
- Why Gartner, G2, Capterra, Reddit, YouTube, and other third-party sources matter
- How to optimize third-party profiles for the positioning you want LLMs to understand
- Why industry pages matter more as AI results become personalized
- How Harpreet tracks prompts like keywords instead of tracking endless prompt variations
- Why he ignores top-of-funnel AI citations that do not connect to revenue
- How to attack hyper-competitive terms such as "best email marketing software"
- Why solution pages and listicles still matter
- How reviews, press releases, influencers, and outside websites create consensus around a brand
- Why moving a brand from mid-market to enterprise creates an AI visibility problem
- How New Balance can outrank Nike and Adidas with basic category-page SEO
- Why enterprise SEO is often much worse than people assume
- Why creator-led AEO still has an attribution problem
- The simple "How did you hear about us?" field Harpreet uses to track AI-driven customers
- Why cheap press releases still influence AI answers
- Why AI search optimization remains a game of Whac-A-Mole
- Why search optimization does not disappear even if AI companies build their own indexes
The biggest point: AI search changes the surfaces and the retrieval process, but it does not erase the fundamentals. Relevance, authority, positioning, third-party validation, keyword targeting, internal linking, and strong pages still determine what gets found and trusted.
Harpreet Singh joins me for a 90-minute breakdown of what serious AI search optimization looks like once you strip away the new labels.
⭐️ Harpreet Singh's Personal Site - https://harpsdigital.com  
⭐️ Harpreet on X - https://x.com/harpreetchatha_ 
⭐️ Harpreet's Newsletter - https://seoespresso.com 
⭐️ Harpreet on LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/harpreetsingh8/ 
⭐️ Harpreet on TikTok - https://tiktok.com/@seoharp 
⭐️ Harpreet on YouTube - https://youtube.com/@harpsdigital  
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 AEO and GEO Repackaging
01:27 Conference Speaker Concerns
04:14 Misleading Studies and Statistics
07:02 Debating AEO Tactics
08:47 Business Expansion Beyond AEO
10:57 Current AEO Sprint Work
13:24 Press Releases and Parasite SEO
15:41 Versus Pages Strategy
17:06 Industry Pages and Personalization
19:28 Query Fan Out Analysis
23:34 Profile Optimization Tactics
25:37 Award Winning Strategies
26:37 Brand Reviews Domain Tactic
28:13 Small Business Advantages
29:38 Tools and Tech Stack
30:34 Prompt Tracking Strategy
32:23 Hyper Competitive Keywords Approach
39:40 Brand Repositioning Challenges
43:26 AI Has Picked Winners
46:00 New Balance SEO Example
48:53 Fixing Page Copy
49:29 Internal Links Win
50:35 Enterprise SEO Fails
54:28 Why Copy Moves Rankings
56:29 Small Brands Need More
58:54 What AEO Talks Miss
01:00:34 Creator Led AEO ROI
01:07:27 Attribution Workarounds
01:09:10 Reputation and Affiliates
01:13:48 Small Business AEO Playbook
01:16:40 Press Releases Game AI
01:28:09 Why SEO Never Dies
01:29:41 Wrap Up and Where to Find
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/ 
#generativeengineoptimization #answerengineoptimization #searchengineoptimization #seo

E1181: I break down six SEO habits that marketers and site owners use to grow traffic without chasing a new tactic every week.
These came from a popular SEO Growth subreddit thread where people shared the habits that made the biggest difference for them. I go through the best responses, explain why they work, and show you how to take each one further.
In this episode:
- Export Google Search Console data every month and study what Google tells you. Look at which queries generate impressions, where your pages rank, which pages get clicks, and where the gaps are.
- Separate keywords into covered and uncovered opportunities. Covered keywords tell you which existing pages deserve updates. Uncovered keywords tell you what new pages to create. This also reduces unnecessary overlap between pages targeting similar searches.
- Refresh old content instead of constantly publishing new pages. Update outdated information, tighten search intent above the fold, remove fluff, improve what comes next, and add relevant queries your page already ranks for.
- Build backlinks every single week. Consistent link acquisition compounds. Journalist outreach, partnerships, link outreach, and other repeatable methods beat doing one huge link-building push every six months.
- Use Google Search Console to find queries you rank for but never intentionally targeted. If a page sits on page two for a relevant search, add a section or paragraph that directly addresses that query. Google already sees the page as relevant. Give it a stronger reason to rank higher.
- Study search results constantly. When you search Google, look at why certain pages rank above others. When you use ChatGPT or Claude, study which sources they cite and why. Over time, patterns become obvious.
