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When Visibility Backfires: Managing Brand Sentiment in the AI Search Era
17 Plays25 days ago
Performance SEO Unpacked brings together host Ruchi Pardal and Daniel Horowitz, an SEO strategist known for building scalable, business aligned growth across enterprise, SaaS, and startup environments.
This episode explores how AI, zero-click search, and LLMs are changing brand visibility and trust. Daniel shares how an SEO pilot at Informatica, built with product and content teams, drove 500,000+ impressions in Google AI Overviews and why enterprise SEO today is about topical authority, internal linking, and AI discovery, not just rankings.
They discuss handling legacy content, aligning cross-functional teams, and correcting the signals LLMs pick up from years of documentation and product messaging. Daniel also connects lessons from scaling SEO at SimpleTiger and working with brands like Shopify and KEEN to enterprise execution today.
This episode is for SEO leaders and marketers focused on driving real business outcomes in an AI-first search world..
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👤 Guest Bio
Daniel Horowitz is an SEO strategist driving scalable growth across enterprise, SaaS, and startups. At Informatica, he leads SEO focused on topical authority, internal linking, and AI search visibility, including pilots that generated 500,000+ impressions in Google AI Overviews.
Previously, he scaled offsite SEO at SimpleTiger, building systems that produced $50K–$75K in monthly agency revenue and worked with brands like Shopify, Segment, KEEN, Synopsys, and Vendavo on technical SEO, content frameworks, and zero-click optimization strategies.
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📌 What We Cover
• How AI and zero-click search reshape brand visibility and trust
• Why topical authority and internal linking matter for AI discovery
• Aligning SEO with product, content, and leadership in enterprise teams
• Using pilots and data to earn buy-in and funding for SEO initiatives
• Turning SEO from a support role into a strategic growth driver
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Guest LinkedIn
Daniel Horowitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhorowitzseo/
Host LinkedIn
Ruchi Pardal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruchipardal/
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Transcript
Introduction to Performance SEO
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Performance SEO Unpacked, the podcast that helps enterprise businesses master SEO and get measurable results. I'm your host, Ruchi Padal, SVP of Innovation at Result First, where we've been delivering pay for performance SEO for over 15 years.
00:00:16
Speaker
If you're tired of SEO strategies that don't scale, struggle to prove ah ROI to leadership, or want to stay ahead of the latest trends, you're in the right place. Each episode, we break down complex SEO challenges into simple,
00:00:28
Speaker
Actionable steps designed for enterprise success. Let's dive into today's topic and help you unlock the full potential of enterprise SEO.
Career Transition to Informatica
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm excited today as I'm joined by Daniel Horowitz and he brings in a lot of experience from SEO, right from technical SEO to visibility and maneuvering the new AI. SEO world.
00:00:48
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, Daniel. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. um Yeah, I've been in the SEO industry for about a decade. Currently, um I serve as the SEO lead for Informatica, which is a data management, AI data management company, um which has now recently been acquired by Salesforce. So now we're a Salesforce company. Prior to working at Informatica, I worked at a so small agency called SimpleTiger, where I ran um offsite operations. I ran their link building department and we built links for some big clients like Shopify, E-Trade, JotForm, et cetera. But um for the last three years, I've been an in-house SEO and that transition has been really big from running a department and agency to kind of being a SEO lead team of one at Informatica. So excited to be here.
00:01:36
Speaker
Wonderful.
Challenges as Solo SEO Lead
00:01:38
Speaker
Working with an agency, working with a team is a different dynamic, but taking the entire workload of SEO and taking the entire department solo is a very different thing. And butre you're leading SEO in Informatica, you're doing it solo, which is great and which must be a lot of responsibility.
00:01:58
Speaker
Starting with understanding the mindset, how has that shaped your thinking around strategy, collaboration, and more importantly, executive alignment for SEO? Absolutely. So I think the biggest part of being a solo um SEO at a mid-market enterprise is building relationships, right? Because SEO, I think, historically has been something where you're kind of like the janitor in the closet, roll, fix some title tags, fix some meta description, update this article, et cetera.
00:02:24
Speaker
So when I first came in to Informatica, there really wasn't much of an SEO strategy, to be honest. um The strategy was pretty much like we have eight different um categories for our products. So let's say like um data quality or master data management. And we had these pillar pages and the only metric was did this pillar page hit page one for the primary keyword one day of the quarter?
