AI-Driven Visibility. Real-World Impact.

The Best SEO Podcast

Getting found, named and cited by AI search. A model now decides which companies get mentioned at all, and most executives cannot see whether theirs is one of them. Every week: what is actually working right now, and what only sounds like it is. Hosted by Matthew Bertram, who owns and leads EWR Digital in Houston, so none of this is theory.

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Somebody has to keep the record.

AI search is three years old, changes monthly, and had no maintained chronology. So we keep one.

The full timeline →
2023202420252026 December 2022, Perplexity: Perplexity released its answer engine, making the per-claim citation the default unit of an AI answerFebruary 6, 2023, Google: Google announced Bard one day before Microsoft's Bing Chat eventFebruary 7, 2023, Microsoft: Microsoft launched Bing Chat, the first mainstream search engine with a generative answer layerMay 10, 2023, Google: Google introduced the Search Generative Experience at I/O 2023, putting generative answers inside the SERPAugust 7, 2023, OpenAI: OpenAI published GPTBot and its robots.txt token, making AI crawler access an explicit publisher decisionNovember 2023, Perplexity: Perplexity documented PerplexityBot as a citation-only crawler that does not feed model trainingNovember 16, 2023, Industry: The GEO paper (Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT-D, Allen Institute) was the first peer-reviewed test of tactics for generative-engine visibilityDecember 13, 2023, OpenAI: OpenAI and Axel Springer made licensed publisher content, including paywalled articles, citable inside ChatGPT answersMay 2024, Anthropic: Anthropic split its crawler into three independently-controllable tokensMay 14, 2024, Google: Google launched AI Overviews to general US search, replacing the opt-in SGE experimentMay 22, 2024, OpenAI: OpenAI licensed display rights to News Corp's mastheads, shifting which sources appear in finance and news answersJuly 25, 2024, OpenAI: OpenAI announced the SearchGPT prototype, and the OAI-SearchBot token appeared the next dayJuly 26, 2024, OpenAI: OpenAI separated citation eligibility from training consent with the OAI-SearchBot tokenJuly 30, 2024, Perplexity: Perplexity launched the first revenue-sharing program tied to being citedAugust 15, 2024, Google: Google took AI Overviews international and redesigned how it displays citationsSeptember 3, 2024, Industry: The llms.txt convention was proposed, and as of 2026 no major platform has confirmed using itOctober 28, 2024, Google: AI Overviews reached 100+ countries and over one billion monthly usersOctober 31, 2024, OpenAI: OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search, giving ChatGPT live web retrieval with citationsMay 20, 2025, Google: Google launched AI Mode, a fully conversational search surface separate from AI OverviewsMay 27, 2025, Anthropic: Claude web search went global on all plans, adding a fifth major citing surfaceJuly 22, 2025, Industry: Pew Research measured organic click-through at 8% with an AI Overview present versus 15% withoutApril 1, 2026, Industry: Seer Interactive measured AI Overview click-through recovering from 1.3% to 2.4% between December 2025 and February 2026May 11, 2026, Industry: Ahrefs tested 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against 4,000 matched controls and measured no gain in AI citationsJune 3, 2026, Google: Google Search Console added generative AI performance reporting, the first first-party AI visibility data
Google7OpenAI6Microsoft1Perplexity3Anthropic2Industry5
Each mark is one change that measurably moved what gets cited or how visibility is measured — 10 of 24 in 2024 alone, including 4 primary-source studies. Every entry is dated and linked to its source.

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Search leaders, founders and operators, on the record.

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Straight answers, sourced to the show

Where 142 questions and terms get answered, each cited to the episodes that cover it.

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Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

What listeners say

Reviews left on Apple Podcasts by people who listen to the show.

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★★★★★
I am consuming as much as I can about LLM SEO. Matt is a great host who has really natural conversations, and finds brilliant guests. I have been diving in and learning a ton recently. Always looking forward to the next episode
AmericanVader · Apple Podcasts
★★★★★
Matt does an excellent job taking super complex topics and making them digestible to both experienced folks and people new to the game. He brings on top notch folks to interview and collaborate with on the show, and his involvement with OGGN’s sales and marketing strategy is a testimony to his work. Keep up the hustle Matt!
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EWR Digital

The Best SEO Podcast explains how to win in search and AI answers. EWR Digital, the Houston SEO and AI-visibility agency led by host Matthew Bertram that produces the show, implements it for operators. The same team behind 680+ episodes builds and runs search and AI-answer programs for companies.

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