The “Other” AI That is Hurting Your Organic Traffic Featuring Wil Reynolds

Garrett: Welcome back to the next chapter of search produced by SEO Week and iPullRank. I am so excited. If you haven’t already gotten your tickets, we’re talking end of April the 28th to May 1st, New York City. We have 40 amazing speakers across SEO, data, AI, content, digital strategy, you name it. Check it out. Today I’m joined by Mr. Prolific, been doing it forever and he is like deep, deep, deep into AI right now. I’m joined by Wil Reynolds, who’s the founder and CEO at SEER Interactive. What is up Wil? How you doing man?

Wil: I’m having a wonderful morning.

Garrett: Dude, it is a fun time to be an SEO, to be in AI. Things are nuts, but last 12 to 24 months have been nuts. What’s your perspective on the current state of search?

Wil: I think search is screwed. I think answers are alive and well. So I think if you have branded yourself as a search person and a search optimizer, then you have attached your ego and your kudos, your image, yourself image to “I optimize for search.” If you have attached yourself to, “I want to help people find answers,” it’s a great time to be alive. Because then I’m not trying to defend randomly SEO or search engine stuff or looking for data points that go, “see, people are still searching!” It’s like, nah, like it’s like– I think in certain verticals, because it’s the other thing. Searching data or like, I’m seeing so much difference between verticals on how much people are or not adopting AI.

It’s a great time because you’re playing the bet with your client and being like, how do I track this to see when that number gets big enough that we should pay attention. But the numbers are actually telling me that that AI chain ain’t where your people are at right now. So let’s not invest and let’s just do SEO the way we’re supposed to do it. But then let’s be prepared for it and set up the early warning signals. That is where I think we all should have been from the beginning. And I’m looking forward to that being the destination where we end up. And I think SEOs could be the right people to be there, but I’m not sure we’re going to be the right people to end up there.

Garrett: I freaking love it because it’s a mindset shift. We’re so used to framing it one way. We have to think more expansively, which kind of leads right into your whole perspective and your SEO Week talk, which is all about authentic intelligence. Can you speak to what you’ll be presenting and kind of like why people should check out what you’re laying down?

Wil: Sure. So, it’s so funny. I’ve been watching my old MozCon presentations and I’m basically like, “damn, I said this same stuff in 2013, 14, 15” because the RCS presentation dropped in 2012. We’re 13 years later. And I was like, oh, two years after that, I got on stage and said, I watch people go through the SERP and I ask them questions about why are you clicking on what you’re clicking on? So, for 13, uh, for 11 years, I’ve been doing that kind of research, which means I’m starting to understand people and humans and what makes people trust sites, not trust sites. Whereas we’re looking at domain authority and never heard a person– like most SEOs have never watched a freaking person go through the process of trying to find an answer and talk back on the quality of the answers they got. So therefore, what do you do? You optimize for search.

When you hear how people think about things you go, oh my God. So those little seeds have been planted for years and now we just get a chance to deploy what I’ve been trying to do and trying to bring in for years. And you’re like, this is how people are going to start to think about these things. So, for me, man, like that’s like the biggest thing is it’s like, man, it’s a great time to be into human psychology. How do people find their answers to their problems? What makes people trust certain answers more than others? Before, we could get you a number one ranking without doing none of that. Now I think it’s going to potentially reward some of that kind of work more than it has been rewarded in the last 10 years or so.

Garrett: I love it, the technology is, is catching up and changing search behavior and it’s getting harder to monitor. Like it really is. But at the same time, it’s that much more important. So, what the hell do people do? Like what do you do right now?

Wil: All right. So to me, Ooh, this is hard because I think so many of us want to know, what do I do right now? And I’m like, “change your worldview.” And it’s like, Ooh, that’s not an easy answer. Like your worldview should have been, “I help people to find answers.” Too many of our worldview was like, “here’s how to build a thousand pages at scale that sound like they were like kind of almost kind of written by a human.” And I put it through now. Now.

So, like for right now we’re building and we’re optimizing pages on our site to perform better in LLMs. The thing that I’m doing right now is interviewing my team members that worked on those projects and pulling out snippets of stories that when somebody who actually has to pick a freaking agency clicks on our page at an industry level, they’re like, “Oh, you’re about that life because you would not have a story like that unless you were actually sleeves rolled up in my industry.” Most people are like, “yo, how can I get the semantic relevance to show that I look like blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “I’m not trying to be semantically relevant. I’m trying to be relevant for humans.”

