Garrett: Inside SEO Week, I am super excited. I’ve got Brian Cosgrove here. He’s the Principal, focuses like these days on analytics and SEO strategies. He’s an OG SEO. He’s at BrainDo. And basically, this is a dude who did the conference thing, hiding behind the scenes, coming back full force because his brain has been exploding with ideas. He’s all about right now kind of like looking at where we are at right now and identifying those practical takeaways. I mean, his presentation at SEO Week is going to be phenomenal. I mean, he’s worked with tons of enterprise organizations. We’re talking like GM, Starbucks, resolving these complex data challenges. And when we’re all talking about probabilistic marketing data, he’s the guy who’s figuring out where the signal is and not just getting wrapped up in the noise. It’s a mouthful. Brian, what’s going on, man? Thanks for joining me. 

Brian Cosgrove: Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, right now, we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift. I feel like a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to use some of the AI tools to kind of write better content and sort of expand on the original SEO playbook. What I want to cover is a few different areas. I want to cover three different specific areas. I want to cover kind of what’s going on with measurement right now. And I feel like that’s one area. I’m going to start there because that’s one area where I feel like a lot of people are missing a lot of information. They’re missing a lot of signal. They’ve got a lot of ambiguity about how to evaluate and create the right feedback loops to perform better in these channels. And I do feel like the problem’s only been getting worse at getting clear deterministic data. So with a lot of the ad platforms, they’ve been kind of grouping a lot of their products together where it becomes clear as mud. They are taking attribution in walled gardens that you can’t deterministically verify or prove. They are claiming greedy attribution for everything and creating these products. I feel like Performance Max is a perfect example where it could be inflating its own information through effectively arbitrage, putting themselves in the right position to get credit, mixing it together with some upper funnel pieces to give you just enough plausible deniability that it’s not just a complete waste. And they’re finding ways to monetize inventory and things that would otherwise be hard to monetize. That trend, and it’s being done under the banner of privacy, and that trend is kind of pervasive across a lot of the marketing data sets that we’re dealing with today. 

The clickstream data, though, is facing kind of its own distinct unique challenge. We do have privacy challenges. We’ve got, you know, incognito browsers. We’ve got, you know, IPs being swapped out by Apple and other services. We’ve got a lot of things that block your analytics very easily, you know, that are kind of generalizing, you know, blocking a lot of that data. And then we’ve separately got a huge rise in bots. And so what we’re seeing right now is there are friendly bots, there are bad bots, there are all kinds of actors that are adding into your data that do not behave like users, that are not useful for user experience design, that are not helpful for analysis, that you still have to go and sift through. 

And then we’ve also got issues around, you know, a lot of the LLM usage, a lot of the way that people are actually performing their decisioning or doing the research are happening in areas that are touching your website less or indirectly through bots and not directly through traffic. And it makes it very difficult to understand the true impact of a piece of content or something that you’re doing, because by the time they get to your website, they might have already made their decision to transact. And a lot of your influence and impact might have been upstream. 

So there are a lot of challenges that we’re finding right now, depending on your industry. What I’m aiming to kind of cover on this front is practical strategies for various different website types. whether you’re a publisher, whether you are in e-commerce, whether you are self-service service, other areas. I’m going to cover specifically what are some measurement strategies and what kind of signal are you looking for? And how do you approach measurement moving forward or create a general strategy around it and be prepared to have a leg up when a lot of other people’s data gets muddier and their analyses get more difficult. 

Garrett: It’s a major challenge right now that I think all the way from the C-suite down is, you know, people don’t know what to do. How does that lead into kind of what you think is going to happen in our industry, in SEO over the next like six to 12 months? What does that look like? 

Brian: I think what we’re going to see is we’re going to continue to experience challenges in traffic. You’re doing things well, but traffic is challenged. We’re going to, you know, this concept of rankings is already muddy. Personalization already made it difficult a while back. But now there are, you know, it’s trying to introduce variability. It’s trying to do a lot of other things. But ultimately, the AI Overview pieces are taking over the experience. And I don’t expect that to slow down. I expect that to increase. What I think is happening is that some people will almost say SEO is dead; they’ll pull out. And those folks are going to run into a challenge where these LLMs and AI Overview type things are still running agentic web searches using web SEO-style algorithms in the background, and that’s what’s bringing your content or your products or services to the forefront. So I do think that there’s a big risk as people kind of approach that area – that you might actually come out ahead because some of your competition’s discounting the value of the channel or underinvesting. 

On the other side, I think that being able to track your actual ability to show up in LLMs is going to be a major differentiator. Your ability to educate and share with the C-suite, “hey, look, when you used to look for us in this kind of line of inquiry, this is how we used to not show up, or we used to show up like this.” That’s visibility. But now we show up like, you know, the After should be a clear recommendation, an endorsement, a reason for someone to read that and want to come to your website, or transact with you. And I think when we’re able to show that to executive levels, it’s the accountability they need to see when the old data sources don’t work anymore or don’t work like they used to. 

Garrett: It makes a ton of sense. And the way you laid out, we have to get that clarity. How are you actually thinking about the problems or questions of the agentic world? Like, play this thought experiment out a little bit without giving out too much away about your presentation, but how are you thinking about that in your head? 

Brian:  Yeah so…I don’t-where do I begin, um, there’s a shift in thinking that I, that I’d like to challenge people to go through. If the old paradigm was, I want to be relevant for a particular topic that might be related to my audience, and I wanted to show up as one of the most relevant sources. And then they would click through and they’d experience my whole website. And they would potentially, you know, transact with me. And I’m looking at my clicks as my primary measure of success. You know, I would want to write articles that ensure that I’m covering all of the topics peripherally related to me. I’m doing so well with the right polish and sending the right signals that I am the most relevant. That’s what I want it to do. 

