Garrett Sussman: All right, Inside SEO Week. I can’t believe that it’s almost here. And we got a vet. We got an SEO Week vet. We got a lot of new folks, but we had to bring back Brie. Brie Anderson is the owner of Beast Analytics. She, it’s so, right before this, it was so critical because we’re talking about the major issue that so many SEOs and AI search marketers are having is like, how do you track this stuff. Like, how do you, what are the analytics of AI search? And while that’s not necessarily like Brie’s specific focus, you can’t help but be immersed in that need to provide some sort of attribution. So Brie, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? What’s going on in your world? 

Brie Anderson: Super stoked to be here always. And yeah, I cannot believe like it’s almost the middle of April and SEO Week is just around the corner. I should really probably like book my ticket and stuff. It’s a good idea. No, but, been super busy. Lots changing in the industry always. But it’s all fun stuff. I love figuring it all out. 

Garrett: Okay. So before we even dive into like your perspective on AI search, take me back to last year. You were at SEO Week. It was our first year. You’ve done a bunch of SEO conferences. What was, like, one of your favorite memories of that experience? What was it like for you being there? 

Brie: Oh, my gosh. Honestly, like truly speaking, I was blown away by the content. I mean, Mike said, I’m bringing the best of the best. These people, what we’re going to be doing, this is tactics. This is strategy. This is hard, like hardcore stuff. We’re not doing theory. We’re doing get shit done and it was just that it was incredible I haven’t been to a conference like that in a long time I’ll say I so to me that was that was a cool thing and then just the caliber of the audience as well. I mean, you’re sitting there next to the people that do SEO for Bose and the people that do SEO for L’Oreal, I mean the, the caliber of the audience is, well, I mean, you were just surrounded by smart people. So that was pretty cool. 

Garrett: Dude, I love it. Cause you leaned in. I mean, I was like reaching out to you for your, your motion graphics background. You’re like, I need, I need a concert rockstar crowd. And then like you delivered on stage. A lot has changed since last year. How are you thinking about kind of like AI search right now in the context of like analytics? Like what’s top of mind for you? 

Brie: I got to tell you, I am, and this will be in my talk, this is kind of like the intro of the talk, is what I’m most interested in right now is how do we get people to talk about after the click? Showing up in a cite, like being cited is great in an LLM, but what happens after they click? What’s happening on your site? How do we use that information to inform our strategies moving forward? Those are kind of the things that I’m thinking about just from like a working with data standpoint. And then the other side of that coin is like, how do we actually know when traffic is coming from those places? Because a lot of it does get, you know, thrown into direct or hidden a little bit. So how do we uncover some of that traffic as well? But really for me so far, it’s been, what are we doing to inform the strategies? Because that’s what people are focused on. And then also, is it worth having a strategy for right now? Everyone’s leaning in because it’s new, but like, is it right for everyone? I don’t know. 

Garrett: Do you have an opinion? Where do you think this goes over the next like six months with SEO and AI? Like, where do you think we’re like, where are we going with this? 

Brie: I think as with any marketing, I think we’ve seen this happen a lot. Like it evolves, right? Like how people interact with media involves, or evolves. And I think that’s what we’re seeing with search engines right now, like how people interact with search engines. But this has been true for the last decade. We’ve been watching it happen slowly but surely with knowledge panels and people also ask and, you know, like they took over more and more of the SERP. And now it’s like, well, what does this mean for our job? The reality of it is, though, you know, so many of our skills are useful outside of just like – the goal should have never been, let’s optimize for these bots, these robots. The goal should have always been, let’s optimize for our customers, so that they’re finding us at the right time and we’re giving them the information that they need in a way that makes the most sense so that when they’re ready to take the next step, they know that they can trust us as a source, or they know that they can trust us as a provider or whatever. 

