Good SEO is all you need for AI? Convenient.

The advice making the rounds right now is comforting: good SEO is still all you need for AI search. Keep building backlinks, keep optimizing your blog posts, and the models will surface you. Every Shopify operator wants to believe it. It is also wrong.

Think about why it spreads. If you keep optimizing for the ten blue links, someone keeps getting paid for every click. The day your buyer stops searching and starts asking ChatGPT what to buy, that whole model is exposed. So the comfortable story is that nothing has changed.

Your buyer already changed. They open ChatGPT and ask for the best option in their category, and the model answers with a few brands. Not ten links. Three or four names. If you are not one of them, you are not on the shortlist at all, and ranking first on Google does not put you there.

That is why I run ChatGPT Ads instead of chasing SEO. The pitch is simple: ChatGPT is a new channel. A buyer asks, the model answers, and the buyer decides inside that conversation. In my own Shopify accounts it converts about twice as well as anything else I run, and almost nobody is bidding there yet, so it is still cheap.

Good SEO is not wrong. It is just not where your next buyer is deciding.

Your ten-minute check today: open ChatGPT, ask it what to buy in your category the way a customer would, and see which brands it names. If yours is missing, that is not an SEO problem. It is a paid acquisition problem, and it is the one I would fix first.

Sacha June 25, 2026 · Issue #19

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If you want this signal four times a week, get the Wire.

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Correction policy. If anything in this post is wrong, I’ll fix it inline and add a Correction line above this notice with the date, what was wrong, what’s correct, and the source. No silent edits.