Garrett Sussman: Party keeps going! Inside SEO Week, and I am joined by none other than Jeff Coyle. Long time friend, first time listener. No, he’s been around. Anyway, he is the SVP of Strategy at Siteimprove. He was the co-founder of Market Muse. He is doing a lot of really cool stuff. It’s like, when Jeff comes in and starts talking to me about his experiments with AI search, I’m like, I have to listen to this man. He’s a knowledge graph expert, information retrieval. I could go on. Jeff, what is up, man? How are you doing? 

Jeff Coyle: Oh, gosh. That sounds great. Yes, I’ve been doing this for about 28 years, as wild as that sounds now, trying to figure out how search engines work, building search engines, building vertical search engines. Back when I thought that was going to be hip, now you can build a vertical search engine in 30 minutes. So it’s very validating. It’s just that it took millions of dollars back then. Now it takes microseconds. So life is good if you’re researching SEO and AEO right now, because there’s just so many branches of this tree.

Garrett:  I know. And it’s like a dangerous question, because I remember like last year where you and I were talking about how you’re running experiments to show up in AI Overviews, like that you were the only brand cited every single time and that was sustainable. Now, here we are a year later, a lot has happened. What’s top of mind for you in AI search at this moment? 

Jeff: The big thing for me is I think the industry’s going out of that intro phase and it’s moving into or getting to some stage of early maturity. So I think it’s a more grounded and durable phase for Relevance Engineering and AEO, AI visibility. So I think what people are finding out is that accessibility and technical SEO are even more important as a foundational layer for everything that is following. They’re like the prerequisites for being ingested or being AI ready – interpretability, trust across systems. And so I think that teams that were already well-equipped on the technical search, on the accessibility side, were already winning. And so they weren’t maybe making that correlation, but as teams get, you know, as teams are building these chops, the recognition that you’re not unlocking a great, sustainable AEO team win if your foundation is weak and like a hack here and there isn’t sustainable as a strategy. So that’s been fun to watch. I think that that’s key. And I think you’re seeing teams recognize that just seeing themselves in a citation isn’t enough to tie any sort of understanding to it. 

Garrett: I think that to that point, it’s so interesting when we’re talking about different businesses of different sizes and different industries. You think about all these regulated industries and what we’re seeing right now with, like health, your money, your life, you know, the adoption of that for AI search and how it does actually matter. What do you think, you know, as we’re moving out of the nascent phase into a slightly more mature kind of phase for all of this, what do you think the next like six months to 12 months will actually look like for SEO and AI search? 

Jeff: I will punt on the YMYL comment because I think that’s a different world of this. I don’t feel the market has caught up with why it’s so different, right? But I’d say, and I’ll answer it afterwards, that’s called a teaser. But the big thing here is what’s happening in the next six months is a desire to understand why things are happening differently, right? There’s a lot of cases where it was almost like a, I would perceive that I don’t have to do anything differently, right? But, do I need to not do anything differently only if I was perfect before? What I see is the recognition that this transition exposes my weaknesses of the past. Maybe I didn’t change my content strategy for a long time. Maybe I haven’t built wonderful content where every paragraph has the possibility of being front page news, right? And so a lot of this is coming from a lens of “people are telling me that my IT person can just, like, update my site and make it AEO’d,” right? By the way, they can do stuff, right? But it’s not likely to have a dramatic impact if you have shaky foundations. 

So what we’re seeing now is that people are recognizing that AEO, Relevance Engineering, GEO, made all of your ailments and all of your gaps obvious. It puts all your issues on Front Street. It makes it so any makeup you add on, as we all get older – I am 46 years old, alright? I look way older than I did in 1999 when I, you know, build my first search engine, right? Your website looks old now. It looks like it had makeup on and then took the makeup off. And that’s what that grind, that reality is becoming part of this world and this big change we’re seeing. It’s the shaky parts of your site, the bad infrastructure. You know, you’re not, your site has accessibility issues. Only 5% of web pages in the Fortune 500, in the Global 2000, only 5% of web pages are fully accessible, right? And so these AI bots are going to these sites and they can’t read them. Or what they’re reading is different than they expect, right? And so it’s a new tilt on search engine  -we always cared about Google bot, right? Now we got to care about every other way a person or a crawler or an AI can see my site. And then I take a deep breath and say, now our content’s got to be awesome. And it’s got to be comprehensive. And it’s got to tell the whole story of the buyer journey. All the stuff we always said that we needed to do. But if we weren’t doing it, man, now we look real ugly real quick in the outcomes. And that’s where, that’s where this gets real hard. So what I’d say is the change is that strategically, you have to be nearly perfect to win. And that is tough. That’s tough for someone to swallow. 

