Garrett Sussman: Inside SEO Week – you know you are excited, I am so excited, this dude – this, man, oh my good, a few years ago we we met in person at MOZcon and i am so excited for Day 2 on the Psychology track. I’m joined by Azeem Ahmad, he is the Strategy Director at Reflect Digital; they’re doing some really cool stuff. I mean, it scratches my psychology itch. The man’s like, he’s an award-winning digital marketer, international keynote speaker. He cleared his schedule for SEO Week. And oh my God, he’s worked with multi-million pound budgets. He joined Google’s AI Search Initiative video series in 25. He actually delivered a keynote in Disney for Disney. What? He’s also got a podcast, Azeem Digital Asks. I was on it back in the day. I love what this dude touches. It’s gold. And he’s a judge. He’s not judging us right now, but he is the global US and European Search Awards judge. Azeem, what is up? How are you doing, man?

Azeem Ahmad: Oh, that is an absolutely wonderful introduction. Thank you so much. I’m very, very well. How are you? 

Garrett: I’m fantastic. I’m excited now because to use the UK phrasing, I’m talking to a legend right now. You’re legendary. But seriously. Okay, so there’s so much to talk about. I’m really hyped for your specific presentation. But let’s start at the beginning. What’s top of mind for you with AI Search right now? 

Azeem: So I will absolutely answer your question, but I haven’t told you that I’m going to do this. I know we’ve only got a short amount of time. You’re going to get your flowers while we’re on this recording, man. You do some absolutely brilliant work. Every single time I see something that you put out – and like you said for me I think it’s more true for you – whatever you touch goes to gold and I’m very glad that we’ve got the chance to to meet in person which was like forever ago I’m very glad that we get the chance to meet in person again if you haven’t met Garrett or looked at anything that he’s done or follow him hit pause on this podcast now and go and check out his stuff because genuinely one of the nicest guys in the industry and like one of my bucket list things for SEO Week is obviously to be there but very close second is just give this guy a massive hug man, because I love him to bits and I can’t wait to see you and hang out and you deserve your flowers so this is me giving them to you thank you so much!

Anyway, talk about search – AI search – so excuse me, getting over a bit of a cold at the moment because this is happening in the UK. We just need to look at a piece of bad weather and we get ill. Right. Top of mind for me at the moment, there is lots, but I’m conscious of time. I think one of the things that I mentioned on LinkedIn very recently was I’ve kind of phrased it as like the attribution crisis. A lot of marketers that I speak to over here in the UK still are chasing this sort of holy grail of trying to get attribution nailed. And when I’m deliberately trying to stay away from the phrase AI because everybody will talk about it, but it can’t be avoided, right? Things are top of mind for me. And like, you know, when an AI will will summarize a content from multiple sources, we do a lot of psychology and human behavioral work at Reflect Digital. Which brand will get that mental attribution? And then things like I’ve got so many things to talk about, literally you’ll have to stop me. Behavioral science will tell us that things like primacy or recency effects matter but when you’re looking at ai generated responses there there might be neither. 

One of the things we talk a lot about as well is cognitive availability. So one of the things I said to you before we started recording was um at the end of the day the consumer of your product service or offering is still a human at the end of the day. How your product will arrive in their hands or how they will use your product, it’s obviously a little bit different. Traditionally or in the past when people make purchase or go on a purchase journey, whether it’s short or long, there’s a lot of cognitive availability there. What we don’t have now is sight or oversight of what’s happening when it comes to the, let’s say, mental models that AI systems are building. You’re either there or you’re not. And an actual example would be when we talk about agents or agentic shopping, you probably won’t even know that an agent has moved on from your website until it’s too late. And then you can’t act upon that. Whereas in the past, as a conscious consumer who’s doing the purchase, doing themselves as a human, you know that mentally and more importantly, cognitively, you’ve got that availability to consider brand A versus brand B. Fundamentally that whole journey and that whole process has changed so there’s a lot about attribution in there, um genuinely I could just kind of talk you talk your head off I think the one thing that I’ll leave you with – I did a conference very recently and one of the things that I said I shared the the stage with Aleyda and people were talking about, you know, what’s one thing that I can do this year, the one thing that I said was consider this – I don’t think, and I’d love for somebody to disagree and can constructively challenge me, I don’t think anymore that your brand is what you tell the world your brand is. It’s now what an LLM will summarize your brand to be. So it’s more important that you try and influence the narrative rather than you influence what you’re telling the world through your website, for example. Like Azeem’s Cars could be the greatest car dealership in the world. But if other people don’t think the same about Azeem’s Cars, then Azeem’s Cars are going to have a problem. So in short, that’s where I’m at. 

