Crystal Carter on the LLM-SEO intersection, new SEO ideas, and reasoning models

“All killer, no filler.”

That’s one of the memorable quotes from my recent interview with Crystal Carter, head of SEO communications at Wix, about the rapidly evolving search landscape and what it means for brand visibility. Some of the topics covered:

• Why curiosity, experimentation, and cross-channel strategies matter more than ever.
• The shift from rankings to relevance.
• What reasoning models and LLMs mean for the future of SEO.
• A preview of her upcoming presentation at SMX Advanced 2025 in Boston.

Reminder: SMX Advanced returns June 11-13 in Boston. Get your tickets now!

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Danny Goodwin: Hey everybody, this is Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land and SMX. And today I am being joined by the one and only Crystal Carter, welcome in. It’s great to see you. Do you want to introduce yourself to the viewers?

Crystal Carter: Yeah, my name is Crystal Carter. I am the head of SEO communications at Wix and Wix Studio. And I am someone who’s been working at search for a very long time, working in marketing for even longer. And I’m really pleased to be joining the group of speakers at SMX Advanced Boston in June.

Danny Goodwin: That’s right. SMX Advanced is back in person live in Boston June 11 to 13. Crystal will be one of the amazing speakers there. And it’s great, too, because despite both being in this industry for a long time, we only just met in real life at BrightonSEO last October, I believe. It was very cool to finally meet you in the real world.

Crystal Carter: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was really nice to meet you as well.

Danny Goodwin: I’m so glad that you’ll be speaking with us. But before we get into what you’ll be talking about at SMX, I wanted to talk to you about the state of things in SEO at the moment – because things are very much in flux. I’m curious to hear what your take would be on how you think we’re responding to it all. What do you think we’re doing right as an industry and what are we doing wrong?

Crystal Carter: I think that SEOs as an industry, as a crew, we’re very inquisitive. We’re very curious. We’re very much the kinds of people where somebody tells us something and we go and we test it. We go, “What if I poke it?” That sort of thing. And that I think is great right now. Google’s saying lots of things and people are like, “Well, I’ve tested that and I see this” or Google’s putting out statements and we’re saying, “we’re going to have a look at that.” And I think that’s fantastic. We’re seeing a lot of great reports about how AI Overviews are affecting click-through rates. We’re seeing a lot of great insights on how people are using LLMs.

Crystal Carter: We’re seeing a lot of great insights on lots of ways that people are using these different search features as search is in such a state of flux. And I think that curiosity that always be testing approach is something that’s really really important right now because it’s changing so rapidly. In terms of things that I think that we could do better with, I think there’s probably some folks who maybe were doing SEO in a way that was sort of templated as it were.

Crystal Carter: Folks who are still holding on to those approaches and still expecting the same results might be in for a little bit of a surprise or they might be going through a little bit of a tough time. And I think that right now is the time to be expanding the breadth of your SEO skills and to be applying it to multiple channels.  I’ve been somebody who’s been advocating for a multi-channel approach for the whole time. That’s something I spoke about at BrightonSEO a couple of years before then. And I still think it holds.

Crystal Carter: And I think Google recently just announced some more ways that you can be more visible in AI and one of the things they said was to be multimodal. As I said, I’ve talked about being on multiple channels. I presented on video search. This is something that I think is really really important and I think that it’s something that SEOs who are able to tap into multiple channels, multiple markets will be harnessing and have been harnessing and I think that’s something that’s worth paying attention to going forward.

Danny Goodwin: There’s obviously been a lot of talk lately about, and even before all this started that there was sort of this checklist mentality that you kind of alluded to when in your answer. It’s just people were kind of following it and getting results. And now those playbooks are breaking if they’re not entirely blown up at this point. And I know just on Search Engine Land, we republished a great article that Jono Alderson had published about it’s time to set your content playbooks on fire. I don’t know if you had a chance to read that one, but it was a amazing read.

