How Yoast Is Rethinking SEO for the Age of AI: Alain Schlesser, Principal Architect at Yoast

Yoast is the SEO plugin behind more than 13 million WordPress sites. For most of its history, that meant one thing: helping sites rank on Google. In October 2025, they launched SEO AI Plus, a product that tracks how brands appear inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. And that's a meaningful signal about where the industry is heading.

Alain Schlesser, Principal Architect at Yoast, joined Joe Walsh to unpack what they're seeing now that tracking is live, and what it means for marketing teams who are still struggling to adapt to an AI-first era.

What you’ll learn:

• Why AI answer engines make traditional SEO even more critical‚ not less, and why most teams have this backwards
• Why playing it safe with your content means AI systems may never know your brand exists
• What Yoast is actually seeing now that their AI visibility tracking is live
• Why blocking AI crawlers is a business decision you'll regret and what to do instead
• The inflection point coming in the next 12–18 months that most companies aren't measuring for

Monday Morning Action: Right-click your homepage and press View Page Source. Can you actually read your content? If not, AI can't either. Share what you find at prerender.io/podcast.

Episode resources:

• Learn more about Yoast: visit yoast.com
• Follow Alain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schlessera/
• Find Alain online: https://www.alainschlesser.com/
• Share your Monday Morning Action results: prerender.io/podcast

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About the show:

Get Discovered is the podcast where AI and online discoverability collide. Season 2 is focused on how AI is changing where discovery happens, what actually gets surfaced, and why so many teams are realizing they don't have the visibility or control they thought they did.

New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.