Host: Sean Barber — https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrbarber/ — He/Him

In this Chat With Sean, I sit down with Arnout Hellemans — a freelance SEO consultant based in Amsterdam who's been in the industry since 2010. Arnout helps businesses earn organic visibility where it actually counts now — in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google — by building content structured for AI retrieval and for the humans who actually buy.

We get into how a brand stands out to the bots in a zero-click world: why the brands that put users first (instead of chasing algorithms) are miles ahead, and why the sentiment around your brand — what people consistently say about you across Reddit, Quora, X and beyond — now matters more than any single ranking. Arnout makes the case that consistency is truth: the same way a person comes to trust a brand from repeated, consistent messaging, an LLM comes to "trust" it too.

From there we look into content that quietly sabotages you (pages that contradict themselves, one-size-fits-all templates), why you need proper intent-led templates (the Porsche vs minibus review), and how AlsoAsked and query fan-out hand you the questions to answer. Then the measurement conversation everyone's avoiding: why traffic and last-click are the wrong KPIs, how to measure conversions and backend/CRM data instead (traffic down, revenue up), and why share-of-voice tools are black-box proxies you should treat with caution. We finish on advertising in AI — why Google (not OpenAI) is positioned to dominate AI ads — and Arnout's three or four things to focus on right now.

Arnout discusses:

- How brands stand out to the bots in a zero-click, AI-search world

- Why brand sentiment — the commonality of what people say about you — beats chasing rankings

- Speaking your customer's language (the "mobile banking" fix that skyrocketed downloads)

- Consistency as truth — for the human brain and for LLMs alike

- How to stop being ignored in AI if you've only ever chased algorithms

- Content that contradicts itself and why LLMs won't trust it

- Pruning and intent-led templates (why a Porsche review ≠ a minibus review)

- Using AlsoAsked and query fan-out to find the questions that matter

- Explaining your accreditations (and why your logo alt text matters to AI)

- The right KPIs in a zero-click world — conversions and backend data, not traffic

- Why last-click attribution quietly killed brand-building

- Share of voice, market share and sentiment as proxies — use with care

- Why rank tracking can't be trusted (proxies, VPNs, hyper-localised SERPs)

- Advertising in AI: why Google, not OpenAI, is built to dominate

- The three or four things to focus on for AI search right now

Topics covered include:

- AI search / GEO

- Brand & sentiment

- Zero-click search

- Content strategy & pruning

- User intent & AlsoAsked

- Measurement & attribution

- Personalisation & rank tracking

- AI advertising

Connect With Arnout: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnouthellemans/

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