On the latest episode of Inside A Hustler’s Brain, I sat down with Jes Scholz 🏆, the 2022 SEO World Champion at SEOktoberfest and one of the sharpest minds in enterprise SEO. She works with global brands on brand entity optimization, automated content distribution, and all things search 🔍
Here’s what we unpacked 👇
🤖 AI SEO, decoded: It’s not about stuffing prompts into your content. It’s about being a recognizable entity that AI systems can retrieve, trust, and surface.
📊 The latest Google update: AI Mode isn’t just a feature 👉 it’s a full re-architecting of the search results page. Click-through rates are shrinking, and visibility now matters more than rankings.
🌐 Your website is NOT the center anymore: Jes flipped the old playbook. Your site is one node in a bigger ecosystem of AI assistants, YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, and knowledge graphs.
💡 What smart brands are doing differently:
✅ Investing in brand entity optimization
✅ Distributing content across multiple platforms
✅ Merging SEO, PR, and social into one practice
✅ Building first party data and community 🏗️
What smart brands are doing differently
Toward the end of our chat, Jes shared what she’s seeing from the enterprise clients who are getting this right. A few themes stood out. They’re investing in brand entity optimization so AI systems clearly understand who they are and what they do. They’re distributing content through automation across multiple platforms instead of relying on a single channel. They’re treating SEO, PR, and social as one connected practice rather than separate silos. And they’re building first-party data and community so they aren’t entirely dependent on Google’s traffic firehose.
My takeaway
Talking to Jes reinforced something I’ve been feeling for a while: the marketers who thrive over the next few years won’t be the ones clinging to 2015 SEO tactics, and they also won’t be the ones chasing every shiny AI tool. They’ll be the ones who understand search as a behavior — wherever that behavior shows up — and build their brand to be discoverable, trustworthy, and useful across all of those surfaces.
If you’re a founder, marketer, or SEO professional, this episode is worth your 22 minutes. Jes brings clarity to a topic most people are still hand-waving about.
👉 What’s your biggest SEO challenge in 2026? Drop a comment!