Crystal Carter: Yeah, I’ve heard Jono speak about that in other times as well. And don’t get me wrong, I think the checklist definitely have their place. We have them in the Wix tool set. It’s useful to make sure that you don’t forget things necessarily. But I definitely had clients, for instance, who came to me and they’re like, “So the SEO is done?” Yeah, it’s done. We checked everything’s green now so it’s done and it’s not done. And I think that feel feeling that if you just check it that you will get the reward. I think it’s a little bit more complex than that at the moment.

Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. One of the big things that I know a lot of people have been talking about – Wil Reynolds, Rand Fishkin, and others – is that it’s not really about rankings anymore. So where do you see this heading? How can SEOs who have traditionally been it’s about traffic and ranking how do we show value heading forward in SEO beyond rankings?

Crystal Carter: So, I think it comes down to relevance. We have very often been like, “Yeah, look at all this traffic that we’ve got to this website.” And I’m sure you’ve seen these websites as well. I’ve done plenty of content audits where you look at it and there’s a lot of traffic to the website, but it’s junk traffic. And it has been for years. Aleyda [Solis] has talked about this. I’ve talked about this as well, and basically I remember, clients that were on a certain CMS, which I will not name, but they had a lot of these tag pages that were getting lots of traffic, but they shouldn’t have been indexed in the first place. They just weren’t useful pages. So, when you took them away, they’re like, “our traffic went down.” It’s like, “Yeah, but you’ve got more killer and less filler.” So, that’s what you want. You want all killer, no filler.

Crystal Carter: And I think that what Google’s been moving towards is trying to give you better traffic than you had before. and this is what they’ve been talking about in their thing recently. And, take it with a pinch of salt, however you want to take it, but what you want to see is that people who actually get to your website are ready to convert. Ideally, Google should be warming them up, however they get to you, their social, whatever, should be warming them up.  And then by the time they get to you, they’re already sort of qualified. And I think that that’s super useful. So in this space where you have hyperpersonalization, which Google is promising, Google’s like, we will have a personalized search, which essentially may very well make Google much more like your social feed. So at the moment, if I go on my husband’s YouTube, it’s a completely different world from my YouTube.

Crystal Carter: My YouTube is all puppies and Beyonce video clips, and that’s what mine is. And my husband’s is all sports and politics and that’s what he’s got on his. And I think that if we have a situation where Google is personalized, it’s going to be more like that where when I go on Google, I get all of the things that I like and all of that sort of thing. And when other people go on Google, they’ll have a very different search experience.  So, I think we might lose the commons in that space, the sort of common like Page 1 of folks. And in that space, being genuinely relevant to your clients is going to be so important. And the way that you get relevance is making sure that your clients and that you’re engaging with your clients directly.

Crystal Carter: So, not just writing about a random topic that vaguely relates to the thing you actually sell, but taking the questions that your customers give you and writing a blog specifically on that. Because if one person asks about it, it’s highly likely that a few other people are going to be asking about it. And if they’re able to by the time they get to, they’re warmed up in that question, by the time they get to you, you actually are able to answer their question, then they’re more likely to engage with your business.

Danny Goodwin: And I must say I love that all killer no filler. I think that’s a great motto to go with heading forward and hopefully people will embrace that. And as you were talking that through I was like wow it almost sounds like it’s the TikTokification of search in a way because it’s very personalized just for you what you’re interested in.

Crystal Carter: Yeah, I mean it’s going to be a very agentic experience. If you watch Google IO is basically the Gemini show and everything was Gemini and then Gemini is doing this for this feature and Gemini, is going to be using a lot of different signals in how you use it in Gemini, but also how you use it in search and as that goes forward, it’s going to be certainly much more agentic. So when I go and look for a recipe about chocolate cake, they’ll know that I don’t do dairy, So they’re not going to give me a recipe that has dairy in it. They’ll give me a recipe that has oat milk or something like that in it. And that’s super useful.

Danny Goodwin: We’re talking about lots of changes going on so I’m curious for you, what is most exciting to you right now in the SEO world?

