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Welcome to Volume 263 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 📊 An Old SEO’s Guide to the New World of GEO
- 📦 SEO Reporting Enters the “Black Box Era”
- 👀 The Latest in B2B SaaS This Week
- 🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
- ➕ The Best Content Across the Web
Let’s get into it.
📊 An Old SEO’s Guide to the New World of GEO
For over a decade, SEO was straightforward: optimize your content, climb the rankings, drive traffic, generate revenue. The playbook worked, the metrics made sense, and everyone went home happy.
Now LLMs are changing everything.
Foundation’s VP of Strategy, James Scherer, has spent the last year watching winning SEO strategies continue to drive rankings while generating significantly less growth. He points the finger at zero-click search and AI-generated answers that synthesize information without sending traffic to source sites.
In his latest piece, James breaks down how Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) builds on everything SEOs already know while adding critical new battlegrounds:
- Reddit engagement, where LLMs pull authentic human language and opinions
- Strategic placements in publications that AI models cite repeatedly
- LinkedIn native content that teaches models who the real experts are
- Review site optimization that literally trains the algorithm on your reputation
- YouTube transcripts that become searchable, trainable data
It’s an uncomfortable new reality. One where you might rank #1 on Google and still share the AI answer with your #2 competitor. Your brilliant content could inform ChatGPT’s response without ever getting clicked.
But the brands that master GEO now by building a persistent, contextually coherent presence across the sources LLMs learn from will own mindshare in the generative era.
If you’re ready to expand your SEO playbook for the GEO era, check out James’s complete framework on Foundation Labs.
🎤 Ross is Speaking at GURU Conference 2025 — Get Your Free Ticket Now
This November 6-7, 2025, Ross Simmonds will take the virtual stage at GURU Conference, the world’s largest virtual email marketing conference. And yes, it’s 100% free.
GURU brings together industry legends like Ann Handley, Amy Porterfield, Donald Miller, and Sahil Bloom alongside pop culture icons (Nicole Kidman and Lance Bass are speaking) for two days of actionable strategies you can deploy immediately.
Whether you’re looking to level up your email deliverability, master AI-powered personalization, or steal proven tactics from direct-to-consumer brands crushing it right now, GURU delivers the insights you need to exceed your current strategies.
The event is free. Virtual spots are limited. Don’t wait.
Grab your free ticket for Guru 2025 now.
📦 SEO Reporting Enters the “Black Box Era”
Google’s recent retirement of the num=100 parameter marks another step into what SEO strategist Carolyn Shelby calls the “black box era” — where the data that professionals relied on to measure SEO impact is disappearing.
This removal, combined with Google now requiring JavaScript execution for scraping, has changed how SEO data is gathered. Add to that AI Overviews surfacing answers without disclosing sources, and the precision reporting SEOs once built entire workflows around no longer reflects reality.
As Shelby points out, the cascading effects are significant:
- Rank tracking degraded: Once reliable, now fragile and expensive because tools must execute JavaScript to render modern SERPs.
- Keyword research limited: Tools can no longer show the complete tail of ranking keywords, eliminating visibility into “striking distance” opportunities that informed optimization strategies.
- Search Console cleaned up: Impression counts dropped, and average positions shifted as bot impressions disappeared from the data.
- AI Overview visibility obscured: Whether your site surfaces in Google’s AI-generated answers is mostly invisible, with little reporting trail.
Shelby’s recommendation is to stop chasing precision that no longer exists and focus on metrics like entity authority, earned media visibility, AI citations (even if tracked via screenshots), share of answer metrics, and trust signals.
For SEOs who spent years escaping the fuzzy world of “awareness,” this may feel like a step backward. But it’s actually a return to the more meaningful work of building reputation when quantification becomes impossible.
👀 What’s the Latest in B2B SaaS This Week?
