What are PBNs? Risks, rewards & SEO implications explained

 

PBNs promise fast links—but at what cost? Learn how private blog networks work, why they’re risky, and what to consider before using them in SEO strategy.

Private blog networks, commonly called PBNs, can tank your search rankings. 

These networks of closely connected websites use questionable tactics in an attempt to manipulate search engine results pages (SERPs). Because of that, they have long been a big target in Google’s crackdown on link spam and poor-quality content.

This guide shows how PBNs work, what makes them so risky, and what you can do if you find PBN backlinks pointing to your site.

What is a PBN?

A private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites created to pass link equity to a single site, often called the “money site.” These websites are all owned or controlled by the same person or company, and they exist primarily to manipulate search rankings.

While PBNs may appear like ordinary websites on the surface, they’re structured to game the system. And while some legitimate website networks are also centrally owned, not every network is a PBN. The difference lies in their purpose and transparency.

Let’s break down what makes a PBN a PBN.

What makes a PBN a PBN?

A typical PBN shares three defining characteristics:

• Private ownership: All sites in the network are controlled by a single person or entity. Ownership details are often hidden using WHOIS privacy protection or anonymized registration services.
• Blog-based formats: Most PBNs are built on easy-to-use blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, or Weebly, allowing for quick publishing and easy control over backlinks.
• Interlinking structure: The sites are strategically linked to one another—and to a designated “money site”—to funnel link equity and manipulate search rankings.

Common traits of PBNs

Beyond those core attributes, most PBNs share a handful of recognizable patterns:

• Established domains: PBNs are often built on expired or auctioned domains with strong backlink profiles. Google’s spam policies note that acquired domains must contain content relevant to their original use—otherwise, they may be flagged as spam.
• Low-quality content: These sites typically publish generic, scraped, AI-generated, or duplicate content that provides little to no real value. In some cases, the content may be nonsensical or misleading.
• Hidden ownership: While the websites are accessible to the public (so Google can crawl them), identifying the actual owner is intentionally difficult.
• Suspicious link patterns: PBNs link to each other and often to unrelated high-authority websites in an attempt to appear credible. These links may violate Google’s spam policies, especially when they lack contextual relevance or use manipulative anchor text.

While these are common, not every PBN will have all of these traits. For example, some PBNs utilize free blog hosting platforms rather than purchasing expired domains, or they may have a mix of purchased domains and free hosting.

Other PBN sites may engage in additional problematic behaviors, like phishing or trying to infect users with malicious computer code, but that is less common.

Legitimate website networks are not PBNs

Not all website networks are PBNs. Networks that are open about their ownership connection—and whose primary purpose isn’t to manipulate search rankings for a single money site—are legitimate.

For example, a company like Ford maintains a central website and links out to authorized dealership sites. Those dealership sites may also link back to the Ford site.

This kind of structure is common and user-focused, helping people find relevant local information, not manipulate search results.

The difference is transparency and intent. When site connections are clear and designed to serve users, they’re not considered part of a PBN even if they share ownership.

Now that you’re familiar with what PBNs are (and aren’t), it’s time to look at how they operate.

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How do PBNs work?

PBNs are designed to manipulate link equity.

Here’s how: Each site in the network earns backlinks—some naturally, some from within the network itself. Then, those sites link to a single destination: the “money site.”

This results in all the SEO value from the supporting sites (or “nodes”) getting funneled into that one target. The goal is to boost the money site’s rankings quickly, without having to earn links organically.

Why PBNs target “link equity”

Link equity (sometimes called “link juice”) is a long-standing SEO concept. It comes from PageRank, Google’s original algorithm for scoring websites based on the number and quality of backlinks.

The higher a page’s PageRank, the more valuable it appeared in search, and the better it ranked.

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Note: PageRank hasn’t disappeared. While it’s no longer visible to the public and has evolved significantly since its 2006 overhaul, link equity remains a core signal in Google’s algorithm.

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The problem with link equity manipulation

Once SEOs understood how powerful backlinks could be, some began using shady tactics to speed things up. Examples included:

• Posting backlinks in forums, blog comments, and other user-generated content
• Embedding links in widgets, templates, or site-wide footers
• Submitting sites to directories, blog rolls, and link lists
• Buying expired domains with strong backlink profiles, then adding thin or spammy content
• Paying directly for backlinks

Not all of these link-building techniques are inherently bad. Used thoughtfully, directories or guest comments can play a legitimate role in SEO.

But when these methods are used only to manipulate rankings—and not to help users—Google considers them link spam.

How PBNs evolved

As Google cracked down on individual tactics, SEOs got smarter about hiding their efforts. That’s when PBNs became a favored workaround.

Instead of leaving links scattered across the internet, SEOs built their own networks. Full control. No gatekeepers.

This approach made it easier to:

• Control anchor text
• Manage link velocity
• Scale backlinks across multiple domains

But it also created patterns—patterns Google would eventually learn to detect.

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Further reading: What is link equity and why does it still matter in an AI landscape?

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Why do people use PBNs?

Like most shortcuts, PBNs promise fast results.

They offer SEOs complete control over where links appear, how fast they’re added, and what anchor text they use. For some, that’s worth the risk, especially in competitive niches or under tight deadlines.

And while PBNs were once effective, today they’re mostly ineffective at best—and dangerous at worst.

Let’s break down the most persistent myths still driving their use.

Myth #1: PBNs provide backlink control

Control is one of the biggest reasons people build PBNs.

You get to decide:

• Where the link goes
• What anchor text it uses
• How quickly you build links, also known as link velocity

Sounds strategic, right?

But the reality is that link placement doesn’t guarantee link value.

Google evaluates context, source quality, and relevance. Even if you control everything, it still decides how much—if any—value that link passes.

If Google detects manipulation, the penalty outweighs the control.

Reality: Google controls a backlink’s value. If Google thinks a site is being manipulative, it’ll rank the site lower in the SERPs or restrict it from appearing altogether.

Myth #2: PBNs allow faster link building

It’s true: a PBN lets you spin up backlinks quickly.

That early boost might nudge a new site up the rankings temporarily.

But “fast” isn’t always good. When it comes to link-building efforts, it’s more important to demonstrate a steady link velocity.

Think about it this way: 

• If you publish a page that gets a lot of links right away, and then the links stop coming, Google will think that page is no longer relevant or helpful.
• However, if you publish a page that continues earning more and more links the longer it’s live, Google will see that page as having long-term value and usefulness.

When it comes to a website’s backlink profile, it’s important to get links from a diverse array of domains. Getting backlinks from only the same domains over and over will likely signal to Google that something sketchy is going on.

Google rewards consistency over speed. A sharp spike in backlinks, followed by silence, is a red flag. A slow, steady stream of natural links? That’s what Google trusts.

Reality: Proper SEO takes months and requires steady backlink acquisition.

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Dig deeper: Link building in 2025: 12 ways to win or fail

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Myth #3: PBNs excel at ranking low-competition keywords

Maybe PBNs aren’t the best option for high-difficulty keywords. But what about keywords with low competition?

Keyword difficulty is a concept based on two factors:

• Search volume: How many people are searching for the keyword each month?
• Search intent: How transactional is the user intent behind the query?

A rough rule of thumb is that keywords with higher volume and more transactional intent tend to be harder to rank highly in search results.

Because of this, many websites try to rank for low-volume, low-difficulty terms related to their products and industry. These terms are often referred to as “long-tail” keywords.

There’s a tenacious belief that PBNs are great for quickly ranking these long-tail, low-competition keywords. Pulling in lots of traffic from these low-competition keywords can then help the money site rank for bigger, more competitive queries—or so the theory goes.

Reality: Low-competition keywords are easier to rank for by definition, and targeting such terms can be a good way for new and unestablished sites to start earning links and ranking. In the long run, however, it’s best to go after terms with varying levels of search volume and intent to attract visitors at different stages of the customer journey.

Myth #4: PBNs are necessary for affiliate and local SEO

Some posters in the seedier SEO forums still claim that PBNs are essential for certain types of ecommerce, including affiliate marketing and local business promotion.

Affiliate marketing, in particular, has long been a source of many spammy SEO tactics, not just PBNs. Some types of affiliate programs are worse than others, though, especially those in “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) spaces.

A few examples of YMYL topics that overlap with affiliate marketing are:

• Health supplements
• Cryptocurrency
• Courses on how to live, how to stay healthy, or how to manage your money

To be clear, none of those YMYL topics are inherently bad. These topics involve high-stakes decisions that require more scrutiny. And unfortunately, because they can be used to prey on people’s insecurities, fears, and frustrations, these topics tend to attract people who are willing to bend or break ethical boundaries to get clicks and transactions.

When it comes to local SEO, the considerations are a little different. In most cases, local business owners want to do the right thing, but their expertise is related to their business, not SEO. 

In such cases, local businesses may be poorly informed or hire an SEO specialist who doesn’t have enough experience to understand the harm PBNs can do. 

The common link between affiliate programs, local SEO, and other crowded ecommerce spaces is the belief that PBNs are the best way—perhaps even the only way—to stand out in a crowded field.

• Affiliate marketers work against not only others in the same affiliate network, but also sellers in other affiliate networks, big retailers, and even direct-to-consumer (D2C, B2B, etc.).
• Local businesses compete against other local businesses, including big-box brick-and-mortar stores, as well as online companies that deliver within their service area.