And I think the other thing that we’re seeing is everybody’s so hyped about AI right now. I’m like, I’m hyped about the authentic intelligence AI, because I think at the end of the day, search is, search is cluttered with crap. AI ain’t that much better because it’s going to give you the average answer. How many of us wake up to get the average agency? How many of us wake up to be average people? How many of us want to get the average of whatever? Most of us don’t want to be there. So, I don’t care how much you prompt it. At the end of the day, I would rather have an answer from Garrett Sussman than ChatGPT on a lot on topics that you’re in, that you have expertise on. Right. So, it’s like, well, I’m going to be showing how like I’m growing the business by actually finding out where are humans saying, read this shit from Seer and saying, I’m okay losing the search traffic because I don’t know what those people are coming here for.

If you are getting a link from SEO FOMO, if you’re getting a link from Search Engine Land, if you’re getting a link from Microsoft Teams, how many B2B SEOs right now are not tracking which you, which URLs are getting traffic from Microsoft Teams and Slack because those are humans somewhere in an enterprise sharing your shit. That is so much more valuable than something that I got 10 clicks on this, but I don’t know who those people were. Give me 10 enterprise people going to one of my pages over a thousand people going to how to fix a, how to find your site map, your XML site map. Like now I’m done with that.

Garrett: I love it. I love it. And it speaks to what Rand’s doing with, with audience research and understanding where your people are spending time. You’re all about it. So like, kind of leads to what, what’s next. We were talking right before this about, you know, personalization and just such a better search experience with like ChatGPT, for instance, what do you think the next few years will look like for buy me an answers?

Wil: So I will say it through the lens of what I’m trying to build for my own business. Cause that’s how you know, it’s fucking real and authentic.

Garrett: Bring it.

Wil: I’m hoping, because I don’t really run the business, so I’m hoping to convince Crystal to allow me to build an organic social practice at Seer. That’s where I think this is going because I think people want answers from freaking people yo and AI is only going to make it sound more like – you know me, now all of a sudden back in the day, you had to do real research on me to write me a good email. Now you can be like, I’m writing an email to Wil, how should I personalize it? So now everybody’s going to sound like they know you, right? What if I actually am a person that you’ve seen over years? Like people will say things about me when they hit me up. Like I’ve been following Wil I’ve been following you for X long. I’ve been watching your posts over years. I authentically feel like you’re that guy on this thing. That’s why I’m referring this person to you. That’s why I’m doubling down on authentic intelligence because it’s the optimal end state.

Garrett: Is that for everyone? Is that, are you talking, cause in SEO and search, we always talk about like generalizations. Do you think that works in the context of the small business owner, mom and pop all the way to the big enterprise with like celebrity endorsements? How do you think across different industries and business sizes?

Wil: I think humans, I read a lot about, I read a lot more about humans and psychology than I do about SEO and shit like that. I think humans want to connect with other humans. And if somebody wants to fight me on that, bring it. Good luck with your AI girlfriend. Good luck with your character AI girlfriend. You only have a girlfriend on character AI cause you weren’t able to get a real one in real life. You haven’t learned the life skills to like deal with the push and pull of trying to make a human happy and want them to spend time with you. So now you’re just going to outsource that to AI so that you can just say whatever you want to somebody and they can just answer you. And come on dog. Right.

So, to me, it’s like, we got to get back to this human component, which is where the authenticity of your intelligence will ring through. So, for me, I think like, who would you– last MozCon, I was on stage showing how I bought a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game, a pinball game for my kids. Right. And I showed a video of the guys who I bought it from. They dressed up like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to do the unboxing and to talk about all the flaps and the flippers and how all that shit worked. I’m buying from those motherfuckers because you could tell they love the process of opening up a pinball machine and delivering it to a family. They loved it as humans. Now could I have bought that from somebody who optimized a website to show up for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball game? Yes. But once I click on all 10 of them, who are you going to buy from if the pricing is almost all the same? I’m going to buy my pinball game from the guys that when I emailed this guy, because one of my left flipper just broke a couple of days ago, I emailed the owner of that business at 10pm at night. He got back to me at 10:15. You know why? Because he loves what pinball does for families. That’s different than a guy who’s like, I run this pinball company, so I can make a lot of money and I can make a fat margin and sell it someday. Like, that authenticity will eventually show itself. Right. So that’s why I’m doubling down on that’s a pinball machine. That’s a local freaking company that sold me a pinball machine.

So, I feel like this is going back to some like Main Street type shit where like people knew you on Main Street and you had a hardware store on Main Street and the person was like, “yo, last time you came in, you were trying to fix that pool or whatever. Yo, I got this new thing for you.” Like like you, you want to buy more from people like that because they feel like they’re invested in you and they care about you and they care about their craft.