Garrett: And to that point, I’m with you 100% as people completely need to reframe how search behavior is changing. It’s changing rapidly. It’s coming from all different channels. But to your point, the way it’s kind of being generated and synthesized in AI search is something that you have to get ahead of. What’s your perspective on where SEO is heading like this year? 

Azeem: Again, I could talk to you about this stuff…I think the obvious thing that is common across many people who are fortunate to speak in this space is although Google is still dominant and still king, let’s say. Search isn’t just no, it’s no longer just like Google. You’re talking things like obviously all the AI tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, blah, blah, blah, delete as appropriate. You’ve also got places, spaces and services like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and everything else. In fact, just recently, when I was at a conference, I was speaking to a brand who have very heavily invested in Google. And I said, okay, well, what does your customer journey look like? A little bit of noise. And I was like, okay, how many touch points will a typical customer journey have? Right, they don’t know. How much of your budget is being spent on Google? Oh, it’s pretty much everything. Right, okay. How often does a video come up in your journey? And I’m asking these questions deliberately designed to try and take them away from thinking purely about Google. So although Google is still dominant, it’s not the be-all and end-all. 

One thing that I’ve said, I think the constant line that I’ve shared in almost every conference talk that I’ve done across the UK, US and Europe is looking at a multi-channel funnel. Let’s say what we used to get in old Universal Analytics (rest in peace!) we missed that. You can still get something similar in GA4. But looking at a customer journey from the bottom up and not the top down where there are let’s say 15 different paths it could be something like direct three times organic social video just take that to a brand and say if you took out social media if you took out YouTube, how confident are you that the rest of that journey is going to carry on? And then you just see sort of plain faces, mouth open, and people then realize, like, look, search is no longer just one place – and to answer your especially in a roundabout way: 

Every platform that we talk about in terms of, let’s say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, they’ve all got different behavioral patterns. And I’m not going to give too much of a spoiler away, but we’ve done a lot of work on this at Reflect. And we’ve narrowed it down into the four main drivers of search behavior, which are all totally different to one another. And there are a lot of behavioral science elements in them. I think a very obvious one that I’m happy to share with now because I think it’s obvious in everybody’s mind is that kind of paradox of choice. So an example that I always say is imagine you go to the supermarket tonight and you want a bottle of wine with your dinner. You’re presented with hundreds and you’re just like… But if you went into the supermarket and you knew that you were going to have like a seafood dish and there was a section of the supermarket that had wine pairs very well with seafood that’s only A or B, you’re going to pick either one of those. And there’s lots like that. I’ve deliberately chosen the more obvious one to kind of bring that to the forefront of people’s minds. But there are absolutely loads. 