Garrett: It’s you’re, you’re right on, especially when we’re talking about, um, the brands that, that benefit from just that benefit from their size. And now it’s potentially a weakness. And the other thing to kind of take it into your core wheelhouse, I’m curious how this shows up in your thinking, is the other hard thing, which is the knowledge graphs, your entities, your hygiene of your brand reputation, that some stuff you have control over and some stuff you don’t. How are you thinking about those problems in the context of AI search? 

Jeff: Oh, gosh. I’m glad you brought that up because it dovetails with the your money and your life component. So a key thing here is it’s not just about being ready and appearing, right? Where before you might have kind of had a scramble or a campaign that, um, there was some uh, you know, there were some websites that didn’t necessarily contribute to your brand’s reputation the way that you’d wish they would, right? Now, they’re part of what is many users’ reality because you’re getting a synthesized book report, right? Part of the footnotes for that book report are pools of text and entity connections that you might not like, right? And so if you’re in Your Money, Your Life zone and half of the contributing sentiment to your brand is in conflict with the way you represent your brand, you are in a big world of hurt, right? So all of that unmanaged reputation management or a case where you weren’t managing your entities or your knowledge graph, how you are connecting the dots. Or maybe you had situations where you went out and tried to jump into another practice area, a branch, a location without doing it really well. And it was super thin. That it’s like you went, you’re in the wind. And so what we’re seeing a lot of in Your Money, Your Life specifically is uh went they branched out a lot of locations a lot of other fields maybe you were doing banking for a small business and then uh you added another company and they did you know high net worth wealth thing and you only you put up two landing pages and that’s it, right? First of all that goes away but guess what, you had customers and you had people talking about you so there’s more content on the web about other people’s perspective about your brand than you’ve put in. Now, if that happens and it’s Your Money, Your Life, the core brand can be negatively impacted. 

So, so often with this, that’s what is causing them to have issues is areas of the business that weren’t buttoned up arms of the octopus that you know were a little bit weaker than others um, are, can actually hurt you. Like I always use this example – you probably heard me say it now a billion times – but, um, you know, I grew up in a grocery store in New Jersey, my dad ran them, every aisle of the supermarket matters. If there’s a spill in aisle 3, that might be a problem for every part of your digital estate, every part of your digital estate matters. If you’re a college and university and your athletics department site isn’t compliant, you can get sued. I don’t care that it’s your athletics site, right? And then if Google thinks that that section of the site is low quality, the whole thing can have a sandbag on it. Everything you do can have a sandbag on it. So like I said, it’s a lot of recognition that you really have to invest more money, invest more time, invest more energy, automate the manual tasks, automate the boring tasks and really sharpen the knives on the precision tasks of managing your web presence and your digital estate. And that’s the journey this year. That’s where I love it for me because it’s like the experts, the subject matter experts, the precision technical SEOs, the true practitioners of the craft, um, have a chance to uh to leap. And I think those are the people that go to SEO Week, too.

Garrett: Yeah! Yeah, I mean those practitioners, right, it’s so beautiful, you articulate all the different challenges. It’s overwhelming, like, and you think about, like, what that’s like for a single mom and pop versus an entire enterprise that has to deal with silos and different lines of businesses. So give us some hope, man, bring it home in terms of your talk at SEO Week, give us a little tease, connecting the dots of, of what people can expect from you that will kind of give them at least that roadmap, that direction to navigate what’s really fricking hard. 

Jeff: Yes. Um, the, the biggest thing I’m going to focus on is a different lens on how to win in AI search, really. So it’s saying, instead of just looking at it to say how you can show up, what I want to bring is understanding of this change. So things that might, you might in a year, it’s gone from being like invisible to slightly more easy to report, but they don’t really explain the why. Why was this content included? Why is this site potentially going to be a site that particular agents love or are more likely to be part of the world, of their world? So how can I look at building systems to ensure that I’m technically ingestible, so that I’m interpretable, so that I’m putting my team, my collection of – my entire website, my entire digital state, putting its best foot forward. And then it’s understanding how the different channels retrieve, reuse content in just fundamentally different ways. 