Crystal Carter: I’ve been really fascinated by the intersection of LLMs and SEO for a good long while. and all my talks in the last sort of eight months have been around that. I think it’s a fascinating space. I think that the way the levers that you pull for LLMs are very interesting. Some people say, “They’re not exactly the same.” I’ve seen uplifts from optimizations for LLMs that have had no effect on Google rankings, but have given us a 15% uplift in visibility in LLMs within a week. And that I think is really fascinating. And I think that it’s moving at such a pace that you really do need to keep up.

Crystal Carter: And the other thing that I find fascinating about it is how many different variables there are but also similarities. So I’ll talk about it in my talk but the way that the different models work, the interplay between how they manage information and how they look at information, I think is really fascinating and also how they perform.  So, Wix, I badgered the team and I said, “Do we have, visibility on bot logs that are like bots that are visiting Wix websites?” And they said, “Yeah.” I was like, “Can we add them to the bot log report?” and they were like, “I guess so.” And then a couple months later they’re like, “Here it is.” And so now you can see which bot logs are going into which bots are hitting your Wix website. And it’s fascinating to see which ones are doing what.

Crystal Carter: So OpenAI, for instance, has three bots and you can see how the different bots will perform on your site, which pages they’re looking at. And I know one of the AI tracking tools recently published a paper looking at how often OpenAI, for instance, crawls the site versus how often Google crawls the site and they’re very different. Google will often crawl a couple of pages at one time and OpenAI or some of the other bots, they’ll often crawl the whole page. Meta is crawling a lot, for instance, right now. And I think that, it’s interesting. They have different intent and there’s lots of different ways. And I think it’s fascinating, challenging, but fascinating time for SEO. And that’s what I’m really interested in right now.

Danny Goodwin: On the other end, is there anything keeping you up at night right now in the world of SEO? Because again, there’s a lot of change going on. Obviously, AI Mode is now here. We’ve already had AI Overviews. Zero-click seems to be not, going away. and budgets are being slashed, people are having trouble getting jobs. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. So I was just kind of curious, is there anything that’s kind of worrying you either among those or something else completely

Crystal Carter: I recently attended SEO Week run by the team over at iPullRank. Shout out to those guys. There was someone who was talking about juniors. I think it was Farrah [Bostic] was talking about this and she was saying how one of the things that’s important is making sure that juniors have the ability to learn in all of this space. There’s a lot of automation that’s coming through with AI and we’ve built a lot of automation into our tools. I know that your team uses a lot of automation for different things and stuff.  But people are saying we don’t need to hire for these SEO roles or maybe we don’t need to hire for these or maybe we don’t need to get a consultant for that. That can be a challenge.

Crystal Carter: But what I think is really interesting in that space is that we also need to remember that we are the generation who were that for the traditional marketers. And so the role of a social media manager did not exist when I was a child. nobody when I was a little kid in the ’80s was saying I want to grow up and be a social media manager. It didn’t exist. Right?  So I think that one of the things I find challenging is that people are stopping hiring. They’re not but I think that what people should be thinking about is who has the new ideas in this space. Who can bring in new ideas that you hadn’t even considered. Who are the people starting in their career right now but who are really good at harnessing some of these tools and might be able to apply them in a way that you hadn’t even thought about.

Crystal Carter: And that’s something I think is really good. And I think it’s something that’s really important for the industry as a whole. And I think it’s something that’s really important for, helping folks get their start as things evolve.

Danny Goodwin: That’s a good point. Yeah, like a lot all the work there wasn’t even an internet when I’m not sure for you…I’m not sure how old you are but I know there was no internet for me growing up.

