Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, joins E-Coffee with Experts to break down what SEO actually means in a world dominated by AI search engines.
Crystal shares how she started her career being handed the internet as a young millennial, built her expertise across freelance, agency, local authority, and e-commerce, and now leads SEO communications for one of the largest website builders in the world with over 300 million users.
In this episode, we cover how Wix is building AI search tools to help users track their visibility, why entity optimization matters more than ever, how brands should think about citations and third-party validation in the age of LLMs, and what signals tell you that an AI search strategy is genuinely creating business value.
Crystal also gets practical about audience research, content strategy for AI citations, the importance of YouTube as a citation source, and why working backwards from prompts beats chasing keywords.
Whether you are an SEO professional, a brand marketer, or a founder trying to understand where search is going, this episode gives you a clear picture of what to focus on right now.
Takeaways:
- AI search users convert at higher rates despite lower overall traffic volumes
- Product and category pages outperform blogs for commercial and transactional queries
- Entity optimization fixes how LLMs talk about your brand, not just rankings
- Perplexity surfaces Reddit content more than almost any other AI platform
- YouTube is heavily cited by AI systems and should be part of your SEO strategy
- Work backwards from prompts and FAQs before building your content strategy
- Men are statistically more likely to use AI search tools than women
- Building genuine relevance across channels matters more than keyword optimization alone