To exacerbate the issue, these types of businesses are often run by individuals with multiple priorities who feel they lack the time, energy, or resources to invest in longer-term solutions. So the promise of PBNs becomes very appealing.

Reality: SEO value tends to correspond to the quality of the time and effort put into it. Both affiliate marketers and local businesses are best served by optimizing and promoting a single site for long-term SEO value, rather than building up a network of private sites with thin content and outdated backlinking practices.

PBNs violate Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines

PBNs violate several of Google’s core policies, particularly those related to link spam and content quality.

Google first issued widespread manual actions against PBNs in 2014, and its detection systems have only grown more sophisticated since then. Today, PBN tactics fall squarely within Google’s definition of search manipulation.

Link spam practices common in PBNs:

• Link exchanges: By definition, most (if not all) PBNs engage in excessive link exchanges, which Google defines as a form of link spam. 
• Programmatic linking: Using an automated linking software to create backlinks to your website is prohibited by Google. Many PBNs automate adding backlinks to their money site across their node websites.
• Hidden links: PBNs are known for trying to hide links to their money site from users, while making sure search engines can find those links for ranking purposes.
• Template and widget links: PBNs often use the same or slightly modified templates and design elements. These may include links in template areas or widgets that all point to a single money site in violation of Google policies.
• Expired domain abuse: As mentioned above, purchasing expired domains with healthy backlink profiles is a key tactic used by PBNs. Websites that contain content or links that don’t align with the domain name are considered untrustworthy. Many domains used by PBNs have fallen afoul of this policy.

Content spam tactics used in PBNs:

• Doorway abuse: A “doorway” page essentially exists to capture search traffic and link value, and then funnel them to another page. The doorway page itself has very little useful content. Funneling traffic and link equity in this way is the primary purpose of a PBN, and many PBNs consist of many doorway pages.
• Low-value content: Google wants to see helpful content. Content that’s scraped from other websites, generated by AI without human oversight, or completely nonsensical will be considered spam.
• Hidden text: Some PBNs use website layout and styling (CSS) to add text that will only be seen by search engines in order to rank for certain keywords. 
• Keyword stuffing: Using a single keyword over and over, perhaps accompanied by close variations, is a common tactic to try to rank for that keyword. PBNs often engage in keyword stuffing, especially on pages meant to pass link equity for specific terms to their money page.
• Thin affiliate content: Similar to scraped content, thin affiliate content uses product copy, customer reviews, and other marketing text from the original manufacturer, merchant, or ecommerce site with very few changes or additional context. Affiliate-based PBNs may try to hide this tactic by stitching together content from different sources, while making only minor changes to it.

While these tactics aren’t exclusive to PBNs, most PBNs rely on several—if not all—of them. Ultimately, it’s not just the tactic that matters. It’s the intent to manipulate rankings that places PBNs squarely in violation of Google’s spam policies.

How does Google detect PBNs?

Google doesn’t have a single system that flags “PBNs” by name. But it does detect link schemes, and PBNs often trigger multiple red flags across its detection systems.

Here are some of the key signals Google uses to identify potential PBN activity:

Shared IP addresses and common hosting providers

Having the same IP address doesn’t always indicate a PBN. But it’s pretty easy to spot a bunch of domains using the same IP address. This is especially true when all the PBN sites link to each other but barely link to any sites outside the network.

Using the same hosting provider can be another indication of a PBN, again, especially when the sites only (or mostly) link to each other. This may go hand-in-hand with shared IP addresses, but it might also be spread across an IP range or subnet.

Tracking code reuse

Tracking codes used for analytics, ad platforms, affiliate networks, and similar programs and tools are traceable by design. 

Google can obviously track the IDs it issues under its own programs like Google Analytics (GA4), Google Ads, Google AdSense, and others. It can also identify similar tracking codes from other analytics tools, ad networks, affiliate programs, and so forth. 

When multiple sites use the same tracking codes in their links and HTML source code, it becomes fairly easy to identify those that belong to the same PBN.

Repetitive RDAP (formerly WHOIS) data

The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) provides information about domain name registration. It replaced the similar WHOIS protocol in January 2025, though some domain name registrars still maintain WHOIS data.

Both RDAP and WHOIS lookups can reveal the owners behind suspected PBNs. For example, multiple domains registered by the same person or company could be a PBN indicator, especially when combined with other red flags mentioned above.

While RDAP and WHOIS lookups can be useful, they’re not always helpful, since some domain registrars offer privacy services that hide domain ownership details. 

Minimal traffic and user engagement

PBN nodes are designed to attract a few users, with minimal engagement from those users who do visit. Instead, they aim to direct users and link value to the money site.

Google can track this traffic and engagement through tools like GA4 and AdSense. For sites that don’t use Google tracking codes, Google can look at things like click-through rate (CTR) on search impressions to estimate traffic.

Sites with very low visits and engagement can point to poor-quality content, poor UX, or other indications of being a PBN.

Manual review of potential spam sites

Google employees manually review websites to rate their quality. One of the things they look for is potential spam.

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines (PDF) contain information about exactly what Google employees look for, including more detailed explanations of the spam policies mentioned above.

Manual reviews of spam websites happen as a normal course of Google’s quality control efforts. However, people can also report spam directly, which can prompt a manual review.

Link spam updates and link graph modeling

Google makes thousands of algorithm updates each year. Many of these are small tweaks and tests to SERP displays. 

Others are significant changes to the algorithm that can cause the rankings to change monumentally. For example, in December 2022, Google began a major link spam update to its algorithm. The update was so significant that it took almost a month to complete.

That update referenced new functionality to the part of the algorithm known as “SpamBrain.” Launched in 2018, SpamBrain is an AI-powered tool focused on reducing the amount of spam pages that make it into search results.

Some of the things SpamBrain looks at are:

• Identifying spam sites and networks
• Discovering hacked sites and pages
• Reducing nonsensical and gibberish pages

The details of SpamBrain’s functionality are not public. However, it’s long been known that Google uses a “link graph” (sometimes called a “web-link graph” or “web graph”) to model the relationships between various websites.

With a link graph, Google is able to identify closely related sites and pages. And depending on how closely affiliated those sites are, it can do things like change how those sites appear in search results or reduce the value of their outgoing links.

PBNs may have evolved in appearance, but their underlying tactics are well known to Google. With the help of AI systems like SpamBrain and years of manual refinement, PBNs have become easier—not harder—to detect and devalue.

Risks associated with private blog networks

PBNs may seem like a harmless experiment, especially if you’re chasing fast results. But the reality is, they carry significant risks that can undo months of legitimate SEO work.

Here’s what’s at stake.

Wasted investment

The ineffectiveness of using PBNs is part of the risk. 

Why waste time, effort, and money on something that rarely works? 

SEO budgets are typically stretched thin enough to begin with. Instead, put those resources into productive SEO activities like:

• Building out your content marketing strategy
• Adapting your content for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
• Improving your site’s technical SEO signals 

Short-term gain, long-term instability

A brand new PBN could give your money site a little boost initially. 

That is, until Google detects it. And you likely won’t be aware of when the search engine discovers your attempt to fool it.

SEOs like to talk about “quick wins.” And while it’s true that there are ways to move the needle a little bit in the short term, the fact is that such tasks are mere stepping stones to longer-term strategies.

Don’t go after tactics whose value could be wiped out overnight. Instead, prioritize your SEO efforts in ways that will stabilize your ability to rank over the long haul.

Algorithmic demotion 

Regaining a fallen SERP position is difficult at any time. It’s even more difficult when Google identifies a page, site, or network as being spammy.

Google’s spam-detection algorithms are trained to quickly push poor-quality content down in the search results. Any value you got from an early PBN boost will be wiped away quickly, and the spammy sites can cause your money site to fall by association.

It’s possible to recover from this sort of algorithmic demotion, but it takes a lot of time and effort. It’s best to avoid this problem altogether and follow good SEO content practices from the beginning.

Manual actions and deindexation

If a site is determined to be part of a PBN, Google may issue a manual action, which can reduce your site’s ability to rank.

A manual action may also result in deindexation—that is, the complete removal of your site from Google’s index.

Some of the manual actions related to PBNs are:

• User-generated spam
• Spammy-free host
• Unnatural links (to or from the website)
• Thin content
• Major spam problems
• Hidden text or keyword stuffing

To have a manual action removed, the website owner needs to correct all of the problems listed in the manual action report and submit a reconsideration request via Google Search Console. Reconsideration can take weeks or months, and there’s no guarantee your site will be indexed again.

Inability to pass E-E-A-T signals

PBNs fail to signal E-E-A-T (i.e., Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust). This means they also don’t provide E-E-A-T value for the money site they link to.

Google attempts to measure E-E-A-T in various ways:

• User engagement metrics such as CTR, time on site, and scroll depth
• Quality ratings as reported by its Search Quality Raters, especially in relation to E-E-A-T factors
• Backlink quality from other domains that demonstrate E-E-A-T principles

Having good E-E-A-T signals is important for any website. However, Google requires an even higher level of E-E-A-T for YMYL content, which many PBNs contain. (See “PBN Myth #4” above for more on PBNs and YMYL.)

Reputational damage 

If Google can find your site, so can others. And once you’re outed, it can take a lot of time and effort to restore your reputation.

