Garrett Sussman: I am joined by none other than Michael King. He’s the Founder and Chief Relevance Engineer of iPullRank. He put this whole conference together. He had a vision. And last year, we executed. And once we knew, and we knew all along that this was going to be big, we’re going even bigger this year. So pulling out all the stops. You can’t even handle what’s about to come your way. Mike, what is going on, man? How you doing?

Mike King: I am fantastic and, you know, eagerly awaiting SEO Week. 

Garrett: It’s nuts because we are less than a couple months out. Who knows what even is going to happen in our industry between now and then. I almost feel bad for any SEOs who are putting together their decks because shit’s going to change. Tell me, for you right now in this moment, what is top of mind when it comes to AI search? 

Mike: For me, I think that we are heading very fast in the hyper-personalization realm. And when we talk about AI search, people talk about it as though there’s a true distinction between classic search and AI search. All search is AI search. And it’s actually been that way for a while. So my expectation is that they’re going to bring that hyper-personalization to classic search as well. And the idea of there being a single SERP that everyone sees is going to evaporate. 

Garrett: That’s wild. What are the implications? I mean, we’ve already had many discussions, you and I, about the metrics we need to focus on and that rankings still matter. How is the hyper-personalization of classic search going to impact the way you should think about rankings? 

Mike: So it’s going to make things way more persona-driven, which we have been for since iPullRank existed, in fact, before that. But I don’t think people are ready to have to think about that level of dimensionality to their content. They’re going to want to continue to be like, well, I have my one piece of content that’s for everybody. And think about like, how do we make a version of this for a very specific audience? Otherwise, you’re just not going to be eligible for those opportunities and ranking. 

Garrett: Okay. So let’s get spicy. Where next like six to 12 months of SEO, like what do you think is going to either break people’s brains is going to be obvious or just like, what is the direction that things are going to go in the immediate future? 

Mike: Frankly, I don’t care about SEO. I care about search. SEO has been so behind the curve on technology for so long. And there’s so many arguments that people want to have just so they can hear themselves talk and look at the words that they type on the internet. And I don’t have time for that. Like I live in the real world where things are changing fast and dramatically. And, you know, AI is going to upset so many things – so many of these tools, whether it’s Claude Cowork or whatever it is, there’s so many different things that are coming out that are all about automating the minutia that people spend so much time on. SEO is fighting against that. Like, oh, you can’t automate SEO? Yes, you can. Most of what we do is the equivalent of what’s called an ETL process, so extract, transform, load. Like you are literally scraping data, you are transforming it into a sheet, and then you’re loading it into a PowerPoint to talk to people about what to do. That can be automated, and it will. 

And even a lot of the actual execution, when we’re talking about, you know, optimizations and things like that, people do optimizations in very qualitative ways. These are actually very quantitative things that machines are going to be better at. So I think realistically, this industry is going to get hit so hard. And so many of these people are going to get, you know, they’re just they’re just not going to have a place to play anymore. And so rather than running from that, I’m thinking like, how do we embrace that? How do we get ahead of that? How do we identify the value that we can continue to have in that world, rather than acting like that world isn’t coming for us? 

Garrett: Okay, and so you’re jumping right into these problems or questions that you’re most focused on in your work. How are you addressing it? Like, what are you doing right now to figure this stuff out? 

Mike: Yeah, I mean, it’s what I’ve always done, right? Like lots of research and lots of like building things and playing with them until I understand how it works and where the opportunities lie. Like where I’ve been spending most of my time lately has been building software, you know, like building out better versions of the things that we’ve been doing so that we can set ourselves up for automation and scale. 

And also, as Google and Anthropic, OpenAI, announced these new technologies in their research, I’m like, cool, how do we use that? There’s a library that Google released called LangExtract, which really speaks to how are they actually extracting this information from the web? Okay, well, we need to be using that. Like we need to be doing things in the way that the platforms we’re trying to optimize for are doing them rather than whatever it is that SEO has been doing for the last like 15 years that doesn’t really align with that. 

Garrett: I love it. And I mean, that’s that’s at the heart of the whole concept of Relevance Engineering is like the science behind it is taking tech, taking tools, taking hypotheses, experimenting, testing, seeing what works, pivoting for what doesn’t. And it all kind of leads into, okay, give us a tease. I know you’re not going to blow everything, but give us a tease on what attendees might hear about at your SEO Week keynote presentation. 

Mike: Yeah. So the last few years, I’ve been complaining about what I was just complaining about. The fact that the SEO space is not ready for this stuff. And one of the biggest reasons for that is that our software is so behind. Like there are so many gaps in what it is that those platforms are doing and what we do in the SEO space. And so I decided I’m going to stop complaining about that. I’m going to actually give you guys open source equivalents of what you need to close those gaps with the thinking that, you know, hopefully more of our platforms will adopt those things. And if they don’t, well, then everyone is now armed with the capability of doing it themselves. 

Garrett: God, I’m so hyped. I just can’t wait. You get excited about, to your point of what we’re capable of now as these tools advance, the coding tools. Take us back to last year. What were your most salient memories of the inaugural SEO Week event? 

Mike: So many. Obviously, the concert was crazy. So many of the talks. I mean, I didn’t see a bad talk, right? Like I expected that there would at least be one. There was not a single bad talk at our conference. In fact, everyone came with very actionable things. Yeah, I mean, you know, so many people blew me away. And the way our team came together to put it on, everything that, you know, the CKE team did to really support us and help us get it to the next level. I mean, I’m just left with this feeling of like it being greater than the sum of its parts. You know what I mean? Like there was so much, so many moments that just felt so good and like went over my expectations. And then it was also cool that my kids came or at least Zora came to watch me speak. Glory was not interested. And yeah, that’s it. 

Garrett: It’s nuts because obviously we are going to go bigger this year, but I was talking with Christian Ward, who’s coming up on an upcoming episode of this podcast, and he was there last year and he said it felt like this moment in time between the inauguration of the conference, but also what was going on in our industry. Like this was a few months before Google I/O, which dropped a lot of new stuff that was coming and every talk was leading to it. Did you get that sense? Did you get that sense that like our industry will never feel like what we what we felt at that that precise moment of SEO Week? 

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think if you look around after SEO Week, like everything that you heard at other shows started at SEO Week. And, you know, you’re right. Like it was a very specific point in time where there’s a lot of confusion, like not knowing what to do next. And a lot of clarity came out of our show. So I really appreciated that. And, you know, with this year, I think we’re at the point where it’s like, hey, enough with the conjecture, enough with like, hey, here’s the theory. Here’s what I think. Where’s your data? Where’s your case studies? Like, what did you do in the last year that can truly move this stuff forward? And that’s what I’m excited to see this year. 

Garrett: So there you go. I mean, if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, you have no excuse. The prices are only going to go up at this point. It is the end of April, 27th to the 30th. It’s going to be amazing. We have 39 incredible speakers. I can’t wait to be there. If you need support and how to get there, we have a blog on the seoweek.org that has various email templates that you can send to your boss. And if you are the CEO or CMO of your team and you’re wondering what to do next, you should send your whole team. So, Mike, give us your last kind of pitch of why do you think people should come to SEO Week this year? 

Mike: I don’t have to pitch you on anything. You know who I am. You know what I do. You know how we have led this thing for years now. So if you want it from the source, that’s where you go. And if you don’t, well, your competitors are going. So see you in the SERPs and the chats. 

Garrett: There you go we’ll see you at SEO Week 2026 New York City end of April, sign off