The SEO Advantage: Organic Growth, Real Results

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind. Join us as we dive into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs. Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA.

Mike Pinkus: Today's guest is Jon Nastor, who is a multi-talented entrepreneur and seasoned podcaster. John is the creator and host of Hack The Entrepreneur, a business podcast he launched 10 years ago, which grew to over 30,000 listeners per episode and surpassed 500 episodes. Today, Jon is on a different path as the co-founder of Digital Commerce Partners, or as we like to call it, DCP, which he launched in 2020 with a content-focused SEO agency for D2C e-commerce businesses. I really enjoyed my conversation with Jon, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Hey, Jon, thank you so much for joining me today on GrowthTales.

Jon Nastor: Thanks for having me, Mike. It's my pleasure.

Mike Pinkus: I am a big fan of your work and the fact that you've been involved in a couple of businesses. I want to start at the very beginning and talk to you a little bit about Hack The Entrepreneur, because I'm not a seasoned podcaster, but you are. So I wanted to ask you, how did this all start off with podcasting? Then we can get into Digital Commerce Partners and your current business. But can you tell us a little bit about Hack The Entrepreneur? How did you become a podcaster?

Jon Nastor: Hack The Entrepreneur started, I don't even know when at this point—but actually it was about 10 years ago. I was in a business called Velocity Page. At that time, I was starting a WordPress plugin business. I ended up at a very small conference, like 25 people, in the Philippines—a business conference. At the conference, there was a mastermind sort of day, and each person had a hot seat.

At that conference were a bunch of podcasters from then, like Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas, who were the big podcasters at the time, and a bunch of others. I was just talking about my business and how to get traction and get out there more.

Jon Nastor: And everyone was just like, "You need a podcast, man. You need a podcast." It was funny. That was the last thing I could ever imagine doing—having a podcast. I said, "I'm a drummer," and anytime I've even heard my voice recorded when we were in the studio, I always just cringed at it. They were like, "No, I think you'd be really, really good at a podcast." So anyway, I went home and decided, alright. I just followed some basic steps that they told me to follow.

I lived in Thunder Bay at the time. I don't know if you know where Thunder Bay is—of course, Thunder Bay, way up north, like a hundred thousand people. Just a little place. And just in my basement, I decided to start a podcast.

Came up with a list of 20 people I wanted to guest, came up with questions I thought would work, and I just started it. Started sending emails to people and started a podcast that, as I've said, took off fairly quickly. I mean, I always thought, like, okay—maybe? But I remember when the first thousand people listened to it, and I was like, "Whoa." And then it ended up growing. Within the first year, I had 30,000 listeners or so for every episode, which was small compared to some of these guys who had taught me, but still—like, whoa. This is approaching half the population of the city I'm in right now. Wow. Which was wild to me. And then it just sort of grew and grew, and I kept going with it. Sponsors, everything came.

Jon Nastor: So I just ended up one hundred percent focusing on that and grew it for years. A business came around it. I put out a book, put out some courses and stuff. But the interesting thing that came from it, I would say, is the relationships—people that I met. Digital Commerce Partners actually came from that original list of 20 people. I ended up partnering with one of the guys on that list, who I didn’t know at all. He was literally just like, "I want to talk to this guy and understand what he understands about business." He wouldn’t just get on a call with me, but if I said, "Hey, I’ve got this podcast—want to get on?" he was like, "Yeah, sure. I’ll get on and talk to you."

And so that led to the podcast eventually hitting 500 episodes. I think I did 503. As I got beyond 400, I was getting kind of exhausted from it. But I decided I needed to get to 500. I got to 500, and I probably should've quit then, but I went to like 503 or something and then ended up taking a hiatus when I went and launched Digital Commerce Partners. I think I want to say it was about four years of running the show. DCP—Digital Commerce Partners—was launched in 2020, January or February. Hack The Entrepreneur was just wrapped up at that point, basically.

Mike Pinkus: Wow. Yeah, that's a lot of episodes, by the way. You have a radio-like voice, so maybe that was part of—

Jon Nastor: That was kind of the joke. I just despised my voice when I heard it played back to me. But I guess it was good. I was pushed, and I was obviously given some super good guidance by people to help with it. It was an early time in the medium, but one thing—it wasn’t easy—but you could get guests. There just weren’t a lot of options. People didn’t have thousands of business podcasts to choose from. There were still hundreds, but I felt like I knew positioning enough, and I just went with a different angle.

