SEO isn't dead, and answer engine optimization isn't a replacement for it. That's where George B. Thomas, Max Cohen, and Chad Hohn land on this HubHeroes episode, recorded live on August 24, 2026. George spent the entire show refusing to say the newer acronym out loud, on purpose, because his whole point is that the old one still carries the weight.
Max put the stake in the ground early: search engine optimization and answer engine optimization are the same thing. Make good content, it gets found, whether a human is reading it in a search engine or a bot is.
Then George shared his screen, opened the SEO tools inside his own HubSpot portal, and asked the guys a genuinely uncomfortable question: is this screen lying to me? What came out of that was two stop-the-episode moments, one number that surprised everybody in the room, and something George now has to go investigate.
The Weekend Question That Started It
Before the intro music, George asked something more human than technical. On a Saturday or a Sunday, how free are you actually? Or do your weekends get crept in on by HubSpot updates, AI changes, and the pile of things you feel like you should be working on?
- Max exits the HubSpot universe completely. His words: he exits it so hard it's insane.
- Chad blurs the line, but he calls what he does play, not work. Over the weekend he built a custom MCP connector, plus an app that makes a playoff bracket out of the flavors at a local ice cream shop by scanning their live camera, so multiple humans can go taste them and vote them against each other.
- George is mid first-home move-in, in the boxing and building phase. He probably should have worked, maybe even wanted to, and instead painted a gate and put things in a shed.
That was the on-ramp. UNBOUND 2026 is less than a month out, and the rename from INBOUND to UNBOUND was George's way into the real topic. His read: there are things we should be working on and don't want to, because we keep getting told there's another acronym to work on instead. Maybe those things aren't separate at all.
The Question George Didn't Write
George opened the show proper with one question for Max and Chad: how should SEO, HubSpot, and RevOps work together now that search is influencing brand discovery more than direct clicks? Max asked him to read it again so he could break it down on purpose, then answered honestly. He had no clue. He didn't even know where to begin with it.
That's when George gave up the reveal. He hadn't written the question. That morning he jumped into his portal and used Breeze Assistant, HubSpot's AI, fed it the HubHeroes site plus Max Cohen's and Chad Hohn's LinkedIn profiles, and asked what the top four questions were that he should ask these two about SEO.
Breeze handed back four questions and then went further. It told him which one to lead with. Lead with number four, it said, and here's why: it's the most HubHeroes-specific, it plays to both Max and Chad's strengths, it avoids a generic SEO-is-dead opener, and it sets up a conversation the audience can actually apply inside HubSpot. It also read each host and said so out loud.
- Max's background as a former HubSpot product trainer and solutions engineer makes it a strong strategic lens question, and gives him room on HubSpot tools, content, and reporting.
- Chad's RevOps and go-to-market systems background makes it likely he'll connect SEO visibility to funnel quality and revenue attribution, so it opens up lead management, lifecycle tracking, and pipeline visibility.
That's the artifact worth sitting with for a second. An AI read two humans' public profiles and coached the host on interview strategy, down to the running order and the reason for it. Breeze even offered a punched-up version: in 2026, what does SEO success really mean if traffic is dropping but AI visibility is rising? Max deflated that one on contact. It's the same thing.
Max's Stake In The Ground
“Search engine optimization and an answer engine, it's all the same thing. Make good content, it will get found, whether it's a human being looking at it in a search engine or a bot looking at it in a search engine.”
Max's honest position is that the crew has been saying the same thing for years, and he doesn't have another way to say it. He's noticed he replaced Google with ChatGPT, and it's still a search engine, it just talks back to him. The bot still has to go out on the internet and find the thing, and it's using a search engine to get there. He also tied it straight back to the weekend question. The reason it's easy for him to shut it off on a Saturday is exactly this. It's hard to have enough mental cycles to process new words for something that already has a word. Chad's version of the same idea is the practical one. Bots still have to go find something on the interwebs, so you still have to put something there. SEO, in his framing, is making sure the content indexing online can be found easily and can tell a machine what you do.