00:02:47
Speaker
I'm sure for your listeners, that's not an SEO strategy, right? That's a vanity strategy. So I had to come in and kind of create an SEO strategy for nothing um and then kind of also like fight against this perception that our SEO is not doing well because of the strategy that had nothing to do with me. So the first thing I did when I came in is I built a lot of relationships with a lot of different people. So sitting down, setting meetings, things like that. So everyone from our product teams, web teams, I sit in the growth marketing teams, even working with the campaign teams and stuff like that. and making sure that we're all aligning our priorities and that everyone kind of has a voice in
Changing Brand Perception with SEO
00:03:24
Speaker
SEO. And ironically, that's how um SEO itself got a seat at the table is by ah seeing that, oh, maybe this is important. Maybe this isn't a role that's a janitor in the closet. So by doing that work, I was actually able to launch our AI SEO Tiger team, which know gets executive visibility. So that means that I'm presenting directly to our CMO, to our senior vice presidents. And I think that's helped to really get, um you know, really the necessary funding to do um a lot of our SEO projects. Like everything from our technical SEO is one thing, you know, we had worked with IT t and that doesn't cost much besides say a screaming frog membership and bandwidth. of the it t t But doing things like building out a topical authority strategy, know, that costs money. um We can't just go to, we're creating highly technical content. So we can't just go to chat GPT and have it blasted out. We have to really work with our SMEs, work with our product teams, um work with our campaign teams to make sure that everything is really aligned into a cohesive strategy.
00:04:22
Speaker
Like you said, that um I started with relationship building rather than just getting into the technicalities of it, because first, getting people to understand how important the SEO is. And while we were having a conversation last time, you did mention that things as small as product mentions were not aligned.
00:04:44
Speaker
But in the universe of internet, in the universe of SEO, they impact and affect the brand perception quite a lot. And that is something that you had to struggle, which eventually aligns with getting the entire board on together, making them understand that we have a uniform messaging that needs to go in.
00:05:03
Speaker
How did you get to realize that these small things and getting the leadership to align with it and that they are actually affecting the brand perception? How did you get to this discovery and what steps did you take next?
SEO's Strategic Role and Executive Support
00:05:17
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So the big thing with Informatica is um Informatica is a legacy company, right? Like there's about 30 years of history of, um you know, doing everything from on-premises data management, which is our called our power center solution to now we have or cloud data management solution, which is IDMC. So I was very aware that this brand perception already existed, that we were kind of considered a dinosaur company, a little update, the product is outdated, et cetera. And I knew that this was a big priority of the CMO. So to create this AI SEO Tiger team, we have, um
00:05:52
Speaker
we use the SEMrush AI SEO toolkit. I'm sure your listeners are using different AI visibility tools. Seems like the new one's coming out every week. um This one is fine for a hundred dollars a month. You're getting what you pay for. Right. But one good thing is you can look at this prompt level data and you can see like what's the brand sentiment drivers and also like, how are we showing up? you Visibility is great. You want to show up as much as possible, of course, but If you're showing up in the wrong ways, that's also a problem too. So we did a deep dive analysis of all the prompt level data in um the SEMrush AI SEO toolkit. And we found that our power center on-premises solution was mentioned at a four time ratio as the IDMC. solution. So this is a real problem because this is pulling from things like we have over like 50,000 documentation pages that mention um Power Center for every single version that exists or there's offsite articles that have been mentioning Power Center or even you know a lot of pages on our website that were not updated. So this is a huge project. So I was essentially able to take this brand perception that I already knew, what a major driver of a lot of our campaigns and was a big priority for our CMO and executive leadership, show how SEO can kind of help us change that brand perception. So using SEO as a driver of brand sentiment and brand narrative, instead of this kind of like janitorial in the closet, like, Hey, did we get our one article to rank on page one for one day?
00:07:19
Speaker
So um I think that's really um driven that sentiment and also I've been able to make our CMO really care about SEO because prior to me getting on board, it was something that was like not considered important.
00:07:34
Speaker
I love these case studies when I hear these stories, when I hear from people where eventually the leadership understands that SEO is so much more than just the vanity matrix to measure the traffic coming to the website or the keyword ranking, but it actually brings in a lot of business intelligence. The amount of data that SEO see that can impact the direction for the business is amazing. And anytime I hear a story like this, it makes me really happy. By the way, I love the word e SEO tigers that you've kept for your team and what you call it. But I want to go deeper into IDMC versus the power center discovery that you just mentioned.