So, like I think that whether it’s B2B, B2C, big business, small business, honestly, we still like to buy from humans. That’s why when people are like agents someday, this is super like controversial for some people. I’m like, I don’t think an agent is going to pick somebody’s agency. I don’t think a company is going to go, “you know what? Like, oh, I’m just going to put an RFP and let everybody answer it. And I’m going to have an agent like go through all the answers.” And I could be wrong, and I could lose my whole business because of this. Right. And I’m like, I think there will be enough people in the market who are like, “I want to talk to these people. I want to see how many people, you know, this, how many people are like, yo, can I meet the team I’m going to work on?” But wait, we told you all the answers. We told you all the answers, dog. Like all the answers are in the RFP. We answered all your questions. Why would you want to meet the humans? Because we’re fucking humans. And then now you get to see who are these people that are going to work on my project? Are they smart? Are they compassionate? How do they carry themselves? Like all that matters in a deal. AI, an agent that picks the agency for your SEO project or whatever, ain’t going to do that.

 I don’t think that people are just going to, oh, I’m going to wake up. Like if you are a, I was buying a charger, an international charger, right? This is the most commoditized effing thing. You know, I still spend 10 minutes on Amazon trying to figure out which one I wanted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, so for me, I think that this concept of we want to buy from other humans is a, is a bet that I’m going to make small investments in in 2025.

And the reason why it’s because it’s the presentation I’m doing, Garrett, my traffic dropped 45% from search, but my business grew 10% and it wasn’t on like I closed one client. We had more leads than we had before, blah, blah, blah. So then you’re like, well, what’s happening? What’s happening? How did you lose all this traffic and grow your business? I thought those two things didn’t match up. And you go, oh, what happened? I went from my lowest point in November, 2023. I had 239 people get to my website from LinkedIn. In February of 2025, I had 5,200 and you know what happens when you went on LinkedIn and not on some bullshit LinkedIn comments, link on my comments to answer me like that’s fake. The problem when people say shit like that is you are faking your actual influence. So, you don’t know if you’re that influential or if you faked it, got a bump, and can’t sustain it. So that’s why I don’t do none of that shit because then I get to see when my shit is shit. “Oh damn, I put this post out. I didn’t ask Rand to push it because I want to find out from real humans, whether or not it’s good or not. So, then I can go back to the lab and try to make it better. If I ask Rand and Mike to push a post that I wrote, it’s going to artificially inflate the value of that fricking post, which then means I can’t decipher whether or not it was really that fucking good.”

So for me, it’s like, I’m going to be breaking down in my presentation. A lot of the little things I did along the way that made me be like, “oh my God, authentic intelligence for my own business where I can share all the tactics, all the numbers” is how I ended up making those connections. So I know it’s a long winded answer, but it’s a tough question to answer short. We’re talking about the future of fricking search. We’re talking about a 20-year industry, 25-year industry being disrupted and we’re trying to figure out what that looks like. It’s hard to put that into like a, you know, a two second answer. Sorry.

Garrett: I know it’s like, it’s like you said, worldview. And I keep thinking, I think I keep thinking about brand and people buy from people and this idea that you do this for a long enough time that every time you put something out and they’re like, oh, Wil dropped another thing. That’s so interesting. The next time they are ready to do an agency, they’re not, people don’t even want to have to like look to 50 million options. They want to find the one they know and, and heuristics, it’s psychology. It’s like, not that we’re lazy, but we want it. We want to just not make a mistake and pick something we trust out of the gate. And that’s going to be Wil.

Wil: Referrals, dog. Like, I don’t know about most people. My business is different, but my whole business has grown. All I know, cause I’m not good at selling. I don’t like selling people on stuff and trying to get you to buy my stuff. I like being who I am and then letting you choose whether or not that connects. Well, if you look at referrals, referrals, why do we want referrals? Because we’re humans. We want a person that we trust to say, I’ve worked with those people. You should talk to them. That lead on paper could be the exact same as somebody who searched “SEO agency” and then hit your lead form and said, “I have a hundred thousand dollar budget.” Trust me, dog. The value of those two leads are entirely freaking different.

Garrett: There you go. I mean, you’re going to get, you see Wil talk at SEO Week. It’s going to be freaking huge. Thank you so much, man. It’s just awesome to talk and you know, just kind of get your perspective. Cause you’re always like five steps ahead and you always keep it real, and you always are about like what’s important, which is family, people, life. It’s messy. Thanks again. I appreciate it.

Wil: Thanks for having me.

Garrett: Thanks. Have a good one guys.