Rather than tactics—we never really talked tactics on my show—because I felt like there were so many shows about tactics, which are super beneficial. But I wanted to know how people think about business, how they decide to make decisions, and how they think the decisions they’ve made have led them to where they are—right or wrong. And then where that comes from. Now there are tons of shows based on mindset and books around it and everything, but at the time, it was unique enough that it just resonated with an audience, and the audience kind of took it and pushed me.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, it's amazing. And it had a catchy title. So—

Jon Nastor: It had a mouthful of a title—Hack the Entrepreneur. I can't even remember how that name came about. I think it was a lot of just talking to some close friends who were in business, and also being on Namecheap.com trying to find a domain that wasn’t already taken. So yeah, that's where it came from.

Podcasting—now it's been five years since I podcasted on an active basis. Now I just guest on people’s great shows.

Mike Pinkus: Which is really cool. And now, Jon, you've centered your attention around Digital Commerce Partners. I'm going to call it DCP for simplicity, now that we have the name of the business out of the way. What does Digital Commerce Partners do?

Jon Nastor: Digital Commerce Partners is a content-focused SEO company for D2C e-commerce. I say content-focused because we don’t do backlinks and off-page PR work or anything like that. Everything we do is focused on your site and your content.

Most companies, I feel, that are established in their markets don’t typically need more backlinks and PR and stuff like that. Their site just needs to be cleaned up, and they need the right content in the right places. That’s who we help, which is different from who we helped when we started. But this is our definite ideal customer now and has been for the last two years—these D2C e-commerce companies.

Mike Pinkus: Right. And in terms of size, Jon, do you help companies of all sizes, or is there a certain segment that you work better with in terms of helping them on that D2C e-commerce journey?

Jon Nastor: Yeah. Typically it's customers that are doing like $15 million in revenue or higher. We've worked with clients in the $3 to $4 million range, which can work as well. I find that typically when you're starting an e-commerce company—especially if it's going to be successful—they can really dial in their market, their audience, and their products with paid media way faster. But that gets expensive.

All of our best clients come to us still investing millions of dollars into paid traffic, but they know exactly who they're targeting and what they're selling. Then we just need to organically also build out a channel for them that's consistent. So it's not so much for, like, “I just started a Shopify store, I have these products, and I want to…” because SEO takes a long time. It's expensive. It's super, super profitable once it kicks in, but it's not the place to start—at least for most people. If you're doing it yourself, then sure. But otherwise, for companies that are scaling, it's just, put the dollars into paid, get a dollar plus whatever out, and you can scale from there.

Mike Pinkus: Do you believe in that dual strategy that you have—like PPC combined with SEO strategy? Is there a certain mix that companies should use to optimize? I guess SEO is the highest long-tail return because you don't have to keep recycling money into it. But what are your thoughts on the strategy between paid versus organic?

Jon Nastor: I think they work super, super well together. If we want to test out keywords or topics, paid is the way to do it because it's faster. Then if we see that it’s profitable—basically, I want to see all your PPC data. Everything that’s profitable for you that you're paying into, I want to make sure you also rank number one or are highly visible for those organically as well.

It’s probably not the case right now because you don't have the right content around it, but that's my job—so that you can do that. I don’t think a company looking to grow in any way can do without both. It's just that PPC, when done right, you can get dollars back right away. You can’t get that with SEO. I mean, we can do that sometimes for clients.

Jon Nastor: That’s only because they come to us with an 18-year-old brand and website. They’ve built up the most amazing link profile, there’s PR everywhere, but they’ve just never targeted their site to it. They’ve just been like, “That’s something we’ve ignored, and now we need to do it.” They come to us and we can just say, “Okay, we can do this, this, this, and this.” We do it, and we get almost nearly instant results for them organically. That’s not because of us—that’s because they have the perfect site and the perfect brand presence in the market for it.

But they couldn’t have done that if they hadn’t been executing on their PPC all along and continuing to do it. I’ve never told one of my clients—and I don’t think I ever will—to turn off their paid traffic.

