Garrett Sussman: Inside SEO Week, I am joined by the man, Wil Reynolds, Founder and CEO of Seer Interactive. Dangerous. We could talk for hours about all the things in the space right now. Wil’s the Founder and CEO of Seer, globally recognized thought leader in SEO and digital marketing. He’s all over the place doing amazing things for our industry. Wil, thanks for joining me. How are you doing, man? 

Wil Reynolds: I’m doing wonderful. Thanks for having me. 

Garrett: Let’s dive in. What – so many directions going. What is top of mind for you in AI search right now? 

Wil: These days, it is all how do we track the impact? Like, visibility is great, but like visibility without some other metric doesn’t seem to drive businesses forward. It’s like we’ve been saying, like you need to be seen and then you need to be believed and then you need to be chosen. And like, we’ve kind of like gotten so obsessed about the being seen part that no one’s saying like, but if what’s getting you seen doesn’t make people believe good things about your brand and choose you, then what have you really done? 

Garrett: So what do you think that means for like the next 6-12 months of SEO? Do you think Google gets it right? Do you think SEOs mess it up? What direction are we going in? 

Wil: Right now, I don’t see enough people talking about the tracking. So I think we’re going to fuck this up again. I think because we all know not to tout rankings. Like we know that rankings in a vacuum aren’t great. Like we know that the job to be done is more than rankings. However, when it comes to AI, I’m literally not seeing enough people. Like I show my data all the time, right? I’m like, here’s my AI visibility. Here’s my conversions from AI. Here’s my leads. Like who’s doing that? Stop the talk about visibility and show us the data that says, like, is that visibility turning into actual, like you have, like it’s so early, like you got to have a bunch of hypotheses. 

So right now the job to be done is to think a lot and have a lot of hypotheses and validate them, have good ones, have bad ones, shoot holes through them. But like, hey, like if I, if my AI visibility goes up for the right prompts, do I see more branded search? Yes. No. Do I see more traffic to my services pages? Yes. No. Like, do I also see more traffic to my brand pages at the same time that I posted my jobs because those could be job seekers? And how do I get that out so it doesn’t give me a false positive? Like, this is the now new work. Unless you just want to be in the visibility business of, hey, I show up a lot. That’s great. I’m instantly going to be like, hey, do you know what that did for your business? And if that answer is, oh, well, we assume that, uh…you assume? The math has changed. The math has changed. And the real sad part is I think GEO or whatever we’re calling it is no longer a performance channel. That’s what I think people aren’t ready for. So they’re applying SEO metrics, search volume. I ain’t got that. Right? Click-through rate. I ain’t got that. 

Like how do you manage the fact that I did a search the other day. Half of the results in ChatGPT were linked. Half were unlinked. So now visibility people, what happens when half of them are linked and half of them are unlinked? I got to copy some of them and paste them into Google, which is going to come through as branded search. And the ones I could click on are going to come through ChatGPT when it’s all in the same answer. How are we as an industry preparing for that world? That’s the conversation that we need to have. 

Garrett: I love it. It’s so messy and it’s like best practices go out the window. And I know you know this firsthand. It’s like every business needs a bespoke conversation. You need to figure out like what matters to your business because you can’t apply the same shit to every single business like it’s just a cookie cutter situation. 

Wil: I think best practices, best practices are for average people who want to run average marketing campaigns. And I think that only gets expedited in an AI world because when everybody goes and looks for the best practice, everybody’s doing the same thing. Right. So my keywords have to be in my desk. My search term should be here. I should use this kind of content. And it should. So now if everybody’s doing the same thing, those of us who choose not to do those things pop out and stand out. Because what’s interesting is just because you can now produce more content. Last I checked, humans can’t process 50x more content than we could before AI existed. 