Is This Screen Lying To Me?
George asked how many humans still use or pay attention to the SEO recommendations panel inside their HubSpot portal. Chad's read: the curious admins, the ones who like to poke at every page, plus the occasional marketing ops human who stumbles in every now and again, runs it, and takes the list to the marketing or website team. Chad also named the two items on that panel that genuinely matter. Page load speed, which HubSpot has never been great about, and crawling and indexing, because you want mister bot on the interwebs to find the thing before it feeds into the AI data sources.
Then George asked the question the episode was built for. We've all heard about AI hallucinating and lying to us. Have you ever heard a conversation about SaaS hallucinating and lying to you? Is this page telling me the truth?
“It's telling you whatever whoever set up those rules of things that it should look at, if it meets or doesn't meet those rules. It's heuristically coded, more or less.”
The code is procedural. Check thing, if thing equals blah then true, otherwise false, don't throw a flag. It isn't AI and it isn't hallucinating. It's a set of if-then rules measured against somebody's definition of best practice. That distinction changes how much weight you give the number on the screen.
The Number That Sent George Off To Investigate
On the non-www version of the domain, the panel showed 36 total recommendations against roughly 30 pages scanned. The reaction on the call was immediate: it felt like George had way more pages than that. He did. On the www version of the same site, the count was 1,627 pages.
Stop the episode moment one: go rescan your site. George's previous scan was two months old, and even the one he ran 20 minutes before the show was already showing him something that wasn't right.
Stop the episode moment two: check whether your www version and your non-www version resolve to the same place. If humans and bots are landing on what amounts to two different sites, you're going to get two wildly different pictures back.
George has the www redirect in place, which is why the 1,627 number is the one that makes sense to him, and he still doesn't know why HubSpot picked up 30 pages on the non-www side. He was clear about how to hold that: this isn't a failure, it's something he now has to go investigate. Dig in, think, stay in a fixer mindset, and the tool will help you fix the things.
Reading The Numbers Like An Adult
The surprising thing in the room was that the recommendation count felt too high. Shouldn't it say zero? The answer came back fast. You can't achieve zero, and everybody should know that. Max has seen portals a hundred times worse than this one. And the count is relative to page count. With 1,627 pages, a big chunk of that list is the same two errors repeating across most of the pages, and some of the performance flags are minute to the point of being insignificant. Read that way, 240 on-page SEO and 133 user experience recommendations is actually not terrible.
So the move on screen was to uncheck low impact and look at high impact only. What's left is the short list actually worth arguing about, and HubSpot gives you the page list behind each one. The honest gripe from the guys: the panel names the problem and hands you a generic description of what's happening, but it won't tell you why this specific asset on this specific page is causing it. Why can't it go analyze your site and say this image, right here, is the one doing it?
Opening one page gets you closer. George pulled one up and the tool reported a total blocking time of 205 against a benchmark of 200, then showed the images responsible. The culprits were a HubHeroes thumbnail and a logo, both little dinky things. Which raises the fair follow-up question. Do you even care about that number?
“Even though I have these errors, people still find me. I'm still getting leads by humans or conversations with humans, and humans reaching out because they found me in LLMs.”
That's the honesty beat of the whole episode. The panel is worth reading, and it isn't worth worshipping.
SEO Analytics, And What Your Homepage Is Telling You
From recommendations, George moved to SEO analytics and pulled the last quarter. Pages viewed were up 108.33 percent. Then he went to the page-level view and pointed at what wasn't there. In his top ten results, his homepage doesn't appear. It sits a long way down, and that's deliberate, because he wants humans finding him for other reasons.