To me, it’s just a different place for it. Typically, organic traffic—our job is to really target your non-branded search. Your branded search, when somebody’s searching for your company or your brand, they should just find that without an SEO expert helping. There’s something really wrong with your website if they can’t find that.

Mine’s to get non-branded search. So, say it’s a dress company, and somebody’s looking for “linen dresses for spring” or something. They should be able to find your brand. Then paid traffic will probably retarget those people back when that person’s finally done all their research. They’re like, “Oh, right, that company,” and go back and buy it. So they just kind of work hand in hand.

Mike Pinkus: I find that interesting—that there are companies that are 17, 18, 20 years old, that have everything they need to be SEO machines, to what you're saying, but they've never actually put attention to it to draw the... So they have the asset, but it somehow just needs the light switch turned on in order to draw the traffic. How many companies do you think there are like that, where they have PR, they have content, they have all these things, yet their traffic isn't optimized because they just don't know how to attract the actual traffic to the site?

Jon Nastor: So many. Oh wow. I mean, there's endless ones, I think. Just because we work across so many different markets. We work with D2C companies, but they can be selling basically anything. And we've worked with companies selling some of the wildest products.

Our ideal clients come to us—typically two or three clients we have right now are all 15-plus years old, their sites when they came to us. And that’s what it was. It wasn’t so much that they'd never done it—they had done it maybe sporadically through the years, or they did it a few years ago, and then the company grew and that part just fell off.

Or they might have some internal people working on it. But something I find happens a lot is that people end up setting up their site—and even setting up collections for different products on their site—the way they think about them and discuss them internally. So they’ll call products just “apparel,” rather than “ladies’ apparel” in this sense, rather than “ladies’ dresses” over here, even though that’s what they’re trying to sell.

Jon Nastor: And nobody's really searching for that, you know what I mean? So you get these disconnects. They just get so caught up in their own business and discussing it with their team that it’s like, “Well, of course that’s how it goes on the website.” And it’s like, other people are like, “I don’t know what you guys are selling though.” And they’re like, “Oh, we’re selling this and we want to sell more of it.” It’s like, “Why does your website not say that?” They’re like, “Oh, we never even thought of that.”

Happens all the time. Like literally, I’ve done this with women’s dresses. I’ve done this with men’s suits. I’ve done this with custom printed t-shirts this year for one of those huge custom printing t-shirt companies.

They’re like, “We want to rank for custom shirts.” I’m like, “Okay, so do you sell custom shirts?” “Yeah, it’s all we sell.” “Okay, so why doesn’t it say ‘custom shirts’ anywhere?” And they’re like, “Well, we talk about them.” I’m like, “Oh, I see.” Okay.

So that’s just how it is, right? It’s a company trying to be a company—they're a retailer or a manufacturer—and they’re doing everything else in the company except this one small part, which is the SEO part to sell D2C. That’s just where we come in. And I think it’s why we can be so valuable, because just small things we can do that we know, and we can come in externally and see it as a potential customer—not as part of the team. And they're just like, “You're right. That is what they’re called. So why do we call them that?”

And it just happens over and over and over again. The market—I don’t know how many companies, but there are lots. There are thousands of them out there.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. It's funny how sometimes the simplest unlock is the greatest return, and it's like—it's sometimes just simple. People don't realize that you just have to take an action, and it can unlock something that you're missing.

Jon Nastor: Yeah, to the point where sometimes people don’t even trust it, I’ve found. Where it’s like, “Okay, we just have to say that on the main navigation, and then we need a collection with these terms on it if you want to rank for those.” And they’re like, “But that’s everything we sell. So that’s just our site.” And it’s like, “Yes, but all of your competition is like this.”

People will sometimes have to work with us for three or four months before they’ll let us do something that’ll take us an afternoon to do—and literally, it sometimes has been worth millions of dollars a month in revenue. And then they do it and they’re just like, “Whoa.” But they didn’t trust us because they’re just like, “That can’t be it. That honestly cannot be the answer.”

It’s like, “Well, it is.” And I’ve told people before, even on sales calls, I’m like, “Even if you don’t hire us, just please—whoever—just make sure they do that. Even if you don’t hire somebody, just get someone on your team to do that.” And then you'll come back to me, I know, in a couple of months and be like, “Oh my god. Okay, well, what else can you do for us?”

