I gave this talk at TwentyThree Summit 2026, the world’s largest conference on video. The room was almost full for what I had warned would be a mostly technical session, which I took as a good sign.
The argument is short. Video is the hardest content to fake, the most expensive to make, and the least visible thing on your own website. That last part is fixable, and it is not a creative problem.
What changed
Google now says Ask Google where it used to say Search Google. That is not a copy tweak. It is a different interaction: longer questions, and multimodal, so you can ask with your voice or a camera instead of words.
I live in Japan at the moment and I do not speak Japanese yet. I point a phone at a restaurant menu and get back something that tells me what I would like to eat, based on what it already knows about me. Slightly creepy. Very useful. That is the interface now.
Meanwhile 900 million people use ChatGPT every week, growing two to three times a year. The world did not decide whether to go this way. It went.
Why your video is invisible
Of the video real estate on Google, YouTube and platforms like it take about 95%. Business sites get the remaining 5% (BrightEdge, 2025). Google would rather keep people on Google’s property than send them to yours.
Underneath that there is a blunter problem, and it was the slide I liked most:
Google can’t watch. LLMs can’t hear. Neither can speak.
Google is an indexer. It needs text. Without text it does not know what your file is, so it does nothing with it. LLMs are worse: they want a blob of text they can process, and a page whose main content is a player looks to them like code. We used to say Google could not read JavaScript. Google reads a great deal of it compared to what LLMs manage today.
So companies spend weeks making something excellent, publish it, and it gets ten views. Put it on YouTube instead and you get reach, but you no longer control the channel, the leads or the brand.
The three jobs
Make video discoverable. Can Google and the LLMs find it at all? Often they do not know it exists.
Make video understandable. Do they know what it is about, who made it, who is speaking, and what it is for? A how-to and a product demo are different things and should not be described the same way.
Make video trusted. This is the one that decides everything. However much content gets produced from here, content that is not trusted will not be shown, even when it is discoverable and understandable.
Video is proof
Four kinds, and this is why I think video is the asset to bet on.
Proof of expertise. Nothing else gets you the value of a founder explaining their own product, or a webinar where someone answers objections live. I could write an article about open heart surgery. It would not rank, and it should not. Signed by a surgeon with the papers and the profile behind it, that is a different claim. On camera, the person is already the validator.
Proof of reality. Everything filmed at that conference is real people on a stage. In a world where anyone can generate a video, that matters more each month, and camera makers are already discussing ways to mark footage as actually filmed.
Proof that platforms reward. Google has said it is not interested in commodity content. Video is so time-consuming that nobody sets out to make the commodity version.
Proof that AI cannot generate. You could technically fake a webinar with a live Q&A. Nobody wants to, and our attention drops the moment we suspect a thing is synthetic, even when it is not.
GEO is 90% SEO
This is the line people argued with most, and I stand by it.
76% of AI citations come from pages already in Google’s top ten (Ben Wills / Nectiv). The strongest correlations with being cited by ChatGPT are search appearances, search rank and backlinks, then Common Crawl, Wikidata, Reddit and Wikipedia. Those are the things SEOs have told clients to do for twenty years. If you are not in Google at all, working on LLMs is a later problem.
The corollary is less comfortable. 65% of Google searches now end without a click, and LLMs send under 1% of traffic to websites, by design: they answer on their own page and keep you there. That is not going back.
But the clicks that still arrive may be the most valuable we have ever had. By the time somebody reaches you they have done the research. They are near a decision, not at the start of one. Pages have to be built for that: trust signals, not exploration.
Shortcuts don’t work
There is a well-worn way to fail. SEOs find something the algorithm has not caught, everyone piles in, results look extraordinary, and Google kills it a few months later. That cycle has run my whole career.
Someone studied 220 sites presented as “AI content success” stories. Half had lost their traffic. You can absolutely show your board a tenfold jump next week. Just leave the company before it comes back down.
The more interesting game is brand and quality. It is also a better business to be in.
The Video GEO & SEO Checklist
This was the slide people photographed. Stars mark where to start: in my experience those are the items with the most impact.
1. Discoverable (Tech)
- ★ Dedicated video pages
- ★ VideoObject schema, with thumbnail and clips
- ★ Crawlable, indexable pages
- ★ LLM-friendly embeds
- Video sitemap in Search Console
- Lazy-load video players
- Open Graph tags
llms.txt, for agentic search
2. Understandable (Content & Intent)
- ★ Full transcripts on-page
- ★ Intent-written title and meta
- ★ Internal links to and from topic clusters and pillar pages
- Speakers, named, with their authority
- Chapters and key moments
- Entity-rich text: people, products, topics
- Video captions
- A structured summary, written as citable passages
- Long-tail FAQs taken from the Q&A
3. Trusted (Brand)
- ★ Clear positioning
- ★ Message consistency
- ★ Entity consistency across your site, Wikipedia and directories
- ★ Backlinks from trusted sources
- PR and media coverage
- Mentions across the web: Reddit, forums, industry press
- Social sharing clips
- Customer stories and testimonials
- Real video, real people
Two notes on that list. Internal links are the gold of how the web works, and the first place to link from is your own homepage: the moment you do, you have told Google what matters. And LLMs work by consensus, triangulating what you say against what everyone else says about you, which is why message and entity consistency sit in the trusted column rather than the understandable one.
Most of the first two columns are now built into TwentyThree’s platform. I have been advising them on it.
One video, many assets
Do most of that for a single webinar and it stops being one asset.
LLMs use query fan-outs: you ask for the best accounting software for a hospital, and the system quietly extends that into several related searches based on what it knows about you and where you are. A properly exposed video can answer several at once. One recording, many doors.
Where I landed
The companies that win will be the easiest to find and to choose.
Not the ones producing the most content. The easiest to find, and the easiest to choose.
I offered the room a free audit of their top five SEO and GEO priorities. That offer stands: tell me what you are working on.