This can be true even when it’s another party building and maintaining the PBNs. For example:

• SEO agencies that build PBNs may do so without their clients’ knowledge or consent. This can put the client at risk, even though they aren’t involved.
• Clients can harm legitimate agencies they hire by working with a second, unscrupulous agency on the side, or even attempting to build a PBN on their own.

In SEO, your reputation is hard-won and easy to lose. Association with shady tactics isn’t worth the risk.

What to do if you have PBN links pointing to your site

You don’t have to use PBNs to be affected by them. Sometimes, they’ll link to your content to mask their true purpose.

If you discover PBN backlinks in your profile, you have three options:

1. Do nothing

Most of the time, Google is good at ignoring low-quality backlinks. Unless the links are extreme in volume or associated with a manual action, you don’t need to intervene.

Google itself recommends this passive approach in most cases.

2. Request link removal

If you can identify the owner of the PBN (unlikely, but possible), you can ask them to remove the links.

But be prepared: PBN owners usually hide behind privacy services and fake identities. You may never reach a real person.

3. Disavow the links

Use Google Search Console’s disavow tool only if:

• You’ve received a manual action for unnatural links
• You see a pattern of toxic backlinks that clearly impact your rankings

Disavowing links won’t instantly reverse damage, but it can be a necessary step in recovering from penalties.

Follow our guide on disavowing backlinks to learn how to do it correctly.

What to do if a stakeholder insists on PBNs

Sometimes, despite knowing the risks, your boss or client still wants to try PBNs. Here’s how to push back with data, logic, and values.

Emphasize how fast Google catches spam

According to Google, its automated systems find 40 billion pages worth of spam every day.

40 billion pages. In one day. Every day.

The chances of building a PBN that passes link value to your website before Google finds it are almost zero. 

In fact, the risk of receiving a manual penalty against your website because of a PBN is much higher than the likelihood that the PBN will help your website rank.

Focus on the return on investment (ROI)

Money talks. And when it’s being wasted on PBNs, people tend to listen.

Even when seeded with cheap, poorly written blog posts, scraped content, and generative AI text, PBNs still cost money to set up and run. 

Some of those costs include:

• Finding and purchasing domain names
• Customizing content management systems and templates
• Loading and coding the content
• Adding the right backlinks
• Initializing monitoring tools

All the money spent on PBNs will go to waste immediately if Google penalizes the domains in the network. In that instance, the ROI will effectively be zero.

In contrast, a great piece of content will lead to more traffic and conversions as it rises to the top of the SERPs, even though it costs more to create.

Focusing your efforts on building fewer pieces of content that target the right keywords and audience will offer a much higher ROI in the long run.

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Connect to values and reputation

If wasted effort and low ROI aren’t enough, appeal to brand values and reputation.

Many businesses have a set of core values, principles, or other beliefs that guide how employees—up to and including the owner(s)—are expected to operate.

Here are some example core values and how you can use them to discuss the risks of PBNs:

• Transparency: “Because they are so manipulative, PBNs are seen as a shady practice by most reputable SEO professionals. If our use of PBNs became public, it could erode the trust of customers, business partners, shareholders, and the general public.”
• Customer focus: “PBNs are inherently anti-customer, because they use spammy content and link practices to gain traffic and link equity. Our time would be better spent building useful content on our main website that’s useful for both existing and prospective customers.”

There are far too many potential core values a company could have to list them all here. Hopefully, these examples and the information you’ve learned in this guide can help you make similar arguments for the values held by your company or your clients.

SEO decisions reflect the company behind them. Make sure those decisions align with what your brand says it stands for.

How to get links the right way

PBNs are shortcuts. But in SEO, real authority comes from real value.

If you want to earn links that improve rankings, focus on strategies that scale:

• Publish original research or data
• Build useful tools or calculators
• Contribute expert insights to industry publications
• Create content that answers real questions better than anyone else

What’s next for SEO in the generative AI era

 

In this exclusive Search Engine Land discussion, four top SEO experts will discuss how to survive and thrive as search shifts in the AI era.

Why we care. Generative AI is shaking the foundations of how people find and interact with information online. The stakes have never been higher for search marketers, brands, businesses, and creators.

The big questions:

• Is this the end of SEO – or the start of something bigger?
• What matters more now: tactics, terminology, or outcomes?
• How can marketers adapt as the rules – and players – of search evolve?

Who’s talking: I moderated a great discussion between our panel of experts:

• Barry Schwartz, contributing editor at Search Engine Land
• Michael King, CEO of iPullRank
• Myriam Jessier, consultant at Pragm
• Duane Forrester, CEO of UnboundAnswers.com

The conversation. Watch the video above for the full conversation and actionable insights you can use right away.

The transcript. Here is the unedited transcript. (It will be reviewed and corrected shortly):

Danny Goodwin

Hey everybody. I’m Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land, and we are here for a very special live with search engine land. We’re gonna be talking about what’s next for SEO and the generative AI era and about the future of visibility, trust, and connection. Uh, now we’ve all lived through a lot of huge changes in search over the years, but the definition of search continues to evolve and what worked a year or two ago may not work anymore.

And the pace of change in SEO is just. Insane right now. Uh, and it’s never been faster. Generative AI is reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and act on information. And for search marketers, brands, businesses, and creators, the stakes are higher than ever. So today we’re bringing together a few of the industry’s sharpest minds for exclusive discussion on what’s all means and how you can adapt, evolve, and thrive in this next era of search.

So settle in. The conversation starts now. I’ll let our panelists each introduce who they are and what they do. Mike, I’ll start with you. 

Mike King

Hey, I am Mike King. I am the founder and CEO here at IPO Rank, and also our first chief relevance engineer. And for anybody watching at home today is IPO rank’s 11th birthday. So I’m excited. Cool. 

Danny Goodwin

Congratulations. That is amazing. Duane, introduce yourself. 

Duane Forrester

Hey gang, Duane Forster, founder and CEO of unboundanswers.com. I help people, what can I say? Been doing this forever. Super happy to be here with everybody and excited to get into this conversation.

Danny Goodwin

Amazing. Myriam, introduce yourself.

Myriam Jessier

My name is Myriam and I’m the co-founder of Pragm. I have been doing SEO for a very long time as well, and everything old is new again, now we’re dealing with cloaking and so many things from like the vintage era, so I can’t wait to talk about it.

Danny Goodwin

Amazing. Welcome. And Barry. 

Barry Schwartz

Hi, I’m Barry. I’ve been writing about what these guys have been doing for the past 20 plus years. That’s about it. 

Danny Goodwin

That’s about it. Okay. So let’s dive right in. We’ll start with the big question that sort of got us all here today. The future of SEO. Mike, you’ve been saying that SEO isn’t dead, but it’s deprecated. So let’s start there. What do you mean by that and what are the implications of that statement? 

Mike King

Sure. So first, let’s explain what the concept of deprecated means. So typically when like a new specification comes out, um, a lot of software will continue to support that specification, or excuse me, the old specification, even though the new one is better, right?

And so to that point. You can continue to do SEO the way you’ve always done it, and you may get some results from it, which is why so many people are just saying like, oh, it’s just SEO. But fundamentally, the way these platforms work is different, right? It isn’t just about the retrieval aspect of it. It’s also about, uh, expanding queries, you know, to be dozens of queries that are used.

They’re pulling passages and then there’s syn, there’s a bunch of synthesis that happens. So, you know, there was some data that came out from ziptie a couple months ago where they talked about how if you’re in the top 10 of the serp, you have a 25% chance of appearing in like the AI overview. So that fundamentally tells you that you need to do something different to have a higher likelihood of appearing in the AI overview.

So that’s what I’m saying, like just us limiting ourselves to what we’ve always done is not enough to be effective in these channels moving forward. 

Danny Goodwin

Great. So, Duane, how about you? Would you agree with that? 

Duane Forrester

You know, um, I’ve known Mike a lot of years and, um, sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don’t.

Um, this is one of those moments where, yeah, I agree with Mike. Um, I have very much taken the perspective that we are in a transitional phase. Um, if, for example, the SEO life that we’ve been living for the last 20 years in the industry is the equivalent of high school. Uh, we are now going to university because there is another layer.

You don’t get to walk away from what you know traditionally, but I will tell you this, okay, and this is really important, and I think Mike’s deprecation example really hits on it. And Miriam touched on this a little bit. Everything old is new. Again, the reality in my head is this. If you haven’t gotten your ducks in a row with traditional SEO at this point, a lot of people aren’t gonna help you anymore because we’re moving.

And I, I don’t know how else to explain this to companies. Like now is not the time to go back and learn what structured data is or how to deploy it. Like if you’re having those conversations, I kind of want to tell you, here’s some remedial studying for the weekend. Come back to me when you’re serious about moving forward because you had 20 years to get that done and you’re still struggling.

So I don’t know. But anyone else, but I’m pretty sure that you, this group is gonna agree with me on this. We are moving so fast now. That it is a, it is a sprint. It is a 26 mile sprint. There is no more example of, oh, it’s a marathon. It’s a, it’s a sprint. No, it’s all a sprint and it’s infinitely long and you either can keep up or you cannot.

And so I fundamentally, I agree with everything I’m hearing so far. I’m right there and mildly frustrated. 

Danny Goodwin

Why are you mildly frustrated?

Duane Forrester

Well, I’m mildly frustrated by that, by the, the traditional oversimplification of something that gets applied to something that is demonstrably more complex.