Because it is—SEO’s just not rocket science, man. It’s just not. It’s really putting the right content in the right place for the right person at the right time. And that’s it. It’s not that much more to it. It’s just most people are running their businesses, and there’s a thousand other things to do rather than focus on that. So we focus on that for you.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. And Jon, you brought up the word trust, and I totally understand the world you live in because all you hear all the time on social media is algorithms—and they're changing. Social media and the mediums available to garner SEO are constantly evolving and changing.

So you grow up in a world where there’s Twitter, and then LinkedIn’s not too much of a thing, and then LinkedIn is a thing, and then Twitter becomes X, and then Instagram is now monetizing. So I guess what I’m getting at is, I think the challenge that businesses face—as I’m sure you hear all the time—is how to optimize in an ever-changing world.

And what do you think about these algorithms? Do you think that the media platforms are doing a good job of getting the right content in front of the right people? And like you said, it’s not rocket science. Or is there something to it that you learn over time—how to adjust and how to optimize these algorithms?

Jon Nastor: Okay, so a lot of questions.

The social media aspect, Mike—we really don’t play in that game. And I think it’s why I’ve made sure that we stay focused on SEO and content-focused SEO. Because there are always going to be other changing platforms, and they’re always constantly, I think, going to be in flux.

For SEO, it’s still 99% Google. Whether it’s Google AI or Google standard search, it’s still— I mean, they put out their quarterly earnings last month, and it was still record-breaking. As much as the sky might be falling, well, according to them, it’s really not. It’s kind of the best they’ve ever had.

And as complicated as we want to make SEO sound, Google literally releases—there’s an SOP-type document, like their guidelines. You can follow their guidelines, literally, that they send humans through to check certain websites to verify if they should be ranking or not.

Jon Nastor: The documentation’s there. There’s always, like, “Well, Google tells you to do one thing and then does another,” sure—but really, Google and SEO used to be easier to spam, easier to fake. I love algorithm updates because typically myself and my clients tend to do better with them. It just gets better at weeding out the spam, right? And the complete crap content that’s out there—and there’s tons of it. There’s always going to be tons of it.

Then there’s the whole other thing with LLMs and ChatGPT and stuff. They were going through this phase of thinking, “Oh, maybe we can just take over Google search,” and then all of a sudden, all these SEOs and marketers move in quickly like, “Whoa, we figured out how we can instantly get our brands to the top.”

And there’s like a decade and a half of spam filtering, basically, that tens of thousands of brilliant engineers at Google have worked through—making it so that typically, the better content should show forward. But that’s also based on your brand and all these other things as well.

Is it the best content you always see? No, not necessarily. I don’t think that’s because of the algorithm—well, I think it’s because the algorithm isn’t necessarily as good as it could be yet, but the AI part of it and the machine learning is really helping.

But even without being in SEO, I think any of us can relate to looking up a recipe for dinner, and then—you know—you have to read through the life story of the person and how their dog died and all this stuff. And you’re like, “Okay, but I just want to know how to make this baked chicken tonight.” And then the recipe is at the bottom.

It’s like, why does this work? Well, because you need all this content for it and blah blah blah. That’s a pain in the ass. I’m hoping—and I think—that stuff’s going away.

Google has always given us what they want on a page: what they want to include in content, what they consider expertise, what they consider authority, what they consider trustworthiness. They’ve always told us those things. It’s our job to make sure those things are available on your site, make sure those things are clear, and then make sure there is presence around your site and that other people are talking about it.

Which go hand in hand—because obviously, the more you get found in Google, the more people talk about you, because you get linked to in articles. That’s still going to keep changing.

But as much as you go to LinkedIn now and everything’s like “the sky is falling” again—because SEO’s over again—and now it’s AI or whatever, my clients still, we present them some stuff like, “We found you in ChatGPT here and here and here, and now you’re getting 2,200 people a month from ChatGPT.” It’s like, “But you’re also getting 450,000 people from Google.” You know what I mean?

And they’re just like, “Cool, can you keep an eye on that stuff? But really, let’s focus over here—because the money is still to be made in Google.”

