You Are Bigger than SEO Featuring Rand Fishkin

Rand: A lot of things have stayed quite similar in 2025 vs. the past 5 years: Google’s the dominant player with ~90%+ market share. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Brave, and the AI search engines continue to be small competitors. It really only pays to go after them if your audience/field is using them heavily (e.g. lots of privacy-focused searchers use DuckDuckGo, many B2B professionals use ChatGPT/Perplexity, etc.).

 

The big differences: Google’s ranking system is mostly public. That’s a refreshing change from the prior 25 years. Now instead of arguing whether Google uses something, at least marketers can argue about how much its weighted. Additionally, the share of searches answered without a click keeps rising. AI Overviews obviously accelerated that. I think at long last, more marketers (and their execs, teams, and clients) are recognizing that zero-click marketing and zero-click content has to be on the table; it can’t just be about traffic anymore.

 

Garrett: Can you give us a sneak peek at your upcoming topic for SEO Week? What’s most important to you right now, or any area within SEO, content, or AI you’re passionate about?

 

Rand: I’m talking about the end of traffic as the KPI for digital marketers, and how/why professionals who’ve focused on that in the past need to change their strategic north star or be left behind by those who do. I also believe it’s our responsibility – YOUR responsibility – to have the hard conversation with your boss/team/client/execs to get them on board with how the world works. Not all those conversations will be successful, but just as it’s professional negligence in medicine not to tell a patient about a new treatment that might help them, it’s negligent not to inform the people you work with that marketing’s opportunities have changed.

 

Garrett: What’s one actionable tip for our audience?

 

Rand: Stop pitching for links. Start asking for coverage (and doing things that deserve/earn coverage). Not only is it far easier to get a brand mention with press, blogs, websites, and other sources of influence than it is to request a link, it’s also likely to be more influential long term (since LLMs don’t care much about links and instead look at the proximity of text to other text).

 

Garrett: What’s your perspective on what’s next for search, whether it’s about Google, AI, Brands, or the broader search ecosystem?

 

Rand: Unlike some prognosticators, I don’t see Google dying or shrinking or changing market share more than +/-5% in the next decade. They’ve got a powerful lock on behavior, an incredible war chest, an overpowering ecosystem, and fairly strong political leverage with the only government that might have held them to account (the US). If I had to guess, I’d say that AI makes it into Google’s results the same way self-preferencing entries like Google Maps, Hotels, Flights, Finance, Weather, Definitions, etc. did over the prior 15 years. If Google sees that their metrics go up when AI powers results, they’ll keep using it, keep taking away traffic, and the opportunities in search will be primarily through getting your brand mentioned by the answers rather than your link posted in the top few results.

 

Garrett: Thank you for answering these questions for us today! For anyone who hasn’t gotten your tickets and wants to learn from Rand, make sure to get your ticket for SEO Week, end of April in New York. It’s going to be a great event.