Jason Berkowitz, SEO Director & Founder of Break The Web, joins Austin Willman on E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what’s actually working in SEO and AI visibility right now, and what most brands are completely missing.
Jason shares how his agency built Hugen, an in-house AI LLM visibility tracker that monitors brand mentions and sentiment across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. He breaks down why brand sentiment in AI platforms is becoming one of the most important signals to track, and how his team uses an open source model to score responses at scale across thousands of daily prompts.
The conversation covers the real state of off-page SEO and digital PR in the AI era, why certain content formats are now being cited as sources by LLMs, and how e-commerce brands should be thinking about product data, Google Merchant Center, and agentic commerce following Google IO.
Jason also opens up about agency operations, how he uses AI as an assistant rather than an advisor, why he tells some prospects to spend their budget on paid ads instead of SEO, and how thought leadership and community have been his most reliable growth channels.
If you work in-house at a brand or run an agency, this episode is packed with practical perspective on where SEO is heading and how to stay ahead.
Takeaways:
- AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are actively citing links as sources of information
- Brand sentiment in LLMs can be tracked using open source AI scoring models
- Digital PR content should now serve both traditional SEO and LLM citation goals
- E-commerce brands should prioritize clear product data over clever copy for AI readability
- Google Merchant Center and product feed quality are more important than ever post-Google IO
- AI tools work best as assistants for repeatable tasks, not as replacements for critical thinking
- Agencies should align SEO KPIs with what the client's internal team is being measured on
- Sometimes recommending paid ads over SEO is the right call for early-stage brand budgets