Jon Nastor: It’s just how it is—especially with Google Shopping now. It’s where people go to buy products. It’s still online. The D2C stuff, I think, is growing and will continue to grow. It was a lot harder 10 years ago to even go direct-to-consumer—to build out your own websites and stuff. And now Shopify, I believe, is Canada’s most valuable company, even, because of it. Because it allows companies to go direct-to-consumer, which is powerful.

But you still have to be found where that consumer is searching and looking. Yes, they can be found on TikTok, yes, on Instagram, and all of those exist—and all of those will continually change. But to me, now, you still need your site, and you still need ways for people to find you on Google, or Bing, or wherever it happens to be—or on AI chat.

Mike Pinkus: Do you think people are being distracted, Jon? Like, you mentioned still—obviously—Google is king, and that hasn’t changed. They’ve also been developing AI for an extremely long period of time, even though it’s not talked about a lot. But they’ve been at the AI game for a very long time.

But it’s no secret that everywhere you look in the media, people are talking about ChatGPT and people migrating to use ChatGPT for search. Do you think the trends are going to change? Or do you think Google will continue to dominate because of their head start—at least in the SEO environment? Meaning, it’s not like they’re absent from AI. So, what do you think that makeup will look like between ChatGPT search, Google search, over the next five to ten years? Do you have thoughts on that?

Jon Nastor: I do have thoughts. They change almost as much as the AI search itself—about daily.

Until ChatGPT-5 came out two weeks ago, I think, there was quite some doom and gloom. Because I saw clients who were not visible—there was no AI traffic, like LLM traffic. And then, all of a sudden, within six months, there was not only traffic now, but there’s also revenue directly tied to it. It’s like, whoa. Again—1%, half a percent, something like that. So it’s kind of like, most clients are like, “Okay, well, that’s cool.”

But that was with ChatGPT-4. ChatGPT-5 seems to be showing us something different. Which—I mean, it’s probably just my bias as an SEO—I’m like, “Oh wow, I think this actually might be what saves the whole thing.”

Jon Nastor: ChatGPT-5 seems to be going smaller. So there was this growth, right? Like, they're all building data centers and everything—“we need everything bigger.” And it’s funny, because after ChatGPT-5 came out, there was all this pushback about it and stuff. I feel like maybe even I got stuck in it. The best analogy I can think of in my head is like watching old sci-fi movies, where computers were the size of buildings. Because what's a faster computer? Obviously, it's bigger. It just has to keep getting bigger.

I felt that way about LLMs too—like, “it’s going to contain everything, every bit of information ever, every bit of reasoning, and it’s just at your fingertips.” And now ChatGPT-5 comes out and it gets smaller—they get rid of a whole bunch of data. Because they’re like, “No, the point of an LLM is reasoning. It’s not to control and have all the data and all the search.”

We have search engines that are amazing at that. And we need to be able to access those. But this should be a tool that can access all your other tools and data when you want—but it shouldn't contain all of it at all times. That’s kind of what Google has, right? And they’re really good at it.

But LLMs should be reasoning tools that can access those things when needed. They’re not really for just “how do I” basic Google-style searches.

And also, now in August, we saw the first month where I’m seeing it across every single one of my clients—there’s actually a slight dip in LLM traffic. So it was literally exponential—it was wild to see. I was like, “Where is this going to be in six months? This is crazy.”

These are sites that get half a million visitors a month from Google, so they’re big, popular sites, and it made sense that they were getting a lot of visibility. But I was wondering, is this going to go parabolic? And now there’s this dip. Obviously, once we pull out to six or twelve months from now, we might not even see that dip—but it’s still interesting. So maybe it is going to be something different. I don’t know.

My mind has changed a lot just since ChatGPT-5. I love the interview with Sam Altman from OpenAI where he said, “We’re nowhere near there yet, but ideally the perfect LLM should just be on your phone—literally self-contained—or on your computer, where it has access to all of your stuff, and you can connect it to any other tools and data you want anywhere else. But it’s just the perfect reasoning tool.”

Jon Nastor: Mm-hmm. That’s what it is—and that’s all it should be. But it should be tiny. It shouldn’t need to cover farm fields full of data centers over and over. Things don’t need to get bigger in that way, because they just can’t—for one reason, it’s too much process. We just need small stuff.