So at the end of the day, you know, I’m looking at folks and I’m saying, are you mortgaging the trust in your brand and the trust in your own personal brand for some quick AI wins, which look like wins on the surface, but long-term, you don’t know the people that no longer trust you. Like, you know what no one has? A trust KPI. Talk to me about a marketer that’s got a trust KPI because we all know there are shortcut ways to win in GEO, SEO, etc. And some of us go, hey, I’m not going to do those things because it’s going to ruin your long-term trust. Or, hey, client, if you do that, I’ll help you to do it as safe as possible. But you are risking trust in your brand for this visibility thing that I’m not even tracking outside of visibility. Like that’s the kind of thing…it’s like how do you put a KPI around making sure you’re not mortgaging your short-term quarterly wins for brand damage over years when people just stop wanting to hear what you have to say? 

Garrett: I love it. And I want you to expand on this, on how this thinking kind of like shapes the way that you approach client work, because I know there is that issue of mitigating risk, but it’s like, how do you balance those experiments and doing things that are subversive without necessarily destroying your brand? Like, how do you think about that balance? 

Wil: Super simple. Any content I help you to build that gets all of its traffic from SEO and GEO and none from direct and none from social is probably shit. Period. That’s it. Like if, if all these people got to it and not a freaking one of them said, I’m going to share this with my friends and my networks and attach my name to it, then yeah, it’s probably not great. So, you know, and sending it to your friends, signing up for a newsletter afterwards, putting it on social media with your name attached to it. That’s how you shift from being visible to being believed and to be chosen. If you just stay stuck in visibility, it’s super easy to win just being visible all day. I need…my clients should hold me to a standard where being visible is the beginning of the journey. It’s definitely not the end. that I’m going to press to try to find ways to, and it’s early. So it’s just a bunch of hypotheses. It’s a bunch of experiments. It’s a bunch of tests. Like let’s get muddy. Let’s get in the mud, right? Let’s try to figure this out together. 

But if you ask me for what’s the best practice on the way to track LLMs down to being believed and chosen, I’m going to look at you and go, did you hear what I just said? Like I got 17 results in an answer the other day. Sometimes I get eight, sometimes I get three. So your visibility could have doubled if it just hit it at a time where they started showing 17 results because now ChatGPT is showing ads. So like maybe they’re adding more brands in. That’s what our research found. All of a sudden, the answers got a lot longer after they started showing ads. So it’s like the answers are longer now, maybe you’re more visible, but we didn’t do anything to gain that visibility. We had done the right things before. But then you have to think 17 results for one prompt? In the same way that you would not go to page two, it doesn’t matter that you’re more visible. So what is your offsetting metric against the visibility to protect you from a time where they go, well, now we’re just showing 18 brands instead of eight. Your visibility went up, but humans cannot click on and process 18 different websites against each other. So what is your metric? And everybody goes real quiet because nobody’s got one. Nobody’s been thinking about it.  

Garrett: Right. Which ties to the trust. How do you, I got to ask you, cause like you met, you do a lot of measurement in terms of sharing with your friends – obviously we have the dark social issue, social algorithms do you even think about social algorithms do you just put shit out there and like see like let the internet tell you if it’s good or not or do you consider like linkedin putting a link in in your post yeah um- 

Wil: Some things I consider some things I don’t, so, um, I don’t do LinkedIn comments because I should, I believe I should write shit that transcends those kind of signals. Um, I will tell you that I am unfortunately becoming kind of cautious about how often I post on LinkedIn specifically. And I’m running some analysis now that shows like I’m in a range of impressions that they’re willing to give me. And if I do one post or two posts in a week, I stay in that range. If I do six posts, I stay just 10% out of that range. So now what you start to see is you’re like, oh man, like they’ve pretty much got me in a range. And if I post a bunch of stuff that I don’t really believe in, or not even that, because I don’t post it, I don’t believe it. But stuff that’s like a friend of mine being like, oh, Wil, you’re speaking at my conference. Can you post it? I’m like, that’s just self-promotional. Like, I don’t really want to put that out. I want to put out education, right? So now you start to post that and you’re like, ooh, do I really want to use up some of my capital on that? So that’s an example of where I am adjusting some of what I’m doing on LinkedIn specifically because I’m starting to do an analysis just around like, do you show my bangers less if I post too much, which then starts to narrow down because I’m stuck in this range. They’re like, yo, we were going to show this one post to 10,000 members. But because you did another post the next day, we shrunk that down to 3,000 and maybe this one will be worth seven. And you’re like, that one wasn’t that great, but now you’ve slowed down this one. So it’s like, it’s a little bit of a game there. 

