The difference between SEO at a small business versus a company like Walmart isn't just about scale—it's about treating search engines as customers. While small teams fight for engineering resources and squeeze SEO fixes between other priorities, enterprise SEO teams operate with a completely different playbook.
Patrick Kajirian knows this world well. As Senior Product Manager of SEO at Walmart, he's previously led SEO initiatives at Disney, ESPN, and Realtor.com—sites that serve hundreds of millions of pages to search engines daily. His perspective reveals how enterprise SEO really works and where the industry is heading as AI agents start browsing the web on our behalf.
The lessons from his experience offer insights that extend far beyond large companies, especially as the entire SEO landscape faces another major shift.
Google as a First-Class Citizen
At enterprise scale, SEO stops being a marketing afterthought and becomes a product function. "You treat the search engine as a customer in a way," Kajirian explains. This shift changes everything about how SEO gets executed.
Instead of begging for engineering time or waiting for approval to make technical changes, product-led SEO teams have direct channels to the people building the site. They work alongside dedicated data scientists, brilliant engineers, and experienced designers. The search engine becomes what Kajirian calls "a first-class citizen" in product decisions.
This isn't just about having more resources—it's about building SEO compliance and best practices into the foundation rather than retrofitting them later. When SEO requirements are "woven into the foundation of how you build stuff," they actually get executed correctly.
The practical impact is huge. Product-led SEO teams can build roadmaps, iterate on solutions, and test extensively. They're not stuck with one-shot implementations that have to work perfectly the first time. As Kajirian puts it, they can "release something, look at it long and hard, see if it worked, do something else, do something different, iterate."
Building SEO Into the Foundation
This product-first approach pays dividends when it comes to technical implementation. Features like structured data for rich snippets, proper metadata handling, and mobile optimization get built into content management systems from the start. SEO teams can create templates and workflows that make optimization automatic rather than manual.
The contrast with traditional marketing-led SEO is stark. Instead of fighting for resources and explaining why technical changes matter, product-led teams are part of the conversation from day one. They influence architecture decisions, database design, and user experience flows—all with SEO impact in mind.
Why Indexation is the Real Challenge
Here's something most SEO discussions miss: at enterprise scale, getting pages indexed is often harder than ranking them. Google has become increasingly selective about what makes it into their index, and sites with millions of pages feel this pressure acutely.
"It's pretty clear that in the last decade, Google's actually been putting the brakes on crawling and indexing the entire web," Kajirian notes. "They're being very judicious and very selective about what gets qualified to get represented in the index."
For a site like Walmart with a massive product catalog, or Realtor.com with pages for hundreds of millions of properties, this creates a fundamental challenge. Google will crawl hundreds of millions of pages, but they won't index all of them. The question becomes: how do you signal which pages matter most?
Strategic Link Rotation for Crawl Budget
Kajirian's team developed a sophisticated approach to internal linking that goes far beyond traditional site architecture. They identify pages with the highest crawl activity—typically starting with the homepage—then map out how search engines discover and move through the site.
The strategy involves creating link systems that rotate through target pages, funneling valuable crawl activity to content that needs indexation. "If you understand where the crawler is, where the highest amount of crawl activity is located," Kajirian explains, "you can generate link systems that can rotate through a number of links targeting pages that are highly relevant."
This isn't random internal linking. The team analyzes server logs to understand crawl patterns, identifies authoritative pages that search engines visit frequently, then creates dynamic linking modules that systematically expose important but under-crawled pages to bot traffic.
The results are impressive: "If you do that diligently and consistently, you'll find that those pages get crawled real quick, they get indexed real quick, and they tend to perform better in SERPs."
The Lifecycle Reality
Enterprise sites deal with constant content churn, especially in e-commerce where products come and go. This creates a natural lifecycle for indexed pages. High-quality, relevant pages that serve user intent tend to stay indexed. Pages that decline in quality or relevance eventually drop out.
Kajirian's team uses link rotation as a "churn system" to continuously surface new content for indexation while allowing lower-quality pages to naturally fall out of the index. It's a sophisticated approach to managing what is essentially a limited resource: Google's willingness to index your content.
The key insight is that internal linking isn't just about distributing PageRank—it's about communicating priority to search engines and managing crawl budget strategically.
Disney and ESPN: When Everything Changes
Few people have managed site migrations at the scale Kajirian has. Moving Disney from Flash-based architecture to responsive design while simultaneously changing domains required coordination across hundreds of websites and multiple years.
The Disney project involved creating an entirely new CMS platform called Matterhorn, complete with built-in SEO features for metadata, structured data, and mobile optimization. But the technical complexity was matched by logistical challenges—mapping pages, managing redirects, and coordinating with teams across different properties.
"There were only like three, four SEOs within Disney that were responsible for doing all that," Kajirian recalls. The scale required systematic approaches to problems that smaller sites handle manually.
Battle Scars and Learning Moments
Even with careful planning, migrations at this scale involve risks. Kajirian admits to accidentally taking down Disney Junior during a redirect implementation, affecting "four-year-old girls who wanted to get the Disney Princess coloring books" for over an hour.