So I don’t know where ChatGPT-6 will be. I don’t know where the next Gemini will be. But to me, the way I’m seeing LLMs now—which again is very different than three weeks ago—is kind of like TikTok or something. Not that it’s social media, but it’s just... it’s a different channel. It’s a different channel where people will start researching and talking and doing stuff.

Like, there are markets where people really don’t go to Google to find certain things. People search things—literally for local businesses and stuff—on TikTok. I don’t use TikTok, but that’s what people do in certain markets, and it works.

Does that mean the D2C market or traditional SEO doesn’t exist anymore? No—it’s just that there are different channels people use for different things. And if you want all of those groups of people, then you have to go to all the different channels. But if you just want certain parts of them, then they can be found.

I think from Google’s earnings—even showing the data from last quarter—it’s clear people aren’t using Google less. People are actually using Google more than they used to. But they’re also over here now, in ChatGPT, also searching stuff.

It’s not just, “Well, we’re no longer using this—we’re just doing this.” It’s just a new place for people to communicate and, I think, research and understand ideas. But also, to create. People do. I'm pointing over here because that’s where my ChatGPT is—on that laptop there, Gabby.

But I use it all the time. I use it for a lot of just ideas, bouncing things off it—not so much for just searching. I’m not against it, it’s just—I know where to go to find things if I need to.

So I think it ties in with, like, “What about LinkedIn?” or “What about Twitter turning into X?” To me, LLMs are going to be just another channel. Just like there are agencies out there—like DCP—that only do social media, and they’re amazing at it, and they probably make some of their clients a killing.

Jon Nastor: Do I do it? No, I don’t. And I don’t need to. I just—I do this, and this is a really good channel for certain people.

Should you also do that? Possibly. Should you also do that? Probably. Should you do that? Sure. There are endless channels, and it’s kind of like—where do you pick and choose from? And I don’t know if they’re going to…

The best I can say is I think they’re going to become distinct things from each other. There was this weird search-AI blending that made it seem like they were going to have to become one and the same. And I don’t feel anymore that that’s how it’s going to be.

But also, we could get off this call and there could be a whole new announcement of GPT-6, and now it’s different. Who knows? It just changes so fast that I don’t really know.

But for now, I think it would be wrong for me and my clients to not focus on Google, because 99% of the revenue still comes from there. And that’s still—doing QBRs last month for clients—it’s year-over-year growth still like 20 to 50% in organic revenue. So, we should probably stay focused over here for a while, while it’s still growing. And then maybe start over here if we need to.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, and I think one of the beautiful things about Google is the fact that they are—they seem like they’re going to be a leader in the AI space anyway. I mean, we’re a Google Workspace company ourselves.

Jon Nastor: Yeah.

Mike Pinkus: And so a lot of people will be adopting Gemini regardless. AI is being integrated into search. So, yeah, it is good to be focused on one thing.

But Jon, I have a follow-up question on AI—around the utility of reasoning. You kept mentioning it as a reasoning tool. Is there any opportunity—aside from AI being a search engine—where companies can use it to optimize SEO?

Like, keywords are important. Picking the right keywords, understanding what people are searching, having strategy around that. AI can also create content very, very quickly.

Is there any other way AI could be used to enhance SEO?

Jon Nastor: To enhance SEO?

Mike Pinkus: Well, I mean from the perspective of content creation, knowing what keywords to target—yeah. All of that stuff. You now have, like, a supercomputer beside you over these things that you never had. And does organic versus ChatGPT/Gemini content rank the same? Like, I always wonder, if you spin something up from a prompt, can it rank—if it has the right keywords—just as well as organic content that I just write up by myself?

Jon Nastor: So there’s a lot of data being aggregated right now around this. There are no definitive answers.

I know that 45 minutes or so before we got on this call, a lead came in for me from a local company. And where it says “How did you hear about us?”—this one was ChatGPT.

It’s just how it happened. And it’s not the first one at all.

Do we optimize for ChatGPT? No—because I don’t think anybody really knows how. We have access to client data showing they’re getting a lot of traffic, but it’s like—they just have this presence.

And it seems, from the most recent data I’ve seen, that ChatGPT is getting most of its search when you ask it something search-related, and it’s going to give you back links and maybe business listings—like “Best CPA agencies.”

It’s going to Google, and it’s doing searches of the first one to five pages, and then pulling, based on its reasoning, into the response.