So I think what’s going to happen is, you know, last year, I felt like we had an identity crisis a little bit in the room. This year, I feel like, you know, over the next six months, we’re going to see people stepping into it. I think the biggest shift is going to be to stop thinking of SEO and GEO or whatever you want to call it as different things and realizing that this whole time we were optimizing with search engines in mind, but it wasn’t for search engines specifically, if that makes sense, that all of this comes together in a bigger picture of optimizing for users.

Garrett: Do you think that changes how you think about analytics and analysis of these different channels or do you think that in a way it becomes simplified by being more complex? I don’t, yeah…

Brie: Oh yeah yeah, it is like when you look at it are we getting, um, I don’t know, I think it’s what I’ve been focusing on with people too because, you know, it’s like are we going to invest in traditional SEO, are we going to invest in, in, this do we need to find a new team, whatever, I, I think those conversations are a bit…I still think it’s a bit early to be leaning into those conversations as heavy – heavily as we are, um, especially when like you know we’re looking at people making big swings and it’s like realistically – LLMs make up for, I mean, I think, I, the biggest, like, chunk of traffic I’ve seen for a client is like maybe 12% of their traffic. Like, you know, it’s not um not things to like scoff at but it’s like is it is this where we we need to be putting all of our efforts? 

Anyways, all that to say um I’ve been actually thinking about, like, how do you prove your, the value of your work in general, outside of this silo that you’ve been put in. Right how, do you prove the value of your work? So like, if you, I mean, because also now we have tools that we never had, if you vibe coded a calculator and, and put it on the site, how do we prove that that actually brought value to your, to your boss, right? Or if you got investment to uh redesign the website or whatever that is, how do we track the design changes made to show that this investment brought in x, right? Like in theory, again these were all things that we should have been thinking about all along but hindsight’s 2020. Um, but I think getting people, what I’m, what I’m trying to do more and more is getting people to think about all of their individual contributions and how they can track those things and tie them back to the value because it’s going to be harder. I mean we talked about this briefly before we started recording, it’s going to be harder to attribute to specific channels. It can be done where, you know, more and more people are going to server side tracking and we’re preserving things a different way. But, you know, more and more legislation comes up and blockers are getting more sophisticated and all of that. So we can’t rely 100% on like, oh, well, I’ve been working on this channel and this channel has brought this in. It’s, well, I’ve been working on this channel and because I’m focused on that channel, I fixed the internal linking. And now I can show you that people are more likely to visit more pages when they come to our site because they’re clicking on these internal links. And so they’ve gotten deeper into our funnel, you know, having more of those conversations of, okay, your um thought of silo out of the way, what what are we working on and what’s going to be our impact? 

Garrett: It’s, it’s such an interesting challenge like data analytics, I feel like there’s so much that you can do because the other thing that, I think, too with all of this and like hold you know dead internet theories like you also have to deal with the the idea of tracking bots. Like, how are you differentiating – and that’s not even just an LLM problem, that’s like an internet issue. I’m sure you’re working with clients on, on how you actually prove that these are real people that are going through these these funnels.

Brie: Yeah, I mean, the, so there are some like safeguards. So I work primarily in the Google suite so I’m, I’m working with tag manager GA4 and Looker studio right. So GA4 had some built-in bot detection and filtering which worked until it didn’t. What we’re seeing right now, I mean, and this has been happening since October and there still hasn’t been a fix, and I don’t know what they’re gonna do because we’re half a year later, but we’re seeing influx of um traffic from Singapore and China and you know, it – the thing about this, they’re bots, um, and a lot of times what it is is it’s they’re not actually like retrieval bot like agentic search bots, right? Like it’s, it’s not like that it’s actually people um scraping sites to inform LLMs, right, that they’re building or, or what have you. I mean, at least that’s the theory that’s kind of going around. But what you can do is you can see that the session source medium is not set. And then the time on site’s very low. But then you have to remember every time you interact with your data to filter out that data otherwise, it’s skewed, right? All of your metrics have become skewed now. 