00:08:14
Speaker
How did you structure your share of voice analysis and what did you uncover when segmenting visibility by product line? So I would say the biggest thing was actually using our Google search console data was huge. Going in, seeing, you know, it's so funny because no one, I feel like this tool is so overlooked, but it's free yeah and everyone has access to it. Right. So we were able to identify a lot of our top um visibility um power center pages just by using impression level data from the last 12
Managing Legacy Content
00:08:43
Speaker
months. So We actually found this page that it wasn't really getting a ton of traffic, so it wouldn't have shown up in the top pages, but it had a ton of visibility. And this was a Power Center download page. So it's basically the search engine on this page was people who were looking to download like a local version of Power Center, which you cannot do.
00:09:00
Speaker
um And this page was set up, I don't know, 10 years ago or something way before. anyone who had been at the company was there. So we actually took this page and we completely flipped the messaging of, but we put in FAQs about like why you can't download Power Center, iPower Center is the outdated solution, updated all the messaging, but the title tags, put in a video that was about Power Center modernization, all the stuff. And then we actually sort of stress tested against Gemini. I mean, ChatGPT, obviously the training data only updates every so often, Gemini is connected to the web. So That's the easiest way to test it. so We actually tested it and now it will say, like oh, you can't download Power Center if you're searching for information around that. if The solution is IDMC and like that's what we want to see. Right.
00:09:44
Speaker
You mentioned there are few thousands of documents around it in Informatica. In this AI world, and you started to touch upon, and that's exactly what I wanted to understand going forward is that in today's world,
00:09:58
Speaker
um How did a documentation can show up in unexpected ways? It's all about brand authority. It's all about uniformed brand messaging that needs to come out. And when there are thousands of these pages and there is so much legacy content, I would love to understand how are you coordinating internally to reframe this legacy content and steer LLMs in the right direction?
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah. So obviously we can't delete all this stuff because there's historical value to it. So I ah met with our head of website and we were talking, know, big, a cross like a million pages on Screaming Frog so much so that it broke the memory on Screaming Frog. And we found like 50,000 documentation pages just about Power Center, which is a lot. It's a very high ratio of a million. So we met with the documentation team. We were like,
00:10:46
Speaker
This is a problem. um I understand that like a year or two ago, like this wouldn't have been relevant, but like now this is what's driving the brand sentiment. So know we met with this team and we kind of came up with an idea of like putting messaging on the top of each page. That's like very clear, like, Hey, oh this is legacy. Our current solution is IDMC and then pointing, creating, you know, an internal links to the IDMC documentation from the power center. So internal linking, I think is actually still, it's always been important, but I think it's increasingly important with LLM.
SEO's Strategic Importance in Business
00:11:19
Speaker
So, you know, it's a big thing we're working on in general and yeah, they were able to add in that messaging real quick and you know the jury's still out with all of this stuff for running experiments, right? Like we don't,
00:11:28
Speaker
100% know what's going to work, not going to work. But I think adding that and or putting that in HTML call out box at the top um is great because of course for LN, you can't use Java, you can't read videos, can't read PDFs. You have to be very, very clear. Like you're talking to a five year old, you know?
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah. SEO is now starting to have CMO level visibility. I've spoken to a few people and everybody's coming back and saying people understand or they don't understand all that the C-suite right now wants.
00:11:57
Speaker
is visibility. oh I want to understand that in a space where you started as a solo person and then you had to carve your way into building a team, bringing in the importance of SEO, what's helped you on a seat at the table and what's different about the conversations you're having now to two years ago?
00:12:17
Speaker
So I would say what was really helpful is there was a senior vice president who's not at the company who was really like a very early champion of topical authority work. So um this was even before like the huge AI blew up. This was like maybe when I first started and I was really kind of coming in, looking at this SEO strategy, a total vanity. I'm like, we need to really build authority around these terms. We don't need to just do master data don't know, master data management rules or just these little keyword pillar strategy. Like we really need to dig in. We need to work with our product. guy This can't be so siloed. So I actually got the opportunity to get put under a VP who was really great advocate for the work. And then she introduced me to a senior vice president and I actually just sat down with him. i never had this kind of experience prior to this. I worked in an agency and I i just pitched him on the project. And I said like, well, we're going to need budget. And he was someone who really needed convincing. But once I convinced him, he was a huge champ. He um helped me build those relationships with the different product teams. because he was the senior vice president of all the product teams. So like everything, our master data management team, our data quality team, they all reported to him. So he helped me build those relationships and introduced me.