And the last thing that I’ll say to kind of, I’m trying to differentiate myself in terms of what people are going to be talking about. I don’t want to give, I don’t want my answers to fall into the sea of sameness: Quality. Quality can be like a differentiator. We know that AI can just turn out, I’m not going to swear, but a lot of garbage, basically. And I’ve seen people take mega shortcuts in doing this, right? When we talk about humans and human behaviors, what I’m about to say is not groundbreaking or new, but people put it to the back of their minds. If you think of yourself as a consumer, right, people recognize authenticity. I know when a brand or a product or a service that I’m interested in has genuinely written this product from a human perspective. For example, you can probably see behind me there’s a treadmill. I spent ages researching it. I spent ages going onto websites and to YouTube. All I wanted to do was find another human that wasn’t from the brand that had a good experience with the treadmill. I specifically look for human to human interaction. People sense that. We talk about EEAT and people, you know, preach its values and extol it until the cows come home. But then from what I’ve seen, it kind of gets left behind, right? We know Google rewards genuine expertise, trust and whatnot. But boil it down to a specific human level. Humans recognize authenticity. People seek people. Right. If you are one of those people that are still churning out AI, what we call it, slop, garbage or whatever, you’re probably doing more harm than good. It might take you five minutes, but it could cost you five sales. So, less of that, more authenticity. That’s where I think SEO is heading this year. I might be wrong, but I predicted in November 25 that by Q1, we’d have agentic shopping. I literally didn’t think that in the second week of January, everyone would be like, we’re on it. But yeah, I was happy to be right on that front for sure. 

Garrett: I’m with you 100%. It’s so fascinating because to your point, the way that people do research, it’s so hard to give these blanket statements anymore. Because the way that someone searches for a car, a doctor, a toothbrush, or just information like a book to read or a new newsletter or influencer to follow, it’s like every different path is is so different in – and people are different, the way that they research and when they want to see reviews or they want to see critics or they just want to talk to friends this is your kind of core wheelhouse. How does kind of behavioral economics and behavioral science shape show up in your thinking as a strategist?

Azeem: So for me – um I’ve said this to every question you’ve asked! For me, I think what what sets me apart from others, um, and people like me apart is I don’t – let’s talk about intent. I don’t class that as let’s say the the old way of is this informational is it navigational, is it transactional. I look at things like where we can track it – what’s the emotional state, what kind of biases are in play, what’s active, what kind of cognitive load are they under? 

So for example to make this like more more real someone who will search best CRM software at 9 p.m on a Friday, they’re in a much different psychological state than someone searching the same thing at 9 a.m on a Tuesday morning. And those are the kind of things that you can take into account when you’re thinking about things like the format of your content, where it goes, the tone, the length, the channel that it goes on. There’s loads of other little pieces that kind of play off in terms of friction. I’ve wrote a lot about removing frictions only when I’ve talked about AI and agentic AI shopping and every kind of piece of where there’s friction, it can kind of kill, kill the journey. That’s not new – everybody talks about that – but when I look at a site strategically or when I look at a brand and their efforts strategically, I think, right, what kind of cognitive effort is required here, what’s going to cause a person to hesitate, what will trigger doubt. And I’ll look at things like – if I’m applying this through an SEO lens, I’ll look at things like what’s the average scroll depth on a page, how much of this content are people reading, why are people leaving at 46% of the page, what are they missing in the other half of the page that they’re not looking about? 

For me, if we’re speaking exclusively about SEO, it’s not just about getting traffic anymore; it’s for me – where I try and apply that behavioral lens is trying to apply or not apply trying to design um an experience that aligns with natural decision making patterns. Nobody, absolutely nobody – if you want a sound clip, here it is, right – absolutely nobody logs on to Google and thinks, ”I’m going to make an informational search today.” Absolutely not, right? Nobody does that. I worked with a brand um – and I studied this – who, who sold beauty products, right, and it was very binary. It was sort of men, women, um and then it was filtered out into other different facets like age and everything else. I said, “you’ve got all the gold here but why aren’t you filtering it into specific stages of people’s lives? A lot of your products for example are designed for new mothers, right – I’m not a new mother, I never will be, but I’ve spoken to enough new mothers to understand what their needs motivations and drivers are the amount of friction that a new mother would have to go through to go on the website filtered by women age for babies, etc. etc., why not just have one section where they can click ‘Motherhood,’ all the products are there and then they’re on – the mental load to do that is significantly lowered and you’re more likely to make a conversions.” So that’s where the where the gold is and I’ll be sharing a little bit more of that during SEO Week I’m not going to give you all the gold.