Mike Pinkus: So we win on both at the same time, effectively.

Jon Nastor: I want to say yes. I want to say yes.

I think that the things you did—or I did—six months ago, and the things you do today, are going to help you in LLMs six months from now. I honestly believe that.

I don’t think it’s going to change what good content is. And it’s not going to change the fact that your site still has to be crawlable—all of those fundamentals still matter.

It’s the same with Google algorithm updates. People get panicked about them, and I love them. Because it’s like—well, you should have been creating good content.

And I really don’t believe that LLMs—or Google—is going to release a new update where it’s like, “Okay, now we’re going to highlight the worst, most obviously generated stuff with no punctuation.”

Jon Nastor: There’s no—like, you know what I mean?—where it’s just completely gibberish. I don’t think anyone’s going to be like, “I think this is what we should start showing.” I think it’s going to be well-structured, well-thought-out, logical content that makes sense to answer particular questions.

Then, as you asked in there—what are the questions people are asking? That’s the one thing we don’t know yet. And I don’t know if there’s a way to know.

This is one of the fundamental changes that I’m seeing within SEO—and working hard with my team to get our heads around. It’s not keywords anymore. Like, it is for search, but people—because they’ve all now used an LLM like ChatGPT or Google AI or Gemini or whatever—are even starting to search in Google in a slightly more chatty way.

You know what I mean? It’s not so much like, “best runners for soccer.” It’s like, “Oh man, I’m 48 years old and I wanna play outdoor soccer for the first time in 20 years and I just need some new shoes.”

And it’s like—how could you ever have figured out that would be the keyword? You know what I mean?

But machine learning and AI can still parse it. If you're writing an article or a product page for that person, it can still figure out, “This makes sense. These two connect.”

It used to be that the exact phrase had to be in there—and maybe bolded—for it to work, like 10 years ago. Now it’s just natural language, right?

So keywords in that sense—and I’m seeing people release things like “query fan-out,” where they try to figure out all thousand different ways the question might be asked, and then try to answer every one on your site.

It’s like—no, you can’t answer the same question a thousand different ways. That doesn’t make any sense. If you think these LLMs aren’t smart enough to recognize those thousand ways as the same question and roll them up into one answer... come on. Then it’s not a reasoning tool, is it?

So it’s—yeah. I don’t know, man. It’s a wild time in this.

But the one thing that has been truly fascinating—and this goes back to keyword tools and stuff, and I don’t want to get too technical with you or your audience because I could nerd out on this all day—but SEMrush, Ahrefs, those kinds of tools were the big ones for keyword research. They still are the big tools.

But now, you can hook up—I use Claude—and you can do these things called CPS, which is like a multi-channel protocol, I think.

Jon Nastor: That’s probably wrong, but I call them CPS—and they’re called CPS. It allows you to connect to APIs. So there’s API data for Google AI and LLM data, and you can just chat with it now in Claude like a regular human. You can tell it, “Hey, this is my website, and I’m looking to do a strategy around this,” and it will—using real data from these tools—pull it in, and then discuss it with you like a human.

Then you can say things like, “No, but I want to focus more on this,” or, “Did you see my page that already has this?” and it’ll go, “Oh, you’re right, let me read that,” and then it works that into the strategy. It’s pretty fascinating to me.

So, using the tools themselves with the data to then create strategies for search—whether that’s search AI, LLMs, or just traditional search—that’s been pretty fascinating to me.

And I think that might be, to me, the biggest thing to come out of all of this. It won’t even be something my clients necessarily see—they’ll still be like, “I don’t know what tools you guys use or how you use them”—but to us internally, that kind of stuff is going to allow us to do a lot better work, deeper work. We’ll be able to pull in spreadsheets and data and really do detailed analysis of our clients and their competitors, and put together more methodical, strategic plans.

We just couldn’t do that before, because it would’ve taken way too much time to go through all that data. That, to me, is really exciting. And I think it’s going to make our work better—and then be better for the clients.

So it’s not something you’re necessarily going to see out there, but to us, that’s where I see AI really, really helping. And I’ve seen the first glimpses of it—and it just kind of blew my mind what can be done.

Mike Pinkus: That’s incredible. And you mentioned Claude. Is there any third-party apps or anything that you integrate in? Or are you just using Claude natively, Jon, where you can integrate into this site—NCP?