And so really being diligent, I think that’s kind of one of the big things over the last six months, six to 12 months, really, that I’ve noticed is we’re having to become even more diligent with our data to keep it clean because the bots are even more sophisticated now. You know, you can block them. You know, some people, if you have Cloud failure, like you can block them at the DNS level, you know, block specific countries. And it’s like, well, one, that’s not a great idea. But even two, they’re not static. It’s dynamic. They’ll just change where it’s coming from. So, yeah, I mean, it’s been tough. But all that to say, Google does have some built in, like, you know, you have like the engaged sessions so 10, 10 seconds or more, two or more page views has a key event, um, you know, the and like time on site, you know, some of the, some of the quote “normal things” that you would look at, um, making sure people are coming from the the areas that you service those kinds of things. But it is it’s new, it’s, it’s interesting for sure.  

Garrett:. I mean it matters too, I can only imagine what was going through your head when you found, we found out recently when this is recorded, that, like, Google’s impression data was inflated for over a year like since May of 2025, how do you do that with a logging error? Like yeah, who do you trust, Brie?

Brie: Well, no one; trust no one! My first thought was, well, everybody’s click-through rates are higher then, so like congrats, everyone just had an increase in their click-through rate. So good job. But two, I mean, it goes back, Dana DiTomaso was great about talking about this. Like all of the data that we’re working with is directional data. There is no one perfect source of truth because also every tool you use measures things differently. It doesn’t matter if they’re measuring the exact same things. Like if they’re both measuring sessions, for instance, they’re both going to use their own definition of what is. And so, there is no one source of truth. Nothing is perfect. I mean, if you want to dig in your log files all the time and do that, but even then it’s like, how do you know what’s what and who’s who we’re not always going to know. So, but we have to, you can’t get stuck on that, right? That you’re not going to move forward being stuck in analysis paralysis. You, we got to find the, the best direction and, and then test. I mean that we’ve been, I’ve been saying that for the last five years, you got to always be testing. And if you test something and it’s, you know, it works great, iterate, see if you can replicate. And if it doesn’t work, then, you know, make a change. 

Garrett: That’s why I love reading from you. And also why, why your session, like I’m so excited for your session is because, like, data literacy has never been more important either in the context of analytics, like to make sure what you’re doing. Give us like a teensy little taste without giving too much about what your talk is going to be at SEO Week and why they should come. 

Brie: Well, the good news is I can’t give too much away because I’m stuck on the ending. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to wrap it up, so boom. No, so a lot of it talks about like, how do we set ourselves up for success when it comes to measurement and what we’re selling clients at the end of the day. Um, and where our boss is, right? And what metrics we’re tied to and how we can, um, measure those things accurately. So it’ll be a lot, buckle up.

Garrett: I can’t wait. Okay well besides that, like, to, to land this plane if you will, what are you most excited about for uh SEO Week?

Brie: This – always the people, it’s always the people. I’m excited to see everyone, I’m excited to be in the room, uh, and, you know, just be around the energy. I’m also excited to see how that shift has taken place last year. Like I said it really was like identity crisis feeling. Um, I’m lucky, like I’m like a step removed from SEO, right, like so you know, I was able to sit back and be like, at least I know I just work on GA4 like it’s cool. I, I, data is data at the end of the day I can, I can figure it out; your jobs just got so much harder. And I felt like, you know, there really was this like tension, not like bad, but there there was this tension of like, where are we going to go, what what comes next, and um so I’m excited to see this year, kind of how that energy has shifted now that we’ve had some time to, like, take everything in, um, and had a year of, you know, a lot of these people doing it for clients and measuring the impact. So I’m excited. 

Garrett: I can’t wait, dude. It’s going to be awesome. So if you haven’t already gotten tickets, we’re getting towards the end here. Day Three, Brie is going to be rocking it. It is the 27th to the 30th, end of April in New York City. Get your tickets for SEO Week. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been awesome. 

Brie: Sweet. 

Garrett: Garrett Sussman, signing out. SEO Week, see you then.