Garrett: I was going to say that is the perfect tease for what you’re actually going to be talking about – like these frameworks, like the what to do’s. Just to kind of pull it all together in the end, give me one little tidbit about anything else people can be excited about for your talk. And why are you excited about SEO Week? Like, what are you looking forward to? 

Azeem: What am I looking forward to? From what I know, because if you’re watching this, the team at iPullRank are very guarded about who’s going to be there, what’s going to happen. It’s like a super, super top secret. And I’m all in. I don’t know if I can say or if I can’t say but the invite that I got from Mike was like proper Mission: Impossible Levels 

Garrett: Tell what happened on the invite! 

Azeem: Okay, cool. So I got asked for my postal address. Great, fine, fast forward I get this card in the post. And it’s like, very formal QR code, I scan it and then up pops Like a hologram version of Mike. And it’s like, talking about you know, SEO Week version one was great – and I know it was because I watched it through super lens of FOMO having not been there – we want to invite you to SEO Week version two – it’s going to be bigger, it’s going to be bolder, it’s going to be better, we’re on a mission to revolutionize like what’s going to happen in the world of search and you’re going to get a front row seat to make this happen. You need to bring the latest and best insights – and by the way this message is going self-destruct in five seconds. I was like whoa! I was like this is proper, like, you know, I like Mission: Impossible anyway, I was like, you know, what, for two seconds I felt like Ethan Hunt! 

Yeah, what am I excited about, I’m excited about everything that I don’t know is coming because if SEO Week um 2025 was anything to go by, 2026 is going to be incredible. And as I mentioned to go after recording, I’m not going to give too much away but I’m planning my biggest and best talk that I’ve ever, ever done. And for the audience who want a little bit of a sneak preview of what I’m going to be, talking about what I’m going to be covering, a lot of it will be around that behavioral science angle, the human behavior lens. I think everybody will be talking about AI, which is fine. But for me, like I said, your end consumer, the one who’s going to hold your product in their hand or use their service when they get that is going to be human. So that whole human side of it, we’ll be talking about things like cognitive biases, availability heuristics. I will be talking lots about trust because we’ve done a lot – by the time SEO Week rolls around, we have done over a year’s worth of work speaking to actual consumers in the industry about trust because I don’t think that’s spoken about enough. Everybody raves about AI and how great it is. Not many people talk about how much it’s trusted. So we’ll talk about how to build trust where certain demographics, for example, the older ones, will have a distrust of AI naturally. God, what else? 

Behavioral segmentation beyond demographics. Frameworks to persuade humans – like persuasion content frameworks throughout it. The four main drivers of search impact. God, I’m planning on doing something live experiment, which, if the team let me do it, amazing. Basically, I’m doing their work for them now. You need to get a ticket yesterday, right? And if you don’t get a ticket yesterday, once you finish this recording, you need to get a ticket to SEO Week because it is going to be mega. And that’s from the little that I know already. Be there because I regret missing out in 2025. I am going to, I said to Garrett after recording, every single second of every day, I’m going to be there like tuned in. There you go. Don’t miss it. Don’t miss it. 

Garrett: If you already want to get started, where do people find you online if they already want to be? And especially if you’re in the UK and traveling over and you want to connect with Azeem, hit him up. How can they get in touch? 

Azeem: I’m @AzeemDigital on most platforms. You can search for me on LinkedIn. Admittedly, I’ve not touched my own website in a while, but if you Google, “how can I contact Azeem,” I should be top. And if not, you can help me in an experiment because there’s a jeweler in London with the same business name as my actual name, so any clicks will help me outrank them. But yeah, if you want to find me, you can find me. AzeemDigital everywhere. And Azeem Ahmed on LinkedIn. 

Garrett: There you go. If you want to be a guinea pig in an experiment, and who doesn’t, get your SEO Week ticket because it’s going to be so good. Azeem, thanks for joining me today. So glad to have you on. I can’t wait to see you in April. 

Azeem: Yeah, I can’t wait. 

Garrett: Garrett, SEO Week, 27th to the 30th in April in New York City. Get your tickets. It’s going to be amazing. We’ll see you then. Peace.