🌐 OpenAI’s AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, is here | The Verge
💰 Deel hits $17.3B valuation after raising $300M from big-name VCs | TechCrunch
🔓 Google officially shuts down Privacy Sandbox | Search Engine Land
⏩ Meta Is Testing Skippable Ads on Instagram Reels, Borrowing From YouTube’s Playbook | ADWEEK
📈 European AI rising star Nexos.ai raises €30M to unlock enterprise AI adoption | TechCrunch
🚨 New Podcast Alert: 10 Real Ways to Get Ahead of Most People
In the latest episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross cuts through the motivational BS and delivers ten brutally honest strategies that separate dreamers from doers.
Most people stay stuck in an endless loop of planning, scrolling, and waiting for the perfect moment. The top performers execute before they’re ready, say no to distractions, and build systems that create leverage in their lives.
This isn’t another feel-good motivation episode. Ross brings raw, actionable insights backed by personal stories and a direct challenge: stop talking about success and start building it.
Here’s what Ross breaks down:
- Take action before you’re ready: Waiting for perfect conditions guarantees you’ll never start. The universe doesn’t care about your feelings. Start messy and learn by doing.
- Make discipline your default: Motivation fades. Consistency wins. Success is doing what you have to do, not what you feel like doing.
- Build in public: Share your journey, not just your wins. Letting people see your process creates momentum and accountability.
- Become obsessively useful: Ask “How can I help you?” and mean it. Being solution-oriented builds networks that actually matter.
- Read more than you scroll: 30 minutes of scrolling = empty calories. 30 pages of a book = intentional growth. Trade entertainment for education.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcast or Spotify for the rest of the tips Ross uses to stay ahead!
🧠 This Week’s Brain Food
Monday’s AWS outage wasn’t dramatic. No cyber attack. No sabotage. Apparently just the result of a mundane Domain Name System (DNS) error at a data center in northern Virginia — the digital equivalent of someone misconfiguring a router.
And yet, it took down Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, the McDonald’s app, Ring doorbells, United Airlines, Medicare’s enrollment site, the UK’s tax authority, Coinbase, Robinhood, The New York Times, and over 1,000 other services used by millions globally.
So, why did one DNS error cause this much chaos?
Because AWS is the backbone of roughly a third of the internet. When someone clicks an app, their device sends a request to connect and the DNS acts like a map, directing traffic. On Monday, AWS lost its bearings. The platforms existed, but AWS couldn’t see where they were.
The really scary part is that there aren’t many alternatives at AWS’s scale. Only two real competitors exist: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. We’ve outsourced so much infrastructure to three American companies that building alternatives now feels pointless.
That is, until a DNS error in Virginia takes down your doorbell, bank app, government website, and secure messaging platforms, all at once.
We’ve built a digital society on a foundation controlled by a handful of companies. When they stumble, we all fall. And the longer we wait to diversify, the more impossible alternatives become.
Monday was a bad day for AWS. But it should be a wake-up call for everyone else.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🏅 Reddit Post of the Week
I Need Advice on how to bring in 10k users to our site Through Organic Growth. In r/MarketingMentor
🎖️ LinkedIn Post of the Week
SEO Tip: The “?hints” parameter FORCES ChatGPT to search for a given query. by Chris Long
🤳🏽 Nice Finds You Should Binge
- ADWEEK’s 2025 Brand Genius Winners Are Rewriting the Marketing Playbook | ADWEEK
- SEO in the black box era: Why reports will look more like Mad Men than Search Console | Search Engine Land
- Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews | Arstechnica
- How Brands Should Think About the ROI of Generative Engine Optimization | Foundation Marketing
💻 Job Postings Worth Checking Out
Looking for a new opportunity? Here’s a round-up of some exciting job openings in the B2B SaaS space.
- Foundation Marketing | Account Executive (Growth)
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Account Manager
- Foundation Marketing | Senior Account Coordinator
- Foundation Marketing | Data & Insights Analyst
- Foundation Marketing | Fractional Recruiter
- Foundation Marketing | Executive Assistant
- Foundation Marketing | Reddit Specialist
- Foundation Marketing | Content Creator
Want us to include your job postings in our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS professionals today.
🎧 What We’re Wired Into This Week
Portuguese Summer (Spotify Playlist)
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email me at ethan@foundationinc.co. We’re always looking for ways to improve and provide the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend!