Like, like people coming at me saying, I write an article about chunking, and they’re like, oh, I can’t say that to my executive. I’ll get laughed outta the room. And I’m like. Do you not understand? That word is actually from the machine learning lexicon, like it refers to something that these systems do.

And you have to understand that of course, they don’t understand that because again, no one reads, they’re scanning things, they’re moving too fast, tr thinking they’re keeping up. I’m telling you, the cost of keeping up is you’re not watching television, you’re not playing video games. You are literally 18 hours a day consuming.

You’re dreaming this stuff at this point. That’s where we are at. At least that’s where I am at. And I suspect Mike and Maryam Barry and you and, and a whole bunch of us are in that same kind of overload, buzzy head space. Mm-hmm. That to Miriam’s Point existed 20 years ago when we first started going to conferences, sharing these little tidbits of what worked and what didn’t work, and how it worked and why it worked.

We’re back to that again. And yet people wanna oversimplify it. They want to dumb it down to, oh, just one thing. Right. 

Danny Goodwin

Okay. Yep. So, Miriam, I;d love your thoughts. Do you believe that SEO is deprecated as well? 

Myriam Jessier

I hope that you would go for Berry because it’s not characteristic when I’m quiet. Uh, but, uh, I’m going to have a a, a spicy take here.

Um, I think that if you have been doing SEO like 20 years ago, yeah, this is brand new to you. If you’ve been doing SEO and keeping up with stuff, you would have noticed that we were headed in that direction. However, and I’m gonna nuance this, where it gets a bit complicated to explain this to folks is before we used to have a bit more control, right?

Mm-hmm. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about branding. Who cares. I don’t care about PPC. I can do my SEOI am king or nobility of the world. Okay? We’re number one. We get money. But nowadays I find myself having to explain to executives some things that are not comfortable. Number one, the darn thing, hallucinates.

Okay, so it’s not even your own, um, I don’t know if I can swear, but, um, let’s just say cow poop. Okay? But it’s not just you pretending some stuff until reality catches up and your brand is strong. Now we have sentiment analysis. Now I’ve seen some April Fool’s jokes being integrated into the ethos of a brand and then spa out in LLMs.

So you have to explain stuff that you would think, okay, maybe the social media team should be helping as well, but nobody’s rushing. We’re the only ones in SEO o trying to figure this out. So to me. Yes. SEO O as people used to do it 20 years ago with a recipe without any curiosity, trying to understand what’s going on, that’s deprecated.

But if we’re talking about a EOG, I don’t care about the acronyms. At the end of the day, are we doing this job? Yes or no? I, I’m waiting the jury’s out on what is gonna be called. I really don’t care. I’m old enough to know everything that’s old is new again. The one thing that I would bring about though is I’m obsessed with multimodal and not too many people are interested in it, but how many times can I just like, show a video of a broken thing or a microwave that’s in German and go help me figure this out and it will help me.

Myriam Jessier

And this to me, opens brand new avenues. So now I take pictures of packaging and I tell people, that’s your landing page. Can we please optimize it for image? Vision? Yeah. It’s, it’s not that to me. Everything about SEO is deprecated. However, the concept that we had needs to be updated for sure. It’s just not the same game.

And now you’re running into new frictions with new teams. You’re no longer like, I’m Nabil, yay. I don’t care what you say. I’m number one. We now have to actually grow up and maybe be polite and learn how to deal with others. Right. So this, yeah. Mike, you, you know what I mean? Like some of us are struggling with that.

We’re having tantrums. 

Mike King

Are you calling me? Not polite. 

Myriam Jessier

Oh, this was not towards you.

Mike King

I’m messing with you. I’m messing with you. Yeah. 

Myriam Jessier

But I have a few names that came up to my mind and I think the audience as well, you know, who’s coming up your mind when I say that? 

Danny Goodwin

All right, Barry, uh, your, your opening thoughts on the future of SEO? 

Barry Schwartz

Um, more on the, uh, I guess Myriam side of things. Um, I don’t think many SEOs are trying to oversimplify things, nor do I think they’re playing video games. Um, I don’t, I dunno, I never have, I never, last time I actually did any entertainment personally. I, I don’t believe in entertainment. I believe in just working and constantly working.

That being said, um, one thing I’ve been doing is writing about how SEOs have been operating for the past 20 plus years. And SEOs who are around today, that were around 20 years ago, are always stepping up. They’re always, it used to be back in the old days, submit your page to the index and submit ’em to 20 different search engines over and over again every single day.

Then it was due OnPage, SEO, then link building, then Universal search came out, uh, feature snippet optimization. I’m jumping a little bit, entities, et cetera. We’re constantly stepping stuff up. Um. So the best SEOs continued to like, add things to their plate? Yes. This is a huge jump in terms of what SEOs are adding to their plate.

A lot of SEOs were focusing on like one thing or two things. Now you really need to have, you have to have everything under your belt to make this possible. And the best SEOs, the ones who’ve been here for many, many years, um, many of you guys on this, on this video right here, um, are the ones who could adapt.

The ones that don’t adapt are the ones that die. We’ve seen many SEOs with big names over the years that either fell off and are, no, no, no longer doing SEO working for big companies, um, doing marketing in general and so forth, uh, but no longer doing SEO and like optimizing their own stuff. That being said, there are a lot of changes coming.

Um, obviously clicks are vanishing for a lot of people. You know, branding is becoming more and more important ’cause of that. Uh, and this whole angen experience stuff, having, how do you get, get your client to think about, you know, building agents that integrate with these AI engines and so forth. Um. I’m the guy who always, it’s not always often like will cite Google about things as well.

And Google just, you know, had us, um, just, it was an article right now in a adage I think, or one of these places where Google spokesperson told adage that, um, basically everything remains the same when it comes to optimization or SEO Um, there’s nothing specific you’re gonna do to optimize, uh, for a I re or AI mode outside of their existing SEO fundamentals.

But again, how you work with clients is gonna change. Like, are you gonna count clicks anymore? No, you’re not gonna say, oh, I got you this amount of clicks or this amount of conversions and so forth. ’cause it’s, it’s gonna be harder to target and, and, and track and track and so forth. And only the ones that are actually looking at, you know, how do I show my clients that this the return on investment?

How do I show my clients what I’m doing? You know, how do I show that we’re adapting to this are the ones that are gonna survive? And this happens every several years, but with this change in search, which is the most fun, I think. I’ve had covering search in a long time because it’s changing so fast. It it, it’s gonna change.

It’s gonna, it keeps changing like very, very quickly and it’s gonna, it’s gonna make and break a lot of SEOs. Um, not that we should call them seo, I don’t wanna call them, but whatever it is, I don’t think SEO the name is necessarily gonna change so fast. Um, but I think the best SEOs that are here today, um, are gonna probably stay and adapt.

But at the same time, there are a lot of lazy SEOs out there that work off a checklist. And those checklists, you know, those checklists are going out the window. Um, so I do think things are gonna change, but I don’t think it’s gonna change. Looking back at the 20 past 20 years, I don’t think it’s gonna be like, oh, they’re, they’re doomed.

The ones that are, were here 20 years ago and that are still here today, I think will be fine. 

Danny Goodwin

Yeah. And I, I think that’s a, a key point there, Barry. It’s like, for the, for the near term, it feels like SEO remains as relevant as ever. Uh, would you all agree with that? Like, I mean, you know, yes, deprecated, but there’s still, you know, Google’s saying there’s 5 trillion searches.

I know a lot of those clicks go to Google, uh, and don’t actually go out to the web. But, uh, how are you sort of po positioning that yourself with the clients you’re talking to? Um, you know, as AI search grows, uh, do we just kinda accept like, Hey, this traffic’s not coming back from Google. Or like, how are you sort of talking about that with your clients?

Uh, Mike, you wanna start there? 

Mike King

Yeah, so I don’t, I don’t think what we’re talking about is that like SEOs are gonna disappear. Like I, that’s not what I’m saying. 

What I’m saying is that everything is fundamentally different. The channel is different. Mm-hmm. The user behavior is different.

The expectations of what we do in order for us to achieve something in this channel has dramatically changed. And one of the biggest follies that we’ve done as an industry is just accept that. It’s like, oh, okay. Core web vitals, we’re suddenly performance engineers. Nobody’s getting paid more for that.

So it’s like silly for us to just continue to accept things that Google impresses upon us. Now to the question you just asked me. Absolutely. We’ve been educating our clients on how the channel is changing for like the last two years. You know, like I wrote a blog post on this very site. Like two years ago talking about how retrieval, augment generation was gonna change everything about our space and how everyone was gonna see losses between 20 and 60% in traffic.

Here we are, you know, so like we’ve been telling clients that for a while and they were, at first they’re like, cool, cool, cool, whatever. And then once they started seeing these impacts from AI overviews, they’re all ears. And then, you know, when I wrote the thing about, um, AI mode, again, they’re all ears.

And then everyone at the C level is all about, well, how do we get visibility in chat GPT? And even though I keep telling them like, Hey, you’re not gonna get any traffic, it’s not gonna have the same level of business outcomes, they still wanna be there because of the, uh, immense growth that these channels are having.

So. Yes, it is a complete reframe of what we do because to the point that Miriam made, like we have to interface with a whole bunch of dis different disciplines here. It’s not just about text on webpages, it’s about what’s going on in video, it’s what it’s about, what’s happening across the content ecosystem.