These experiences teach important lessons about preparation, testing, and having rollback plans ready. At enterprise scale, small mistakes have large consequences, but they also provide learning opportunities that improve future migrations.
The ESPN migration was particularly challenging because of user reception—the redesign was "very polarizing" with roughly 50% of users either loving or hating the new experience. This highlighted the importance of balancing SEO technical requirements with user experience considerations.
Browser Agents vs. Cloud Agents
The emergence of AI agents that can browse and interact with websites represents another major shift for SEO. But not all agents work the same way, and the differences matter for how businesses should prepare.
Google's Project Mariner and OpenAI's approach involve cloud-based agents that require users to share credentials and authentication details. This creates privacy and security concerns, especially for e-commerce transactions where customer data is involved.
Perplexity's Comet browser takes a different approach—running agents directly in the user's browser where they're already logged in. "It's basically your browser," Kajirian explains. "You're logged in with your credentials, and you're executing tasks as if you were doing it."
This distinction matters because browser-based agents can access authenticated systems without sharing credentials, making them more practical for complex workflows that span multiple tools and platforms.
Real-World Applications for SEO Teams
The potential for automating routine SEO tasks is enormous. Kajirian describes a workflow where an agent could open multiple tabs in Google Search Console, apply filters across different properties, export data to spreadsheets, and perform analysis—all tasks that would normally take an hour but could be completed in minutes.
"What would normally have taken me, if I were to do this on my own, an hour to do, it'll take you two minutes to do it," he notes. This isn't just about speed—it's about being able to perform more comprehensive analysis across larger data sets.
The broader implication is that SEO teams will be able to handle more complex, strategic work as routine data collection and analysis becomes automated.
The Traffic Quality Trade-Off
As AI agents become more sophisticated at answering questions directly, traditional organic traffic patterns are changing. Many sites are seeing fewer clicks from search results, but the traffic they do receive converts at higher rates.
"What we are seeing is the people who do eventually come, they're highly qualified," Kajirian observes. "Even though the traffic's going down, they're more qualified."
This shift requires a fundamental change in how SEO success gets measured. Instead of optimizing purely for traffic volume, teams need to focus on conversion quality and user intent matching. The challenge is ensuring that when AI agents do refer users to websites, those sites provide clear value and competitive advantages.
Why the Wild West Days Are Back
Every major shift in search creates opportunities for those willing to experiment and adapt quickly. The rise of AI agents represents another "Wild West" moment where established practices get disrupted and new winners emerge.
"This is a really great time to be thinking about SEO in general," Kajirian argues. "We're thrown back into the Wild West days where you just had to study and test and experiment and see what works."
The key is balancing experimentation with solid fundamentals. While tactics and tools evolve, the basic principles of how search systems work remain consistent.
Constants in a Changing Landscape
Despite all the changes, SEO fundamentals haven't shifted as much as the noise suggests. Search systems—whether traditional algorithms or AI agents—still need to discover content, understand it, and match it to user intent.
"The fundamentals are still the same," Kajirian emphasizes. "You're still dealing with algorithms or agents or bots still having to discover your content, rank that content and serve it in the context of what the customer wants."
Site performance, content quality, structured data, and technical accessibility remain important. Crawl budget still matters. Pages still need to be indexed to appear in results, even AI-powered ones.
The tools and interfaces will evolve, but the underlying requirements for helping search systems understand and surface content remain constant.
Advice for the Chaos
For teams navigating this transition, Kajirian recommends focusing on fundamentals while staying open to experimentation. The community sharing knowledge through platforms like LinkedIn provides valuable insights about what's working and what isn't.
Most importantly, periods of uncertainty create opportunities for those willing to adapt. As Kajirian's interviewer noted, "new winners are made" during chaotic transitions when established players are slow to change.
The web isn't dying, but it's definitely evolving. Enterprise SEO teams have advantages in navigating these changes—dedicated resources, direct access to engineering teams, and the ability to implement systematic approaches to complex problems.
But the lessons from enterprise SEO apply more broadly. Whether managing a small business website or a massive e-commerce platform, the principles of treating search engines as customers, building optimization into foundations rather than retrofitting it later, and focusing on fundamentals while experimenting with new approaches remain valuable.
The future belongs to those who can master both timeless SEO principles and emerging technologies. In periods of rapid change, that combination of solid fundamentals and adaptive experimentation becomes the key to long-term success.
"This is a really great time to be thinking about SEO in general... We're thrown back into the Wild West days where you just had to study and test and experiment and see what works. The fundamentals are still the same." - Patrick Kajirian
02:26 - Enterprise SEO as a product function vs marketing function
06:24 - Google's indexation challenges and internal linking strategies at scale
16:47 - AI agents and agentic browser automation discussion
30:38 - Disney and ESPN migration war stories
46:51 - Traffic quality vs quantity in the AI era
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Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickkajirian/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
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Patrick Kajirian honed his career in technology and media in a broad range of roles that involved managing a full-service web design agency, operating world-class e-commerce and media websites, and driving user acquisition initiatives for global brands and fortune 500 companies. Patrick facilitated over a million daily Google searches as a principal product manager for SEO at Realtor.com. He currently works as a senior product manager in SEO at Walmart in the San Francisco Bay area.
