Jeremy Moser of uSERP: AI Search Still Comes Down to Good SEO

Jeremy Moser co-founded uSERP, a link building and digital PR agency, eight or nine years ago after local SEO in Denver and a few years inside a content agency. His clients used to arrive already sold on links. Since the end of 2025 every conversation opens with AI search instead, and his answer is the same each time: "all the conversations, when we actually dig into it, boiled down to just a fundamentally good SEO strategy with a little bit more brand building in there as well" (3:38). Jeremy Rivera's full write-up is at unscriptedseo.com. The uSERP survey Moser plugs at the end is the State of Backlinks report. What you will hear The 92% stat. HubSpot data Moser cites: of the mentions a brand gets inside LLMs, "92% of it boiled down to content that wasn't on your own domain" (4:08). Off-page SEO with a new name. Jeremy's own read of the same question is in what actually got people cited in AI search.AI-search-first is a ticking time bomb. Self-promotional listicles have ranked "maybe two or three years" without getting dinged and he is "surprised to see that it worked for that long" (7:55). For B2B SaaS clients on a one-to-five-year horizon he "pretty much never recommend[s] anything that's even remotely in a gray area" (10:33), because tanking traditional search also shrinks what the next model trains on.Recovery is slower than it was. Disavow, restructure, six months. That was the old pattern. "Now I see sites that almost never recover from that initial high" (13:46). A site that peaked at 200K a month crashes to 20K and stays there. Timothy Malmros walked through the current drop-domain canonical trick in his episode.Traffic down 30%, leads flat. Clients see organic "declined 30% over the last year but our metrics are the same in terms of leads" (18:20). "We've got a million organic visits a month, but 70% of that is really not doing any heavy lifting for you" (18:49). Go deeper, not broader Zero-volume, 400 clicks. A question kept surfacing on uSERP sales calls. Ahrefs and SEMrush said "maybe zero to 10 searches a month" (20:49). They built the page anyway for sales enablement and pulled "over 400 clicks to that page from organic" in 30 to 60 days (21:19). Jeremy's version is the anti-dig page for a precast concrete wall client.Local still moves. For monday.com the play was broad, high-authority domains. For a local business, a general authority site barely registers; a publication in that city, state or region "tends to move the needle far faster" (24:15). Both think local SEO is the liveliest corner of the trade, which is where the #SEOchat on the helpful content update landed too.The attorney test. Moser asked Claude to draft a clause for a real estate offer. His attorney's first words: "did you put this in the ChatGPT?" (26:40). "AI works really good if you have the expertise to relay to it and feed through it. It doesn't work really good if you're just relying on it from like a baseline standpoint" (27:40). He has "yet to see a single company" that moved all content to AI "sustain or improve" performance (29:10). Jeremy's link scarcity thesis is the other half of that argument.Three questions before anchor text. Is it...