And so I had a meeting with one of my clients last week when they were like, Hey, we are going to stand up a GEO team. How should we structure this? And that’s my whole point. SEO is defined in a lot of people’s heads as a specific thing. It’s free traffic, it’s content for robots. It’s all these like backdoor things that people don’t, um, give much value to, which is why our industry is very much undervalued right now.

We’re talking about AI and people are saying to us, what do we do? How does this work? Who do we need on the team? And so for us to keep living in this, this limited SEO lens, we’re missing out on this opportunity to reshape what this is and the media is coming in and defining it for us. And then clients are starting to come to us with those questions rather than, than the framework that we can develop as the industry that’s been here for the last 20 years.

Danny Goodwin

Right. Duane, your thoughts there? 

Duane Forrester

Yeah, so this is, this is really interesting, right? Um, Mike is touching on something here that, uh, I, I’ve written extensively on recently on my substack. Um, and it’s this whole notion of, um, skill retraining, um, new skills that we need. Um, I even did a four-part series on inventing new job titles that might exist.

They’re fictional, right? They’re, some of them are just like tongue in cheek funny, uh, but the point behind them is very serious. Um, I’ve had a half a dozen calls with companies looking to restructure teams, and they want guidance on how, like, what skills should I be hiring? I took a tremendous amount of heat from people in the industry a couple weeks back when I suggested that we need to start hiring new skills now so that in two years those people are executing on the work you need them to execute on.

If you are hiring someone to do keyword research now. You think somehow miraculously in two years, they will be an expert at the concept of query fan out and how to utilize that information in a content context. You’re delusional if they don’t understand it. You are going to have to have a training program.

You are gonna have to bring them up to speed or you’re gonna have to hire people who already have this skillset. And that’s what I’m advocating is you have to hire the skills today. Look, this, I think the industry’s gonna be a mess for the next couple of years. I think companies are gonna be a mess for the next couple of years.

Um, we are back for better or worse, Barry said, you know, like it’s kind of some of the most fun a lot of us have had in a long time because the change is so rapid and it’s interesting and, and I don’t, I won’t speak for everyone else, but I will speak for myself when I say. It forces me to learn new things every day for hours a day going deep.

And it’s stuff that I normally would not, I would not have gone and read all these academic papers on all of this stuff just for fun. But it is such a fundamental part of what we’re doing, what we have to do in the future, dude. Like I just, it’s not optional now. So you, you need those skills. You need that understanding.

You need that curiosity. I think, and Barry raised an interesting point, like we are seeing a lot of people burn out of the industry. They’re not interested in all of this change we’re seeing. Thankfully a lot of people willing to adapt, want to learn about it. And we’re seeing, I had a call, um, really large brand, like a Fortune 50, and they’re very concerned about their procurement pipeline for tool sets in 2026.

So I launched the quadrant ra like kind of ranking all these 40 different AI tools and where they are on trust versus features and they’re using that to define the top 10 that they will then go put time into to interview and look at and demo and all of this. And I’m like, I’m not saying what I did was the right path, but it is a path, it is something and it’s saving someone a lot of time.

And we’re gonna see a lot more of this happening. People wanting to add, excuse me, wanting to identify tool sets and what they can do with them and what they can use them for. Mike mentioned zip tie. It’s amazing. It is awesome. Extremely technical. So if you’re not a technical person, you may not be able to wrap your head around a lot of it.

There’s a lot of talk about Profound, they just scored 20 million a few weeks ago in funding, so obviously they have an advantage, but there’s a lot of new things out there and you know, it’s not just know the tool, it’s know the tool, know the work, know your work. What are your goals? This is across everything in your company.

You’re no longer the little pet off in the dark corner doing your strange language. No, no, this, this work is now impacting everyone and it is really important that people doing this work truly step forward. I, I, I can’t stress that enough.

Danny Goodwin

Right. Um, so I’ll, I’ll shift topic just a little bit. Uh, we know that at this point AI search is still driving, you know, pretty small amount of traffic to websites despite, you know, what Google’s, Elizabeth Reed may have, uh, told us in a recent blog post.

Um, I’m just kinda curious, uh, Miriam, I’ll, I’ll send, throw this to you first. You know, do you think people are expecting like AI search to eventually become a Google level of search or, you know, ’cause obviously we’re all seeing a lot of traffic declines, a lot of, uh, websites are seeing that. So do you, do you, what do you make of all this, do you think do GEO or whatever we’re gonna call it as over overblown or, uh, is it just not there yet?

Myriam Jessier

I have plenty of opinions. So first of all, I don’t think it’s quite there yet. Here’s why many people that have companies will not be willing to throw a bunch of money on something that could one day just say the opposite of what it was saying. The day before, and these types of inaccuracies, like I really appreciate the fact that Mike’s clients and Duane’s clients are like looking towards the future, are invested in it.

I deal with the scared clients, okay? Mm-hmm. I deal with the ones that have the legal department going, what you do in here? Mm-hmm. And so this is something that I’ve been paying attention to. Whenever Sam Altman needs money, he’s going to talk about AGI and then there will be funds coming in. Okay. The other thing is I am.

I’m obsessed with something, uh, that Mike said, and uh, uh, I’ll tie it in a second. We are redefining the web. We helped build the web as SEOs. We helped make it a trash fire. Okay? And right now we have a chance to not make the same mistakes. So this is fascinating to me, but it also means that, um, rest in peace to all the ex SEOs that ran into analytics land because now they’re struggling because the metrics are changing and we have to rebuild them.

So this is a notion that I have and profound, I great for the $20 million. Fantastic. I’m wondering other stuff. Yeah. So what is this nascent industry built on? Okay. Mm-hmm. So first of all, there’s the whole, we need money and I, I’m waiting for the hype bubble to burst. And whatever remains behind will be what we use.

That will be the gold and. For profound. I’m just wondering, okay. How do you get the data? And this leads me to having this, this thought that for core web vitals, we have what we call lab data and field data. So what happens in perfect conditions and what happens out in the wild when users are coming on your website?

Well, when it comes to tracking LLM visibility, it’s the same. We have the prompts that us as a company have defined because that’s why we want, in ideal conditions, no personalization, no memory, nothing. And then we have the field data. And that field data. Right now, the closest thing to it is clickstream data.

So whenever I evaluate these solutions, I’m like, where do you buy that clickstream data? Where is that coming from and how do you cut it up? Because if I’m in France, I don’t need the US clickstream data. That’s not the same real world that I’m facing. Mm-hmm. So I think that all of these situations really need to be figured out on the business end of things for this to become a viable thing that we look at and go, okay, this is serious.

We have some compliance, we have some legal frameworks around it, et cetera. Um, Danny, if you’re comfortable with it, I need to dovetail into something because I’ve seen a very good set of questions from Navah Hopkins. I’m going to read them. I don’t know if anyone else has seen them, but what does ethical SEO look like in the AI era versus Black hat and.

There’s a few PPC people that thankfully are interested in SEO, and they had a discussion regarding how brands might be able to fool AI into believing something about a brand based on UGC or other inputs, and I’ve seen that happen. I’ve also seen some hackers enjoying themselves very, very much with poisoning all of these LLM outputs.

So what would a holistic SEO perspective look like? So for me, the work I’ve been doing with some big enterprise clients is slowly trying to explain to them. You need to think about your branding quadrants, not in I own brand, and then I’m gonna make SEO demands and PPC demands. There’s what you say about your brand, your known brand, all your assets that you put out there.

There’s the latent brand. Everything that everyone is saying on social media about you that you may influence but you don’t control it. There’s the shadow brand, all the stuff, all the leaks, all those forgotten PDFs on like page four of Google search results. They come back to haunt you. You had a lawsuit in 2016, you’re still having that lawsuit according to chat, GPT.

So once it’s out, how do you handle that stuff? And then from all of these bits, you have the AI narrated brand, it’s now your brand ambassador. And for better or for worse, and that’s the portion that brands are struggling with. So. Just before I pass it off to someone else. When we talk about holistic stuff, that’s what I think about.

And I know I’m going to break Zara’s heart, but when we’re looking for fun, summer, spring, uh, summer or spring dresses, that typical Zara model face of, uh, is not gonna cut it because machines are not looking at the model’s face going, you don’t look like you’re having fun. I have 89% confidence. This is not joy on your face.

So this is the type of stuff we have to think about now.

Danny Goodwin

Absolutely. Okay. Uh, Barry, I’ll come back to you. Um, I, we sort of started with is GEO overblown there before we veered off for a minute. So, I mean, obviously you’ve been covering the industry for, you know, 20 plus years. You’ve seen a lot of stuff come and go. You’ve seen SEO declared dead probably more than anybody else on this, uh, on this call.

So, um, what are you, what are you thinking as we, as we see this heading forward? Do you, do you think GE Geo at this point is overblown? Or, or how are you feeling about it? 

Barry Schwartz

Uh, I, I don’t know. That’s a tough question. I, it goes back to our original conversation about SEO versus geo. I think, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s overblown.

There’s a lot of money. At these days being thrown at this place. Mm-hmm. A lot of, like I said, 20 million to profound. They’re all gonna get consolidated at some point. Somebody’s gonna buy most of them up and consolidate them into, into something else. Um, I know several companies, not just profound, they got a lot of money from massive investments, um, to build tool sets around this stuff.