00:13:31
Speaker
And then we ran a couple of pilots of top of authority. and I just got maybe a small budget, $5,000, $10,000. And we're able to present that to the product leaders, not not just on the marketing team, but on the product side. And they were very impressed because of course they want to see visibility for their product line.
00:13:49
Speaker
Right. So then once we were able to do that, then everyone was kind of chomping at the bit to get budget. I want to pitch budget because I want visibility for our product. So even before the AI boom, we were kind of getting on the strain. So I think that was a really, really good foot in the door is um using topical authority, using product visibility and tying your work to business priorities. I mean, everything we're talking about from doing the AI SEO Tiger team, that's how you get visibility because nobody cares about SEO if it's not generating revenue for
Technical Migrations and Narrative Alignment
00:14:20
Speaker
them.
00:14:20
Speaker
but They want to see um some tie to that. you know Visibility is nice, but but not for its own sake, right? Like there needs to be some sort of strategy behind it. Wonderful. 100%. I fully agree that if it's tied to the business direction, you will be heard of. And congratulations on convincing your VP there. I want to get a little practical here and try to dig your brain into getting out a checklist that the listeners can just pick up and start implementing tomorrow. So for SEOs navigating the M&As and the legacy rebranding like yours, what's your checklist for managing both technical migrations and narrative alignment in search? So I would say for technical migrations, I mean, Screaming Frog is your best friend, right? Yeah. So that's how I found all these pages. I knew this was a problem already. I didn't know it was a 50,000 page problem. So once I was able to dig into that, was like, oh man, holy crap. Like there's a lot pages here. This is going to be more than just like putting a working with one team. I work with all the different teams of all the different product lines to do this from the documentation side. So I think from a technical standpoint, you want to learn, of course, like a screen frog, I'm sure lot of your listeners are familiar, but also to actually be able to use LMS interpret data. So I have a few different, like I guess in, in cloud, they're called projects I use to help with like data analysis and things like that. just built for my own. So I would say just like experiment with creating custom GPT is and another thing I do at Informatica is I'm not only on the AI SEO Tiger team, but also on the AI Tiger team, which is a different person from each, I said, under growth marketing. So there's one person from there, one person from
00:16:06
Speaker
product market to one person from campaigns etc so a big goal of ours is to kind of train people in how to use custom gpt's you know getting people to use our internal gpt um etc so we actually increase adoption from like i don't know 35 to like over 90 which is huge yes now i mean we're an ai company right everyone should be using this everyone should know so um i would say learning how to do those even Here's a basic one, right? So every time you publish an article, but you got to build internal links to older content. That can be a pain to find through a site search if it's not exact keyword bench. So basically I just trained a customer. I went through an exercise with um claw, and which is access the internet and just said, oh Hey, like, know can you find
00:16:55
Speaker
five to 10, you know, slash blogs or slash, you know, on on our site, like we differentiate between blogs and articles, which has no SEO value, but it's just how it's set up. Can you find five slash blogs and five to 10 slash articles and do this? I kind of read the process. And then I said, okay, like this process looks good. Create some custom instructions for me to repeat this. And it was able to create those. It works great. so you don't really have to have any serious technical knowledge to create these and use these, but Now it's kind of like having um an over eager and often wrong intern that you'll definitely have to double check. Right. But don it work it saves me a lot of time. This would take yeah something where don't me wrong. Like it doesn't connect with a Adobe experience manager, which is our backend. Um,
00:17:40
Speaker
It doesn't connect with that. So I still have to go in and build the links myself, but now this saves me from, it could take an hour to find a five to 10 articles. And now it takes, you know, 10 minutes of just using it. yeah And then having that repeated for publishing 15, 16 articles
SEO's Impact on Brand Narratives and AI
00:17:56
Speaker
a month. Well, that saves me a lot of time, right? So finding all these areas where you can leverage just your subject matter expertise to build custom GPT use to kind of help you from a narrative alignment standpoint. um definitely finding out what um the pain points of the business that you're working on already is. So like, i already knew that this brand perception of us being outdated, another one actually um that we're working on right now, our pricing is pretty,
00:18:23
Speaker
I would say a little opaque, but more importantly, it's hidden behind PDFs. um You can't, like we have a pricing page, but it it just says like consumption based pricing, blah, blah, blah. It's not a hundred percent clear. So if you go to LMS and you search things around Informatica pricing, guess what? It's not just estimating it incorrectly, but it's pulling from competitors who are estimating our pricing. That's terrible for us. Like we don't, we don't want that. Right.