Jon Nastor: You can use it on a desktop download. So I’ve got the Mac version of it—otherwise I can’t connect it to CPS. If you do it in the browser, it doesn’t work. You can use it in the browser once it’s connected, but you have to get the apps first.

And then I use DataForSEO—so dataforseo.com. They’ve been collecting data for more than a decade now. Lots of other tools use their data. And I was always wanting to use it, but it was just like, “Here’s a list of 21 different APIs.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to work with APIs.”

And then all of a sudden I got an email like, “Here’s an MCP,” and I was like, “What?” And I tried it—and it just blows my mind—because you literally don’t... an MCP just lets Claude talk to the APIs the way it’s supposed to, without you having to do anything.

Like, you just talk to it like a regular person. It tells me it’s connected to 42 or something different APIs of DataForSEO inside Claude, and I can just talk to it about that. I don’t even have to mention DataForSEO. Just—if I’m talking and it happens to come up with keywords or certain data points, it’ll just be like, “Okay, I’ll use DataForSEO AI,” and it pulls it in.

Which is pretty wild. And again, it shows—to me—that whole ChatGPT-5 mindset: make the tool reason really well and work with other tools really well. Don’t make this everything else. Because then it’s just... you know what I mean?

And maybe I’m just projecting, but I feel like that’s even how I think about DCP.

Jon Nastor: It’s like—of course there’s PPC, and it’s amazing, and you should do it.

“Why don’t you do it, Jon?” It’s like—because that’s just not what we do. And I don’t want to do that. I want to do what we do super, super well for our clients.

I have people I can refer them to—who do social media, who do PR, all that stuff. And it’s like, “Yeah, but you’re an SEO agency, you should do that stuff.” It’s like—no, I shouldn’t.

I should do what we do, and do it really, really well, because I think we’re some of the best at it—for the right audience. And that’s it. We just don’t need to do everything for them.

So I love that tools—as powerful as they are—are choosing to maybe go in that direction too. Where they do this one thing—reasoning—but then just interconnect, rather than try to build one monolithic tool themselves. That’s kind of how that works.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, and I think you’ve given great advice over the fact that creating great content, doing the right things—one way or another, it’s all going to work out. Because if you put in the work, and you’re doing the right things, and you’re targeting your customers—it’s going to fall into place.

I mean, algorithms aren’t designed to hurt you. They’re designed to help people find things.

And I know we’re running out of time here, Jon, so I wanted to actually just ask you—for Digital Commerce Partners, for D2C brands that want to find you, what is the best way to find you or connect with you?

Jon Nastor: I mean, I would say come to our site and just check us out. Check out some case studies, see if we’re aligned with you in our thinking. digitalcommerce.com is the site.

And then LinkedIn—I do like to... that’s probably the social media that I use the most. It even gets tiresome for me sometimes, especially being in my market and hearing a lot of it. But I am on there quite a bit. So you can track me down there and just ask me some questions.

Or else just stop by the site. And yeah, I mean—even if you don’t feel like you’re quite ready for us, at whatever level you happen to be—you can still contact me through there or just email me: jonnastor@digitalcommerce.com. 

I’m happy to help people, even if it’s just working through getting to that stage. We have a bunch of free resources we can give to people to help them with their Shopify store or whatever—to get going.

My job—I can’t help everybody. It’s just how it is. And we don’t try to. But I do try to help as many people as we can.

Mike Pinkus: That’s amazing. I wanted to thank you, Jon, for joining me. Obviously, you’re on the up and up and you have a pulse on so much going on in this space—because it is an ever-evolving space with AI, with Google evolving—and the fact that you’re helping companies of a significant size navigate that landscape.

I think it’s really, really cool, and you have a lot of experience with it. So I do appreciate you joining me and adding some authentic color to this—because a lot of people, they hear a bunch of things in the news and think things are bigger than they are with an LLM. But they don’t actually see the data, and they’re not necessarily working with bigger brands where they can see large degrees of traffic and where it’s going.

And I think you created a lot of clarity for people who maybe have a misconception over what’s driving traffic currently and where things are going.

Jon Nastor: Right, right. This has been fun.

Mike Pinkus: Thanks so much.