This interview is with Lewis Carhart, Founder at LLM Agent, Inc..
Lewis Carhart, Founder, LLM Agent, Inc.
Lewis, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in SEO and AI?
Absolutely. I’ve always had a high entrepreneurial spirit. I ran community forums for online gamers in the mid-2000s as a teenager, which eventually led to a career in tech. I enjoyed working but always wanted more, or needed more—I went through side project after side project, picking up skills that any founder would along the way.
It wasn’t until after I built a really great SaaS platform that I realized that just making something great wasn’t enough. I had to market it, and SEO was one of the best ways to get an audience. Now, I run a successful SaaS platform that helps companies with SEO and uses AI to filter out low-quality advertising opportunities.
What pivotal moments or decisions in your career led you to specialize in the intersection of SEO and AI?
I worked for a venture-backed startup as their founding growth engineer. They were building an AI platform, and I needed to help them scale. I eventually built AI-powered tools, which were used as lead magnets.
It was a successful play for them; to this day, two of the tools attract 250,000 visitors a month to their platform, according to Ahrefs.
Can you share an example of a time when you used AI to solve a specific SEO challenge? What tools or techniques did you use, and what was the outcome?
Every website that I launch now has JSON-LD structured data, a schema markup that helps search engines understand more about your website. JSON-LD is inserted into a web page without disrupting the content, and crawlers get a better understanding of a particular entity.
This used to take us several hours, but now, with common AI tools like ChatGPT/Claude 3.5, it takes just a few minutes to add to any web page.
What are some common misconceptions people have about using AI for SEO, and what advice would you give to those looking to leverage AI in their SEO efforts?
The biggest misconception about using AI for SEO is that you can just use a platform to create thousands of articles and you’ll get traffic. Google’s official guidance about AI-generated content is straightforward: appropriate use of AI or automation is not against their guidelines.
However, the articles need to be useful, helpful, original, and satisfy their requirements of E-E-A-T. I prefer to take the approach of using AI to help with outlines, and then interview experts, find data that backs (or disproves) the claims, and do our own in-house research.
Looking ahead, what are some of the most exciting developments in AI that you believe will significantly impact the future of SEO?
In my opinion, tools like Perplexity will significantly change SEO. The search engines of the future will be chat/voice-based, where I can ask a question, and they will find up-to-date answers based on reliable sources.
I find myself using search engines less and choosing tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude more and more.
For businesses with limited resources, what would be one actionable tip you’d recommend for starting to integrate AI into their SEO strategy?
AI is perfect for helping you choose content to write about. If you’re in the biotech industry, for example, I would find common questions and searches across the industry and then use AI to generate whole content clusters around those.
What advice would you give to aspiring SEO professionals who are eager to learn about and specialize in AI-driven SEO?
We’re still very early. If you are eager to learn about AI-driven SEO, and you have the time and resources, get that ChatGPT/Claude subscription and use it to your advantage. You’ll be further ahead than 95% of the rest who ignore it.