00:18:50
Speaker
So you know a lot of what we've been working on is taking a lot of these um gated assets and creating like a hybrid gating strategy. So essentially working with the writer, not just using AI, but working with the writer to um kind of create almost like articles that are based on these PDFs. So instead of just having like them totally gated and like you would use PPC to get the email, we actually would create like an article version of that, that has a form intake to get the full version. but that summarizes the key points or takeaways. So with things like pricing, we're like now the LLM summarized from our article because ideally we would be the source of truth about our own pricing, right?
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So help me understand this one level deeper with this to control this narrative. Are you guys ah trying to create more content and articles around giving a range for pricing and all the parameters that kind of define and control the pricing? Or are you trying to create a narrative for the brand where everywhere it says that there is no pricing out there, it's very custom?
00:19:55
Speaker
And when he searches LLM says, these are the parameters, there's no specific pricing, go talk to them to get what fits you. No, we're trying to create c specific pricing because specific pricing is already out there. Right. So um like we have a few competitors that summarize them. So saying that's what we kind of were doing was saying like, oh, there's no pricing, it's custom, et cetera.
00:20:18
Speaker
But the LM is going to take the numbers. Like they don't really differentiate between who's the source. So we need to be the source and not let our competitors be. Yes, that is very smart because even I had the same thought process here that LLMs love the numbers. Anytime, anywhere they will see a number to answer the price question, they might just pick up a number and they will throw it out.
00:20:40
Speaker
Wonderful. I mean, these are like real interesting, real life day-to-day challenges that impact the business big time. And it's so important now to have a uniformed brand narrative.
00:20:54
Speaker
As AI reshaped how users discover content and pricing is one of the examples that you just shared with us.
SEO's Evolving Role and Future Outlook
00:21:01
Speaker
What's that one SEO belief or strategy that you think enterprise teams need to let go of?
00:21:07
Speaker
Honestly, that SEO doesn't deserve a seat at the table, at at that it's purely a support role. I would say it's not, it's a strategic role. I think SEO should um shape the direction. and I think we have a really important as SEOs.
00:21:21
Speaker
we We kind of touched on the idea that SEO for the first time, probably in a very long time, certainly in my tenure career is getting CMO level visibility because of the AI search boom. That's a real opportunity for SEOs, I think, to sell themselves.
00:21:37
Speaker
I think just a problem in the industry in general is a lot of us are people who, especially like on the technical side, who are kind of um not used to talking, not used to presenting. Maybe they'll present a report. I mean, I know even like at Informatica, like we have a separate analytics guy and he reports the analytics, like I don't.
00:21:55
Speaker
So for me, I'm someone who likes to work behind a computer. I get it, but it's time to kind of come out of the shadow, so to speak, and really learn how to present yourself, to present your work, and to tie it to the business priorities be discussed and really shed this perception that we're the janitors in the closet. Because I think there's this real problem now where you have a lot of people who are selling like geo services, which like, but there's there's certainly some truth to those like AI search is not the same as traditional SEO, just like you would say local SEO or e-commerce SEO are all different, right? They sit in the same wheelhouse. There's certainly differences, but yeah it's not things like, oh, chunking content. I just saw like Google came out they said, don't do that.
00:22:38
Speaker
for example. So there's a lot of things that I think are being sold by a lot of these people who probably never heard of SEO like a year or two ago. And now suddenly they're experts. now We're here. Your listeners are here. We're practitioners, right? So we need to be able to sell ourselves as but just like with the pricing, right? We need to be the single source of truth. Otherwise someone else is going to define this for us.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yes,
Closing Remarks
00:23:01
Speaker
absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts here, Daniel. It's been a great chat. I really appreciate you giving us real life examples and the challenges that you're facing and how are you getting through those challenges. I hope the listeners are able to pick up something interesting that they can apply tomorrow in their strategy, especially around how you've maneuvered. and bought the entire C-suite into the buy-in for the strategy. Congratulations on acquiring the budget and your SEO Tiger team.
00:23:32
Speaker
Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me.
00:23:42
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Performance SEO Unpacked. I hope today's episode gave you practical insights to help scale your SEO and drive results. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value, share it with your team or a fellow marketer. For more tips, tools, and strategies, visit Resultfers.com slash unpacked and connect with me on LinkedIn for the latest episode on enterprise SEO. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time on Performance SEO Unpacked.