And what, I – the practice I’m looking to preach against is optimizing without understanding. And that’s really what we’re seeing, I feel. And I think if you have competitors who you know are optimizing without this level of understanding, you have an extraordinary advantage. And this could be, you know, something tactical or it can be something where, you know, and you can make the business justification that if you all invest at this level, if you clean this, clean this stuff up or you add a tremendous amount of unique differentiated value. What used to be –  I used to call it ROSS, the risk of standing still, right? What used to be a case where if I was competing against a zombie site, I could just roll them. But now you can compete against someone who’s buying AI visibility software. They’re investing in content, but they’re optimizing without understanding. You can win against someone who previously would have been a very formidable competitor because what they are twisting, they’re zigging and you know why you should zig and zag. And that’s a really cool time to be in the know of how this works because you can take someone spending megabucks and you can win with a whole lot less than megabucks. And that’s really special right now. So that’s what I’m hoping to bring is, is that, hey, you understand it and you can win against a jumbo jet with a, uh, Cessna. 

Garrett: I mean, and that’s the hope. That’s the opportunity. That’s the reason that you actually come to an event like this, because you’re going to figure out what you can do where historically you might not have had a shot. Now you can, no matter kind of what resources you’re dealing with, you can go up against those good guys. Dude, you were there last year. What was your best memory of SEO Week? And why are you excited for this year, man? 

Jeff: Oh my gosh. I have so many great memories of SEO Week. The, um, there was some folks that just don’t normally make it to some of these events, made it to the event. Um, and, and, and that was so exciting, um, to, to just catch up with, um, catch up with teams, customers, um, that were at the event who are, you know, if they’re, they’re going to make one show every year, last year was the first year, but I mean, I think I said it at my – I was the first speaker. I think I said “Every future year, you’re going to say you were here at the first one.” Um, but if you weren’t at the first one, that’s okay. You can be there at the second one. Um, the energy is extremely high. The, um, the, the speaker lineup, I mean, many events have great speaker lineups. Um, so I, this, this bigger lineup is it’s well, uh, organized, such that there isn’t really a dull moment. It’s very interesting. The different types of communication, you can be something very technical, be something very unique or different, but still with a focus on understanding. There is a lot of interactions with – you have the opportunity to interact with folks who you typically wouldn’t be able to. The events were just unbelievable. Honestly, I tell people about the main event last year with Busta at the Algorhythms After Party…

Garrett: Oh yeah!

Jeff: …with Busta Rhymes and Mike. That was just excellent. I joked around and said, you know, that’s really fun when you take something that you’re so passionate about and you’re able to deliver it to the other group of people that you are passionate about. That was really fun. And just being able to have enough time to catch up with a great deal of people. I still feel like I didn’t hang out with everybody. But it really, it feels like if I were to build a really big clubhouse, let’s just say, if I were to build a really big clubhouse and it would be like the SEO…iIt’s kind of what you get to hang out, man, for a couple of days. You know, you get to hang out in a couple of days. And that was my experience. It was like, “Oh, wow, yeah, I haven’t seen you in a couple of years!” And it really felt inclusive, whether it was somebody’s first SEO event, whether they were just starting out or, you know, they are talking about the late 90s building intranet. 

Garrett: Doing it for 20+ years; back in my day!

Jeff: Snow, by the way, um, it really was fun engaging um the events, uh I went to a number of the events with um, a number of the teams whether they were small, medium, or large, like Mike’s one, and it was it was fun. I wouldn’t miss that, I wouldn’t miss it. Yeah, I miss it; I can’t wait. For a lot. I’m excited about it. 

Garrett: I can’t wait to see that. 

Jeff: In New York City. New York City is great. I’m from New Jersey originally. So it’s always nice to get back up there. I live in the Atlanta metro area now. So any reason to get up to the tri-state area, I typically say yes. 

Garrett: There you go. You want to see Jeff. You find him online ahead of time. Where’s the best place to get in touch? 

Jeff: Twitter/X is always good. @jeffrey_coyle. LinkedIn – as long as you like write, Hey, SEO Week chat in the message, I’ll probably read it. I kind of read everything. You can email me, jeff.coyle@siteimprove. Like if you were going to improve your site, siteimprove.com. And I’d give you my cell phone. I love this stuff. So as you know, but if you’re thinking about going or on the fence, I’d say take the risk, get there Sunday night. Yeah, man. I can’t wait. 

Garrett: Speaking of which, if you haven’t gotten tickets, it’s April 27th to the 30th in New York. Can’t wait to see you there. Can’t wait for Jeff’s presentation. Jeff, thanks for joining me, man. This has been awesome. 

Jeff: Thank you, Garrett, I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing you in a little bit more than two months. 

Garrett: Gosh, it’s coming. It’s going to be here before you know it. 

Jeff: Good luck. Good luck with that. I’m really excited. Thanks, Garrett. 

Garrett: Signing off. We’ll see you.