Laurent Cohen: We Are Indexing Voice Agents, Not Pages

Laurent Cohen launched a brand new directory on September 18 with 1.6 million pages, and within about four months 300,000 of them were indexed and Google was serving it for broad terms like "chiropractor near me." His explanation isn't links. It's a voice agent on every page. Laurent builds GetOblic, a voice-first AI business directory, and writes at Laurent's Substack.

He has been doing SEO since 2003, starting in health and beauty e-commerce, back when you could rank a deep link in the top five within three hours. He now splits his time between Florida and Tel Aviv. GetOblic is also on LinkedIn.

Jeremy's full recap, with the quote cards and the takeaways written out, is at Laurent Cohen: we are indexing voice agents, not pages.

In this episode

• SEO is 20% technical and 80% semantic. The technical side you can learn from an LLM in days. The semantic side needs you to know the business and write for the user, not the keyword.
• Why AI-written pages at scale still work, and why "Google knows it perfectly" when you use AI carelessly.
• The retention play: every directory page carries a trained voice agent, visits stretch from seconds to minutes, and Laurent believes that is what Google rewarded.
• The pivot the customers chose: small businesses subscribing for the voice widget on their own site, purely for the SEO effect.
• Behavior signals, the DOJ case, and Laurent's rule of thumb that none of the big seven tell you the truth. His worst lesson was Facebook in 2017, when organic reach fell 80% almost overnight.
• Why he set authority link building aside around 2015 and cares only about intention and relevance. Bradley Benner makes a related case in relevance over DR.
• Core updates: why he doesn't chase them, and where a speakable schema fits if you use voice.
• Page speed as a third of his working day: Cloudflare caching took origin response from about 2,500 ms to 200 to 300 ms. Images are the usual killer.
• AI bot floods from Germany, and Facebook's crawler hitting the site hundreds of thousands of times a day for preloading, not indexing. Dan Kurtz covers bots as an audience in bots as a customer segment.
• Is AI visibility tracking another inflated metric? Laurent keeps it simple: LLMs fetch from search engines, so he focuses on SEO.
• Pick three AI tools, train them like employees, and run production AI on local models through Ollama so you control the boundaries.
• His soapbox: if you aren't using AI professionally two hours a day, stop everything and deep dive for a month, possibly three.

"We thought we were indexing pages. We are not indexing pages. We are indexing voice agents." - Laurent Cohen

Related on the network: Laura Hoot on why the industry doesn't think SEO is dying and Jon Henshaw on AI hype and Google's sources of truth. For the pages-at-scale side, see programmatic SEO on SEO Arcade.

Disclosure: Jeremy is a GetOblic affiliate.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Want to be on the show? Apply to be a guest.