I also cover:
- Why informational content keeps losing clicks even when impressions stay strong
- How to spot pages that need an update
- Why broken links and fading pages deserve regular attention
- Why giving companies free SEO recommendations sometimes turns into paid work
- How partnerships create recurring backlink opportunities
- Why learning directly from SERPs beats blindly trusting tool scores
⭐️ The Reddit Thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/seogrowth/comments/1wh0yvq/whats_one_seo_habit_that_has_made_the_biggest/ 
⭐️ Ep 787 - The #1 SEO Hack: Why Content Refreshes Beat New Content - https://youtu.be/UKvGmqzIxg4 
⭐️ Ep 1104 - The 1-Hour SEO Update That Makes Your Best Pages Rank for More Keywords - https://youtu.be/GmsAuotHGso 
⭐️ Ep 1160 - How To Get Free Backlinks in 2026 (Methods That Actually Work) - https://youtu.be/U-5VL9o9RGQ 
⭐️ Ep 1173 - The Internal Linking Trick That Uses Topical Authority You Already Have - https://youtu.be/2dPc80Z_DZk 
⭐️ AI SEO/GEO/AEO: How to Get Shown in LLMs in 2026 - https://edwardsturm.com/articles/ai-seo-geo-aeo-get-shown-llms-2026/ 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 Biggest SEO Habit
00:16 Monthly GSC Review
01:14 Covered vs Uncovered Keywords
01:45 Content Refresh Checklist
03:22 Weekly Backlink Outreach
04:40 Query Tweaks to Rank
05:27 Learn From Other Sites
07:37 Consistency and Internal Links
08:21 Partnership Link Exchanges
09:08 Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#searchengineoptimization #seo #digitalmarketing #performancemarketing

E1180: Google's September 2026 spam update is rolling out, and this one looks very different from the last few.
The update started September 24 and is registering a 9.4/10 on Semrush's volatility tracker. Google Search Advocate John Mueller also confirmed that this spam update is expected to take longer than recent spam updates, with volatility potentially continuing for roughly two weeks.
At the same time, a Google research paper about a system called SAFE started circulating across the SEO industry.
SAFE stands for Scaled Abuse Forensic Examiner. Google describes it as an AI-driven anti-abuse system built to identify synthetic threats that traditional classifiers and manual review struggle to catch.
The timing raises an obvious question: is SAFE connected to the September spam update?
Google has not confirmed that.
But the paper shows how far Google's anti-spam systems have moved beyond simply asking whether a page "looks AI-generated."
I break down:
- What Google's September 2026 spam update is
- How this rollout is taking longer than recent spam updates
- What I'm seeing across two very different websites
- Why one bottom-of-funnel SaaS site dropped and quickly recovered
- Why a top-of-funnel content site is still experiencing volatility
- How Google's SAFE analyzes content, behavior, infrastructure, timing, and relationships between content producers
- Why multimodal semantic embeddings matter
- How Google is using specialized AI agents to investigate synthetic abuse
- Why SAFE appears designed to catch new forms of spam that traditional classifiers miss
- How this relates to Google's other 2026 AI spam detection research
- Why some SEOs think the September update is catching spam missed by the August update
- What SEOs are reporting across X and Reddit
- Why thin programmatic SEO pages may be especially exposed
- What to do if your Google Search Console data suddenly becomes volatile
- Why I would wait for the rollout to finish before making drastic changes
- The two things I would still check immediately on your most important pages
- How bottom-of-funnel SEO tends to remain more stable through major updates
The biggest point: do not panic and start rebuilding your site because rankings move during the rollout. Wait until the rollout ends.
Always check whether your important pages are tightly relevant to the query. Make sure the keyword appears in the title, URL, H1, and opening sentence. Then make sure the page answers search intent immediately.
Google's spam systems are getting more sophisticated. SAFE shows that Google is looking at far more than individual pages. It can analyze coordinated behavior, infrastructure, semantic patterns, content relationships, and signals across larger abuse networks.
The September spam update is still rolling out, so we do not have the full picture yet.
I'll continue covering what changes as more data comes in.
⭐️ SE Roundtable: Google September 2026 Spam Update - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-september-2026-spam-update-42163.html 
⭐️ SEMrush Volatility Tracker - https://www.semrush.com/sensor/ 
⭐️ Search Engine Journal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-has-deployed-a-new-ai-spam-detector-called-safe/590918/ 
⭐️ Google's SAFE Research Paper (PDF) - https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubtools/1039292.pdf 
⭐️ Barry Schwartz on 𝕏 (update rollout discussion) - https://x.com/rustybrick/status/2103161355561766957 
⭐️ 2026 September spam update on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1wp6ml7/google_search_central_on_x_today_we_released_the/ 
⭐️ Ep 1083 - Google's New AI Spam Detector Could Wipe Out Entire SEO Networks - https://youtu.be/I78IQS99EwU 
⭐️ Ep 1153 - Google Can Detect Your AI Content. Here's What Happens Next. - https://youtu.be/G0qcfknUCcU 
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/ 
00:00 September Spam Update Hits Hard
00:34 What Spam Updates Mean
01:24 How This Rollout Is Longer
02:16 Real Site Volatility Examples
03:18 SAFE Paper Goes Viral
05:00 How SAFE Detects Abuse
07:33 SAFE Technical Foundations
10:01 SEO Community Reactions
11:57 What To Do If Hit
12:31 Bottom of Funnel SEO Stability
13:56 Final Sign-Off
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/  
#searchengineoptimization #seo #googlespamupdate #searchmarketing