Episode #233: Jesus Requena — Dropping SEO entirely to optimize for LLMs
Sanity stopped producing SEO content and started building pages only machines will read. Roughly 60% of last month’s signups came from LLMs.
For B2B growth leaders watching organic traffic fall and trying to work out what replaces it.
Jesus Requena is CMO at Sanity, and previously led growth marketing at Figma, demand gen at Unity and Algolia, and growth at Hex. After watching client SEO traffic fall to a tenth of what it had been, he stopped SEO content production entirely and rebuilt Sanity’s content for LLMs to parse rather than humans to read. He walks through the three-layer playbook: fixing contradictions across 100 to 200 pages on their own site, converting roughly 1,000 FAQ pages from user-centric to LLM-centric, building five single-topic microsites excluded from Google, then correcting third-party citations that conflicted with their own story. Sanity moved from ranking 15th or 20th in LLM visibility to top five.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– Why visibility comes from reasoning: if an LLM can reason your concepts clearly, it recommends you, which makes first-party consistency the starting point
– How they executed it — crawling their own site to find unclear terms, writing content no human is expected to read, and partnering with AirOps to fix obsolete third-party citations
– Why attribution breaks when signups arrive through a CLI or MCP without ever touching the website, and the self-reported “where did you find us” question they fell back on
– Where to start from zero, in order: audit your own site, then third-party mentions, then microsites — plus the caveat that Reddit’s influence is fading and LLMs are pulling more from video