Crystal Carter: We started all that stuff. I think that if we want the industry to thrive going forward into this new age, I think that embracing new ideas I think is really really important and I think bringing young people and people who are maybe new to the industry through that is really important. Dale Bertrand is someone who started as a programmer and he brings that perspective to all of his stuff and he’s doing incredible things with MCPs and every time I hear Dale Bertrand talk I literally can’t take enough notes and I think that people who have sort of different perspectives are going to be able to bring us new things and we can bring in all of the things we know about search as well

Crystal Carter: But I think also for SEOs we need to remember that we aren’t just beholden to what Google does. We have lots and lots of skills. So the knowledge that we have about how search and how algorithm works all of that can be brought to bear for SEO for TikTok for YouTube for things like that but also for audience research. So we know how to tell from the data what audiences are interested in. That’s something that a lot of businesses aren’t able to apply. They don’t really maybe know how to do that. And also as we go into the LLM space, I have an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub that talks about the KPIs and the metrics and things like that. And there are a number of ways that we can apply, things like keyword research in order to make prompts in order to reverse engineer prompts for predicting LLM searches and things like that.

Crystal Carter: And also we can use those to combine them to make more of the complex prompts as well and also to find data for different things like that. So I think that we need to not keep ourselves in not make a box and keep ourselves in the box. I think we need to expand that and maybe bring some folks with us.

Danny Goodwin: We’ve talked about a lot of stuff at this point already, but if you want to put your prognosticator hat on, look into your crystal ball for SEO heading forward. Do you see it this as a period of growth, decline, or reinvention that’s sort of ongoing right now? Where it’ll be in maybe the next year or two.

Crystal Carter: I think reinvention. I think we’re seeing so many changes if you think about this Google I/O versus the last Google I/O there’s so many more things going on and if you think about the ones before and I’ve watched them before and they’re little iterations a little bit here a little bit there and what we’re seeing now is a fundamental shift  And we’re seeing some core shifts where before we had sort of Google’s algorithm and there are 199 ranking factors or that sort of thing and we now have one of the core engines behind what’s happening on Google is Gemini. And they’ve said it explicitly and previously the algorithm has been very much blackbox and stuff.

Crystal Carter: But all the Gemini stuff like it’s patents … it’s in their documentation it’s in at Google Cloud they’re constantly trying to sell Gemini so you can see all of the workings behind what goes into it so on the one hand it’s really opening things up but I think that we to evolve and I think we also need to bring clients with us I know folks who are looking into the intersection between SEO and LLM optimization or SEO and LLMs on their and people are needing to bring clients with them to understand what’s going on. I think we also need to think about that more ourselves. I think it’s going to be a very interesting few years I think between this time and next year surgery is going to look very very different and we’ll see what it looks.

Danny Goodwin: Before we get there, we still have to get to June and SMX Advanced. Your session, will be The deep search shift: Optimizing for LLM reasoning models. For someone who’s maybe watching this and thinking about coming to the show, can you give a little preview what you’re going to talk about in that session?

Crystal Carter: So, first of all the other speakers are great, but mine is going to be the best. No, I’m just kidding!

Danny Goodwin: Not according to Mike King.

Crystal Carter: I’m really fascinated with how the different models behave and how they work and how it changes how you might market to them. Reasoning models are really really fascinating and I started looking at this as Deepseek sort of came out and the story of Deepseek I find really fascinating.  We’ll get into that a little bit. But the other thing is that AI Mode is a reasoning model. So basically what we’re going to be talking about is the reasoning behind the reasoning models and what a reasoning model means. What it means for your optimizations going forward and how you can surface in those models and what things seem to make the difference.

Crystal Carter: I’ve done a lot of research around it and I’ll share that information. I’ll be doing some more research as well going forward and I think that there’s some good opportunities for brands that are particularly well nuanced. But I’ll share all those details during my talk.

Danny Goodwin: Awesome. I can’t wait for that. That will be at SMX Advance Boston June 11 to 13. Tickets are still available for that, so go get them. The ticket price just to meet Crystal is well worth it. I believe. and many other super smart people, of course. And Barry [Schwartz] will be moderating your session. So, I’m sure he’ll take it super easy on you. Crystal, thanks so much for joining us today, to talk about SMX and the state of SEO. Really appreciate it. I can’t wait to see you at SMX.

Crystal Carter: Thank you so much.

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