So I, is it the new blockchain? No. I think AI search and AI chat bots and all these things are really the future. Um, I just don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t like to diminish SEO and say, SEO was just somebody in the back room. It was SEO O is not like it was 20 years ago. I mean, you have VPs of mm-hmm.

Marketing and SEO Yep. At massive organizations. I don’t think, s se I try not to believe that SEO is something that’s undervalued anymore. It used to be undervalued. I, I really don’t wanna believe that it’s undervalued anymore in this year. 2025. That being said. Yeah, 

Mike King

very. What, what Fortune 500s do you work at? It’s still very undervalued. 

Barry Schwartz

The, we had a number of, uh, VPs of like SEO for, like their New York Times and different organizations that are really high end. I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know off the top of my head, but I know we had them on search engine land and XMX speaking and so forth with vice president staff.

Mike King

Sure. There are, there are VPs of SEO, I’ll give you that, and some of ’em make like $300,000. Yeah. But they manage a channel that yields billions of dollars and they’re only getting 300 k. Like, that’s a pretty big disparity. Whereas you’ve got people in the media side that are making closer to like five, 600.

So I, I don’t, I, I still don’t believe. It’s valued that way. And also like when people come to go get a, uh, an SEO agency, most of them wanna spend like 10 grand a month when again, they’re spending millions on paid search. 

Barry Schwartz

I have people coming to me looking to build an Amazon clone for five grand. Yeah, I hear that.

I mean, there’s always people like that out there. So yeah, it’s all, a lot of that has to do, do what you brand your company. I mean, there’s one SEO company, a reputation management company charging, you know, $500 a month and you have one charging, you know, I don’t know, hundred, you know, tens of thousands of dollars per month for the same exact service.

So I think a lot of that is around branding, which goes back to a lot of what we have to do in terms of this whole new model. It’s not really new per se. I mean, there’s the fundamentals that you need to do, and there’s the stuff that SEOs, the really good SEOs have been doing, like yourself, Mike and Duane, you guys, and, and Miriam, you guys have been doing this stuff for a long time.

Mm-hmm. Um, you’ve been talking about this well before the AI rev revolution over, when you wanna call it, there’s some new elements to it, like. That’s really API integration is the whole nGenx stuff. So a lot of this stuff is new, but it’s really not new. And I think, like, like I said before, the best SEOs will survive and adopt these things and tell their clients how to incorporate it.

I don’t know if we need to change the name so that, I don’t know, some VP could get another 200 grand on a salary. I mean, it’ll be nice. I don’t care about that per se. Um, but I do think, um, I would like to see the SEO name become more and more credible and I think this is the avenue toward, towards it.

And we don’t, I don’t think we have to change it to being GEO or a EO or E-I-E-I-O or whatever you wanna call it. 

Mike King

So that’s why I disagree, because if that was true, it would’ve happened by now. You know, I think it’s been happening. Like you said, all of these people have been doing great work for so long.

It hasn’t changed the perception of SEO. 

Barry Schwartz

I mean, Duane, how many of the former speakers back from the early SES days that were sitting black hat SEO are now like in. Like massive corporations doing SEO, um, maybe with bigger taxes, what you’re thinking 

Duane Forrester

And it’s, it’s a very real thing, right? Like, like there, there is a number of people historically from the industry who were really good at, at traditional SEO, black hat, SEO, understood all of it.

Um, were very successful. And those people have largely gone into the background to be the guiding force at larger, technically minded companies and, and they’re doing good work, right? Like, I, I, I think both you guys, like, it’s funny, you know, I, I’m kind of envisioning this like boxing match happening, but it’s all like candy canes and, you know, like fluff and popcorn and whatnot.

Because I agree with both of you and I disagree with some things. I fundamentally think that, um, I’d say about seven, maybe 10 years ago, we hit the peak. Of SEOs getting large titles and large salaries, and we’ve seen that trailing down because, not because of necessarily a lowering appreciation of the work, but because a vice president of marketing is an easier title for a company to understand, especially a publicly traded company that has to report to a board that has a C-suite making these organizational decisions.

And marketing then becomes the catchall that holds all of the disciplines within that, including SEO, which ultimately means as an SEO, you’re never really gonna get above director. And if you do, it’s probably a smaller company or sometimes at a much larger company where they need more executives to spread across.

So I, I think everybody’s right. I mean, that’s my kumbaya statement on it. Um, but I will say this, um, I, I fundamentally think that, that we are seeing a change here. Um, you can’t let go of the face. I love how Miriam put this. You know, when Sam needs money, he comes out and talks a GI, right? It’s like, this is a really, really, really important nuance for SEOs to wrap their head around.

Okay? It’s, she says, Sam, right? But really she means perplexity. She means quad. She means anthropic. Like every one of these companies has their little pull that they, they go for. And what’s incredibly, so, very important about this is the 700 million people that use chat GPT, because most of those people.

Don’t know what search actually is or is not. All they know is they asked a question and they got an answer that seemed trustworthy and that seemed trustworthy part is really important. Okay? Because for us to actually trust answers out of these systems, we need universal verifiers and universal verifiers are a minimum.

Beta versions are 18 months away, and then probably 20, 27 before we see practically applied universal verifiers and LLM fact checking and LLM, I’ll let you go down your own rabbit holes about the efficacy of that concept, but it’s being worked on. Fact is 700 million people don’t know the difference and they’re looking at something.

I needed a new washing machine two weeks ago, so I took a photo of the barcode that was on mine, was shocked to realize I’d had it for 10 years and was like, oh, no wonder. It’s kind of like crapping out on us. There you go. Immediately, Chachi PT 4.0 comes back with, here are the top three compete products to that modern version.

You know, would you like a, a summary of each one? And sure enough, I’m not joking, I went from 11:00 PM at night having that conversation in the dark because I couldn’t sleep and needed to solve this problem to the following afternoon. Lowe’s was delivering our new washing machine to us. And so do I really care whether it’s a search engine, whether we call this geo or SEO, or no, I don’t.

As a consumer, I really don’t care. And I got a good answer and I’ve got a great machine, and I love the music it plays every time the, the cycle ends. Like, like that’s what matters to me. I solve my problem. And you guys know this. I mean, if you’re on this group, you, you’ve heard me, you know, go on about this ad nauseum, like this is the fundamental thing that marketers need to wrap their head around is the consumer side of it.

Their intent, their interest. And, and the rest of it is, is kind of, um, I don’t know. It’s a little squishy right now. There’s, you know, I look, I, I can sit here and argue and tell you there’s all kinds of new technical stuff and you have to know this, and you have to do these things. And then Barry can just look at me and say, yeah, but you know what?

I can find homes for every one of those things conceptually in content and topics that we’ve already talked about. And I, I can’t really argue that it’s, it’s maybe a shinier version of that old thing. Everybody went nuts a month ago for Query Fan out. It just blew up. Like it was something, and I’m like, I literally do not know a single SEO on planet Earth who doesn’t understand this concept and hasn’t been working on it for 15 years.

It’s, it’s the basic concept with a new name on it. And yeah, in the world of ml it’s important and it, you know, should have that name and do whatever, but you as an SEO should know better. You should be doing this already. So nobody should be shocked by it saying, oh my God, that’s new. Now I have to do this, and I will buy a plane ticket and give somebody a crisp high five If they end up as the vice president of a query fan out at some company.

Like I, I swear, I like, that would be just like Fonzie jumping the shark. And if you’re young and you don’t get that reference, go look that one up. You’ll enjoy the video. 

Myriam Jessier

I need to update my LinkedIn profile right now.

Mike King

Here’s my problem with that though. We, we talk about this idealized form of SEO that very few people actually do, right?

Like when you talk about like, oh, everyone should have known about Query fan out. Like, yes, query expansion has existed the whole time, uh, in a partially different way or what have you, but what tools do we have that explicitly show you this is the direct relationship …

Duane Forrester

Mike. I, I just, just to, to push back on that. I will point out, um, um, is it answer the people and, um, there’s another tool that’s similar conceptually to what you are saying, right? Where Yeah. You’re talking about it goes on. 

Mike King

You’re effectively talking about like, okay, I’m mining. People also ask, which is a form of that.

Duane Forrester

Yeah. 

Mike King

But it’s not exactly what these systems are doing. Oh, I agree. My point, my point is this, like a lot of us know these concepts, but the average practitioner of SEO, the people that watch these videos, read these blog posts. They, they read all this stuff and they’re like, okay, well what do I do next?

And so then they don’t do anything different than the checklist. So yes, the knowledge, yeah, that’s fair, but it’s not actually happening because our space is just so backwards in that regard. 

Myriam Jessier

It, I would say that it is happening, but we haven’t been paying attention to it. So here’s why we have done our job so well.

That search is now. Democratic, I mean, watching people go on Instagram, like community managers and social media experts explaining to me how hashtags are working. And I was looking at them for years going, you are adorable. Thank you for doing the SEO work. I don’t wanna do good for you. So it’s, it’s one of those situations where I think it’s the opposite.

People take search for granted and there’s nobody else but us going into the LLM space trying to figure this out. So it, it’s, it’s bit unusual. And when it comes to query fan out, I’ve been dealing with this as an internal search nerd forever because what do you do when people go on your own website to buy groceries and they’re typing for healthy, um, um, healthy cheap snack.