What is up there is his complete guide to the HubSpot hubs: roughly 105,000 impressions over the quarter against 27 clicks, at a pretty decent position. George said the quiet part out loud. The clicks are the work to do. He also confirmed he used his AI assistant to help build and create that guide, which is exactly the point of the ten-week AI content system he teaches.
The query list underneath told its own story. HubSpot, HubSpot, HubSpot, HubSpot, and then all of a sudden SEO, twice. That's literally why this episode exists. Somebody, or something, is still asking about SEO and about topic clusters.
“If people are just finding your homepage, that's not necessarily a good thing. That doesn't mean you're doing inbound, that means somebody told them about a brand name and they googled it.”
Max's follow-through is the content strategy line of the show. If you want to go hard on the content side, the pages humans are actually searching for should be the top of that list. Somebody trying to understand the difference between all the different hubs is exactly the human George is trying to serve, and that human is building trust while they read.
“Great, I'm position six on the search engine, but what about actually being able to understand if that actually brought me any deals?”
Chad's addition: the more ways humans have to find something useful, the more relational trust gets built, and the further they'll move down the funnel. But visibility isn't the finish line. Getting people to see the thing is good. Knowing what impact it made at the end of the day is better.
What hapily Is Actually Doing About It
Max brought two things hapily has seen work. The first is super in-depth competitor comparison guides, which the LLMs picked up like crazy. They don't write them because they think a human is going to sit and read them. They write them knowing an LLM is going to scan them. A ton of hapily's traffic now comes from LLMs, and as Max pointed out, the calculus isn't that different from making content because you knew someone was going to search for it and find it.
The second is ChatGPT ads, which they're running like crazy and which are cranking. George wanted to sigh at that, and then the marketer in him got transported back to a conversation he had with Marcus Sheridan on The Hubcast around 2014 and 2015, about how much they hated pop-ups right up until they saw a 400 percent increase and loved pop-ups. The hate-it-then-love-it type. Both of them named the worry underneath it. AI ads that aren't obvious, where highest bidder wins and the recommendation shows up inside a model you've built rapport with, one that learns you and knows you better than a Facebook pixel ever did. That's a different episode, and the guys said so.
The INBOUND Moment That Ties It All Together
At INBOUND last year, George sat in the audience watching Yamini Rangan on the main stage and started laughing. He leaned over to the human next to him, and he believes it might have been Chris Carolan or somebody sitting nearby, and said the line the rest of the episode had been circling.
“They Ask, You Answer is the best AEO strategy that we never knew was gonna be an AEO strategy, because it was a great SEO strategy.”
And it was a great SEO strategy because it was human first. That's the thesis. Just because there's a new acronym in town doesn't mean you give up the old acronym, because the old acronym is tied to the new one, and the answer to both is human-first, value-first content that you're still willing to go dig into and fix.
The Wish List Close
George closed the way HubHeroes usually closes, with one wish list item each.
- Max: a WebSocket connection to HubSpot for public apps.
- Chad: a knowledge-base-agent-style assistant that reads through your support tickets and tells you what you should do next.
- George: HubSpot does not offer a public API endpoint for programmatically managing its native SEO topics, clusters, and pillar pages. He wants one.
What To Do On Monday
- Rescan the URL that is your website inside the HubSpot SEO recommendations tool, just so you can see the list. If your last scan is months old, the picture you're carrying around is stale.
- Check whether your www and non-www versions go to the same place, and confirm the redirect is actually doing its job.
- Uncheck low impact, look at high impact only, and start with the errors repeating across the most pages.
- Open SEO analytics, pull the last quarter, and look at your top ten pages. Then ask where your homepage sits, and whether you're happy about the answer.
If this episode has you itching to go look at your own portal, that's the right instinct. Run the free HubSpot portal audit to see what's actually sitting in there before you decide what to fix first. And if you want the episode where the guys argue about the most overpowered part of HubSpot, that one pairs well with this one.
And then, in George's own words to close the show: be a happy, helpful, humble human and of course do some happy HubSpotting along the way.