Now, when you realize that going to a website isn’t the answer to every question, when you realize that showing links isn’t really following that line of inquiry, that people are using full sentences, full paragraphs, voice, and other channels and not keywords, it changes the paradigm of what it means to be able to win the attention, win ultimately the endorsement and the business. And, you know, without getting too far into it, we’re going to explore different ways to not have the best answer that would rank as a link, but to be the answer. 

Garrett: Whoa. It’s really interesting. And I guess, do you feel like, assuming we move away from links, which no SEO wants to hear, a marketer wants to hear, less traffic, less clicks or whatever, but people are still using these LLMs, AI search, to to discover and to find things. Do you think this will still be a valuable channel that we’ll spend time on? Or do you think that we’re better off spending our efforts elsewhere? 

Brian: I think it will be at least as valuable, if not more so. I think that how we approach it and what we prioritize will shift. 

Garrett: Okay.

Brian: And we are going to, and our techniques are going to change, too. We are going to need to think through how not just humans, but agents will interact with our business. And we are going to need to win both audiences, the humans and the agents. And I’m going to get into specific examples of what that looks like today in 2026. And it’s a good time to invest and learn about this and start the line of thinking about this and to spin up your program. Because anytime you remove friction, just like we always did in user experience, you get better conversion. And that’s going to have new definition and we’re going to look at it a bit differently. The kind of the conclusion piece of my presentation is related to some real world examples of where we are setting a company up to have a leg up against the best user experience, against the other strategies that have worked to date. And I’m really excited to share that because I think it will be distinctly different from a lot of the other content at that conference. 

Garrett: I can’t wait because it is such a contrarian take and it feels topical right now, as we were talking a little before the interview, of this idea of producing, almost, these paths for two different audiences, as you’re mentioning, the person versus the agent. And whether that is the right decision, a risky decision, are there, you know, how you need to kind of work through that thought process of investing in how are you creating or presenting content for the appropriate person without necessarily cannibalizing? I’m hoping that your presentation answers those questions. 

Brian: It does. It does. And it will. And I think when people think through when mobile websites became a thing and how big of a shift that was. And yes, there was some time that you could go through where you were slowly getting your websites mobile-enabled. And we went from, you know, a case where we were trying to retrofit a mobile version of the websites, we were trying to make the mobile-enabled to progressive enhancement where we focused on being mobile first. And, you know, the stats and the actual user behavior will dictate the market opportunity for these items. And so part of what I’d like people to do is to start to look at the actual usage statistics and how they’re shifting over time, and what the projections are looking like there because it’ll show you that some of the shifts that we’re going to be addressing, they’re not, are they going to happen? This isn’t a flash in the pan kind of a, you know, fad. This isn’t the metaverse. This isn’t, you know, things that, right? This isn’t that. This is more of a transition shift like the mobile web was. This is more of a transition shift even when people were primarily all offline and going into online in the dot-com bubble. 

What we’re seeing right now is we’re seeing behavior shift and we’re seeing some of the lag and the inertia happen there, but this is building momentum. And so what I am hoping is that people won’t look at it as controversial; they’ll look at it ultimately as inevitable. And then they’re going to use guided benchmarks to say, but how important is it and how much do I invest in this direction? Do I want to, do I want to lead early or do I want to wait until some things are proven? And, you know, the right answer could be different depending on your business model. What I think is more important is that you’re aware and that you’re tracking kind of that this is, these are real things. They are real opportunities. And that some people are going to get a headstart and, and get ahead by jumping into it a little bit sooner than others. 

Garrett: Dude, and this is why people come to SEO eek because, well, you know, there are presentations like yours and our whole lineup of, like, the stuff that you guys are talking about, that we’re talking about is happening today, but it’s also really a responsible kind of look into what is going to happen next. Whether we’re right or wrong, your whole thing is like, we need to think about this differently. We need to open our mind. Brian, I got to ask you, man, like, what are you excited about for SEO Week? 

Brian: I mean, there’s so many great speakers. It’s, you know, when you read about last year and how epic it was, um, I think it’s it’s it’s fun it’s it’s, it’s an industry event that is a bit more fun, a bit more hip, it’s in New York, it’s, it’s an exciting kind of energy in the room. I’m looking forward to just being part of that, I’m looking forward to meeting with the attendees, I’m looking to, looking forward to meeting with the other people speaking, I’m looking forward to seeing all of the different talks, there are connections between what I’m going to be sharing and what other people are doing, you know, and I’m going to point those out, you know, reserving some space to point those out in my talk to do some tie-ins with some of what the other speakers are going to be covering, because I do think that people that come here are really going to be best positioned to elevate their program and sort of evolve their program to be competitive at the next, you know, this next, next year. 

Garrett: I can’t wait, man. You know, if someone wants to find you online before they even come to SEO Week, where’s the best place to find you? 

Brian: I would say, I mean, certainly LinkedIn and we do have a podcast called Marketing Roundtable on YouTube, but also you can just, you know, come in and check us out at brain.do you know, but I am, I am very much looking forward to you know, to meeting, to meeting with all the attendees. 

Garrett: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today, Brian. This has been awesome, dude. 

Brian: All right. Thank you, Garrett. 

Garrett: Yeah. If you haven’t, you guys, if you haven’t already bought your tickets, April 27th to April 30th in New York City, four days. It’s going to be nonstop SEO Week. So excited. I’d better see you there. Catch you.