Of course you’re gonna query fan out in your own internal search engine. You need to match that expectation with your own store and with what you know about your audience, how they purchase stuff. So. I think that just certain things have caught up and are going much faster, but then there’s some stuff that is just so backwards.

Like, I am not going to recommend to clients that they remove all their JavaScript just because some crawlers from LLM are slow, inefficient, and costly. I’m sorry, I’m not here for this. So we’re No, no, I, I see you laughing and I agree. But I mean, uh, Chris Green was bringing up an example with a big e-commerce site where in the code it said, product is available and product is not available.

These were the two states available in the code. And then what do LLMs do take for granted that if it says not available, let’s ignore the available, we’re gonna say the product is not available. 

Mike King

Right. 

Myriam Jessier

So now we’re, we’re, we’re dealing with things that are going way too fast. And to me, it seems normal.

It’s like, Hey, weren’t we all on the same page that we have to write good content, just period for humans? And then there’s this other end where we have to figure. Okay, so Agent Agentic AI stuff, I think about in the shower, INP as a core web vital is super important now. Mm-hmm. What happens with mobile overlap?

Like if the bot is going on there and you have three popups, it’s gonna be pretty deterministic. It’s gonna go first button, I don’t care. I’m not gonna mm-hmm. Waste my time. So you are gonna end up with even weirder behaviors that you may attribute to humans going, oh, humans are getting less smart. No, they’re sending bots to do the job.

Mm-hmm. And we have to think about that as well, these new mm-hmm. Behaviors. And, um, FYI for my PPC people, yeah. INP is now something that you should get friendly with your SEO about your technical SEO because this will impact you. People are buying shoes with agents now. I know that. Um, I think it was like the SEO max, uh, waffle.

I’m so sorry for pronouncing your last name like this. I can’t German. Well, he purchased a pair of his own brand’s shoes with an agent and it’s working super well for him. I don’t know how well it’s working with everyone like Duane, I’m glad that you did not delegate the purchase of your washing machine to an agent so far.

Okay. Yeah. I don’t trust it quite well. And last but not least, no. Yeah, not quite. Tinfoil hat moment perplexity is headed by people who have a. Contract with Google. They used to be with Google Labs, and in a few years they have to return. Haven’t you noticed that some of the stuff that works well in Gemini, that they want to popularize, they will take out and put in perplexity and vice versa?

Like the check sources from Gemini is now in perplexity and there’s other stuff I see like, uh, let’s just say a walkway between the two. Mm-hmm. And when we know that Google had a few moonshots as well, would I say that, um, Google and so SEO as a whole, because they are the main driver behind that industry at the end of the day, not saying that they like it, just saying they have to deal with it.

Are they going to really lose out? I don’t think so. That clickstream I was talking about, Ooh, isn’t that useful for AI mode ads that are coming? Isn’t that a leg up on the competition? Mm-hmm. I, I can’t wait to see how it plays out. 

Danny Goodwin

All right. So I wanna circle back to something we touched on a little bit earlier.

Uh, you know, if we call the, if we do call this a new marketing discipline, which is, you know, being found on AI engines, is this something that SEOs today are going to own? And do you think this will allow them to maybe get big, bigger budgets, uh, and maybe salaries too, like Mike was alluding to? So, uh, Mike, do you wanna answer that one first?

Mike King

Yeah. Mike, check 1, 2, 1, 2. Okay. Um, yeah, so. It’s my hope that they can do that because again, you’re in a space where you’ve got a lot more responsibility. You have to do this across a bigger content ecosystem rather than just your website. And again, it’s an opportunity to reframe because people associate a very high value with AI, and this is AI.

So I think if we’re smart, it is an opportunity for everyone to reframe. And the question on the name, I mean that that ship is sailed, guys. Like as soon as Andreessen Horowitz was like, this is generative engine optimization, that’s what it’s, as soon as the media starts saying, this is generative engine optimization, that’s what it is.

We can push back all we want, but it’s too late. We should have done that a year ago when this thing first popped up, rather than just saying it’s more SE. So I think that there’s an opportunity, but again, just as we generally have as SEO to begin with, it’s a huge branding problem that needs to be overcome. 

Danny Goodwin

Duane, what do you think? 

Duane Forrester

Yeah, um. You know, I think that, is there a chance for more budget? Yeah, I think so. Um, but you know, as we’ve seen since the pandemic budgets have been slashed, there’s been massive headcount reductions. Um, you know, people are slowing their purchasing, um, large companies still have large procurement cycles that take, you know, six months to a year to get through sometimes.

Uh, forget government, i, I if you’re gonna look at that, just, you know, plan for your kids to take over your contract because it’s, it’s a long haul with, uh, with.gov. Um, I think that, um, what we’re likely to see in this kind of interim. Timeframe is you’re gonna see a lot of people who don’t understand the space, didn’t understand SEO, but were responsible for the teams managing that work.

Um, understood it enough to listen to the team and, you know, like accept the guidance or say no to the guidance that the team gave them. Um, but, but they’re not practitioners themselves. They don’t have a deep knowledge. They’re not gonna have a deep knowledge in this space either. But they’re going to accept responsibility.

They’re gonna hire the people with the skills, they’re gonna listen to the conversations they’re gonna spend, the company’s budget. Um, I think there’s gonna be a lot of that. And I think that maybe in five years, um, we will see people with skills in those positions because it will matter to companies.

Right? Like, you know, something that Mike was talking about earlier, right? Like this decline in click volume that we’re seeing. Like I don’t see a lot of people talking about the fact that if. If we can agree that our future is built around an answer as opposed to, you know, a clickable link, for example.

Um, if we continue to see that growing and it goes in that direction, we will inevitably find ourselves trying to track a mention versus a citation versus a linked citation. And was that my phrase that was used in that answer? And how exactly do I do it right? Which kind of comes back to the tools and their ability to do these things properly.

And, you know, the viability of all of that. Um, it, it becomes kind of an ecosystem unto itself. Uh, its own arcane, um, vertical of data tracking basically. Um, I think that we’re gonna see expansion in that area. We’re going to see, unfortunately, a lot of people, um, you know, look, we got, I’m tracking 40 tools right now.

Like there’s probably gonna be another 20 in the next year. And then we’re gonna see to Barry boy, like. A metric crapton of consolidation where all of those ones and twos that made up, the companies are just gonna drift off because they never got funding. They’re just gonna walk away. They didn’t care in the first place and the whole thing dies.

Um, but until that two to three years from now, everybody’s gonna be walking around this weird kind of landscape of, well, this does this and this does that, and this does this over here, and this does this, and it’s, it’s going to be hugely messy, which means there’s opportunity for some people. And some of those people will be internal people looking to bulk up their, you know, budgets with their teams and proposing new headcounts.

And because AI is so shiny, when you start talking in that direction. Boards of directors lean in and pay attention, and C-suites start to lean in and headcounts get approved. I need a keyword researcher on my content team. No, you get no more head count. I need somebody to manage, query fan out to determine what content that we should be focusing on moving forward.

Is that related to ai? Yes. Great. Have two headcount. Like it’s this type of world that I think we’re about to see turbulence for the airplane, right? It’s gonna be a lot of it over the next couple years. 

Myriam Jessier

You wanna talk about messy? I wanna complain about something. My work is being attributed to another SEO called MIM because some person took a YouTube transcript of one of my talks.

Yeah. And because my name is not spelled with a Y, it automatically assumed that because I’m talking about local SEO, well who’s the other MI that’s known for local SEO. And all of a sudden my entire. Life. Like my Hawaii references, my Jewish background. All of that is attributed to that poor woman out there.

And in lms. I’ve been working hard and the agency that published that slop, it’s literally, I slop 

Myriam Jessier

Has not changed it. And the efforts I’ve had to do to fix that, I mean, I, I dug into this and that’s why I say like it, like LLMs do need to grow up because the ai Oh yeah. Brand semantic drift is Yeah.

Off the walls. It’s not just one thing. You have like factual drift, you have intent drift, you have the drift of people on Reddit, memeing your brand, you have narrative collapse, like all of these things. Are going to be something we have to deal with and we’re gonna have panicked brands coming and going.

Clean that up. No, I can’t just bury the body in page two of Google search results. Now you have content debt. 

Barry Schwartz

It’s funny, it’s a, it’s funny because I have people coming to me and saying, you know, this is what I, this is what some topic, what could be anything, like what’s the best washer and dryer to buy?

Or whatever it is. And then this, this is the answer from Chatt PT and I’m gonna go with it. I’m like, it’s, you’re like, it’s like, first of all, on our topic, I know about SEO O they ask this question that I know about, which is only SEO. Um, I’ll be like, that’s wrong. And it’s just outright wrong. Yeah. And it’s like talking to a really confident friend who thinks they know everything, but they know nothing.

Yeah. 

Mike King

Drunk and that’s what confident. Yeah, but they’re gonna 

Barry Schwartz

get better. But at this time, it’s like, you 

Mike King

mean it’s like talking to SEOs? 

Barry Schwartz

Exactly. Uh, but you know what I’m saying? It’s like you have that one friend that really knows everything. Yeah. And they act like they know everything and they’re so confident about it.

That’s what it’s like asking these chat GPTs and these ai, and they’re getting better. Mm-hmm. Um, but then optimizing for that, like they could run out, you know, chat. GBT came with a new model last week, it’s brand new. And they had to like, they, we were getting rid of all the other old models and they’re like, right.

And everybody’s fighting and like, we want the old models back. We don’t like the new models. We want the old models back. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s, we’re in a really exciting space. It will get really, really good. And the AI will, we’re not gonna have to hire anybody, Duane. It’s just the AI’s gonna do it all for us.

Duane Forrester

yeah. So, you know, it’s funny you say that Barry, and like half joke, half truth, right? Yeah. Where, where like, like I, if, if you’d have talked to me like nine months ago, I would’ve been telling you we gotta be careful with Chachi BT five, because it’s probably gonna be capable of doing a lot of work that SEOs do.

And like it’ll get there. Right. And so I believe in that, but now that it’ll live through a bunch of cycles. The hockey stick is further away, right? That moment where it ramps up and it becomes a truly utility-based trustable asset, we are not there and, and I just like, we will get there. I believe that, but boy oh boy, you need human in the loop now more than ever.

Right? Miriam’s example is like critical for this, right? I mean, anything at all. I do a lot of writing and I put my writing into these systems and I say, find the facts that are incorrect. Find examples of backup, this statement. Go do this, go do that. I asked chat GBT the other night, and this is on 5.0. I asked it, I have a YouTube channel, it’s got nothing to do with SEO.

And I said, Hey, you know what I’d like is I’d like a ten second bumper that I can add a video that I can add to the beginning of every one of my videos. Kinda like an opening reel, right? Can you do that? Oh yeah. No problem. About 18 hours into the project, I asked it, can you actually make this video? And it assured me it could make the video.

The problem was uploading it. Now Dropbox wasn’t working. Google Drive wasn’t working, all these things weren’t working. So after about another hour, I said to it, are you lying to me? And it said, well that depends. And I’m like, what? Uh, there is no version of this answer that should start with that depends coming from you.

And then it went on to it. It went on to explain how it was working on everything I asked theoretically as a simulation in the background. And it was not capable of building a video interfacing with any of these third party systems or doing any of the work that I thought we were doing that it kept telling me we were doing.

And, and then it just went on to like apologize a bunch of times and whatever else. Right. And I’m just like. Okay. Object lesson, right? Like this is, you see 

Mike King

Canadian 

Duane Forrester

God, dude. I dunno. Right? Like, like I get, you know what? I can find it. I’ll ask it about maple syrup. I know this. So, so like, I’ll dig in deep on it.

But, but the point is like, like you cannot, every single word has to be vetted. Every single concept has to be vetted because the basic concepts, like if I ask about my king in relation to an article, I’m assuming there’s no other, my king in this industry that is well known as the My king I know. And therefore my reference is solid.

And it turns out that there’s like two other Mike Kings in America. One’s a real estate agent and one’s this, and, and then the system just conflates those Mike Kings with my reference in SEO. And it gives me a link to someone’s company that has nothing to do with the topic. And I’m like, geez, you know, this creates more work than it fixes.

And so that’s like the reality I tell people, it’s like you are working with a genius level 7-year-old who has access to humanity’s knowledge, but is so interested in saying yes to you that they will lie and not necessarily care about the lie, so that you, you’re constantly needing to be on top of it.

We’re not there yet. And it kind of makes me think, and it kind of makes me wonder, look, the money that’s being poured into these tools, you are building your tool on the backbone of Chachi PT that API call into their system using their logic to come up with an answer to this admittedly very narrowly focused questions.

Okay. And I think we can all agree that if you can narrowly focus in AI on narrow data, the hallucinations dropped precipitously. Like it gets very accurate and it’s really good. Okay. But are the tools that narrow? Is the training set that focused versus what the customer’s asking for? I don’t know if we’re there yet.

So my fear is that we’re seeing a lot of money thrown into these systems and we’re gonna find ourselves like kind of hitting the edges of the envelope really quick. And a lot of customers who are paying on a monthly basis or an annual basis are gonna back away when they get stung a couple times and they’re like, oh, the data told me this and I made this decision.

The decision you made was dollars, cents and resources and it was made on data. You have no way to really validate or that you just trusted and didn’t validate. So I, you know, this is, this is like a hugely problematic layer. I think that’s there. And we have a lot of people taking shortcuts right now. We see it already.

We know it. 

Danny Goodwin

Alright, I’m gonna move on because we are rapidly running outta time. I’d love if I could get kind of maybe a quick tip from each one of you. How can the people watching adapt as AI search continues to evolve? Or any new skills that we need in the next era of search. Barry, I’ll throw it to you first.

Barry Schwartz

Um, yeah, I’ll just repeat what I said. You know, branding, which is, yeah. And then, uh, I would look into all the new stuff around Ntic, experiences, agents and so forth. Play with it a lot. It’s new, but play with it. All right, Myriam. 

Myriam Jessier

I actually have more than one tip. I always have more than one tip. So number one, you don’t need to be technical.

Just disable the JavaScript and see if the important stuff is still there. I could nuance this. If you’re a technical SEO, let’s go talk. That’s fine. But if you are just trying to survive out there, disable the JavaScript and see if all the real information you need on there is on there, like the price of your product, for example.

The second tip is you’re not happy with the output you get in an LLM for your brand. Click the thumbs down button and give some feedback as to why it’s bad. I know, I know it sounds completely just, you’re wasting your time, but I believe that Chad GPT stopped. Working, like speaking in Croatian, because Croatians, unlike Americans, are not positive.

They were like, you are crap. It got so overwhelmed. I was like, I don’t wanna speak anymore. Okay. I just don’t do it anymore. And the third tip that I have is go on perplexity.ai and select, because you can do that. The Reddit, the social search, disabled the web. Just look for Reddit and check what people are saying about your brand because that stuff is getting eaten up.

Like beyond that in social. I love the fact that Biba a huge financial group. Their logo, if you ask, Hey, who is this brand? They will go pull from bird logos, volume one on Pinterest from some dude named Marco or whatever. Pay attention to social. It does some weird stuff. So go on perplexity and check it out.

Danny Goodwin

Duane, your tip or tips? 

Duane Forrester

Okay. Um, I’m gonna keep this one pretty simple and I’m, I’m hoping a lot of folks are already doing this. Um, you should be using the major, um, models in all of the systems. Um, my preference would be that you have a paid account, even at the lowest level of paid. Um, however, I’m not gonna spend your money.

You know, you, you could go in with the free ones. ’cause what you’re gonna do here, start with your query fano. Create a whole bunch of actual prompts that are related to your company, a hundred, 200. Run those daily, weekly, monthly, through the system. Track the results that you’re seeing with dates. Make a matrix for yourself of where you’re showing.

Then start applying all of this logic that Barry and Miriam have shared, and I’m pretty sure the genius that Mike is gonna add here. Start applying it to what you are seeing as the actual outputs. I am not aware of a tool that does this for you on mass. Currently. It may be out there and I simply haven’t found it yet.

That’s fine, but you have to have this view. You have to see what’s happening in these systems. You already have tools that’ll do that in traditional SEO and the regular engines. You need to create your own version and these new systems. It’s a really, really important view for your company. 

Danny Goodwin

All right, Mike, you get the final word.

Mike King

All right, I got three thoughts. One, SEOs, you need to demand more, demand more from your tools, demand more for what the work is that you’re doing. You’ve been the janitor for the web, for Google for the last 20 years. Like you deserve more. Um, and also you gotta demand more from yourselves. ’cause again, there’s so much that’s happening in this space that you need to learn the nuances of difference.

Like if you don’t understand what a vector embedding is, and you don’t really know what you’re doing in this space right now because everything operates on that. Next thing is, um, embrace omnichannel content strategy. Again, it’s not just about what’s on your website, it’s what’s across your ecosystem.

So you need to be thinking about what are we doing in Reddit? What are we doing on YouTube? What are we doing on LinkedIn Pulse? ’cause for whatever reason, you publish something there and then you’re in an AI overview, right? Like overnight. And then my last thought is really on measurement, especially if you work at the enterprise, like that is the first.

Thing that needs to be solved. I think Duane wrote a great blog post on this that you can check out on his substack. But the way I I break it down is in the three different buckets. So you have your input metrics, that’s things like, um, you know, your passage. Relevance for the queries. Queries and the, the fan out matrix, what have you.

Also bot activity. Also the classic rankings ’cause they’re all inputs there. Then you’ve got your channel metrics. Those are the sorts of things that you get from profound. And for the record, from my perspective, profound is the only tool. There’s 40 tools out there, but none of them are as good as profound and profound.

Has the lead on collecting the, um, the clickstream data as well. As far as I know, like few of those other tools have clickstream data. And the last bucket gonna your, um. Performance. And that’s not, not any different from what it’s, that you already look at. That’s like, okay, how many people come to your website from this channel?

And then what do they ultimately do? So traffic, conversions, things like that. But the main thing to know is that there’s no connective tissue between there, there is no Google search console for uh, GPT and so on. So the best you’re gonna be able to get, at least in the short term, is gonna be that clickstream stop.

So yeah, those are my three tips. 

Danny Goodwin

All right, well, this has been an absolutely amazing conversation, but we’ve got to end it there. Thanks to Mike king, Duane Forrester, Myriam Jessier, and Barry Schwartz. Uh, and as a reminder, SMX Next is coming November 18th to 19th, and of course, we’ll be continuing to dig deeper into the future of AI search and where we’re heading next.

Thanks to all of you for watching. Bye everybody