Garrett: And it’s so frustrating because you do have to play the game as much as it’s just like, and this kind of speaks to marketing of like, whether like the best product doesn’t always win, the best marketing doesn’t always win. I mean, you still have to play the game. And so I just find it very frustrating. And with AI visibility, it’s like, we still want to tie it to revenue. We tie social to revenue as best we can. I like the way, I like the experiments. Like, I think it all makes sense. It’s just the game is rigged. And so it’s just always frustrating that you have to play it. 

Wil: It is. But, you know, I think there’s the algorithmic part and then there’s the you just sucked part. And I prefer to look at it through the lens of do I play one or two of those games? Yeah. But like that’s why I don’t mess around with LinkedIn comments. Like it’s why I don’t mess around too much with like, you know, thumbnails and game changer and caps in my YouTube. Like I’m not doing none of that. Um….also here’s what i think too – in a world of infinite content, people are going to look more and more towards people that they trust to be their curators. And this is what I mean when I talk about trust as a KPI is you don’t realize when you have the same number of followers but your engagement drops. Like find me somebody who’s like really like yo I, I got my engagement coming in, this is how I analyze it, this is how I’m figuring out, is it me do I just suck because usually that’s it. 

At the end of the day, these algorithms are built to show people things that are going to bring them back in, right? More impressions, more whatever. So I would rather, rather than think of like the algorithm sucks, which I can’t control, I’d much rather think my content probably fucking sucked. So let me step my game up. Let me try to analyze what I was doing. Maybe I phoned it in and got a little lazy. How can I level it up a level or two to then see if I can get back to the areas and the level that I want to be?  

Garrett: Makes sense. You worry about what you – okay. Fuck it. I’m being self-promotional. We got SEO Week and you’re coming back year two. Tell me about last year, what it was like while you were here and what you’re looking forward to in April. 

Wil: I think the most important thing in times of deep change, I think, I don’t know, some of this being in the industry for a long time shit is starting to have some impact in an AI world because you notice cycles. How I optimized Northern Light and InfoSeek have no bearing on how I do Google today. A lot of the knowledge, it was the tenacity. A lot of people confuse tenacity and tenure. It’s like, oh, you’ve been doing this for a long time, tenure, so therefore you’re good at it. That’s a mistake. It’s the tenacity to constantly try to stay on top of this stuff is what makes you win. 

However, the tenure part for me is seeing a lot of these things, listicles, whatever. And I’m like, oh, we’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this before. Oh, like events, like SEO Week. Oh, I’ve seen this before. Like in times of early change, where there’s a lot of change happening, you need to get in the room with other people who are super amped up about testing and super amped up about learning and super amped up about sharing because nobody knows what they’re doing right now. There is no best practice. So therefore you need to get off your sofa, come and meet some people – and you won’t realize that one or two relationships where like you make a real relationship, not some like, you know, uh, virtual shit, if you make a real bond with somebody, they’ll start being like, yo, I’m testing this. What are you seeing? What am I seeing? And you start swapping notes and that keeps you from having to follow best practices. Right. So, um, cause a lot of people are holding one of their stuff more than ever. They don’t want it in the training data. So it’s like, you think what somebody is posting is their new hotness. Their new hotness very often is only shared by them and their friends. And like, most of the people I tend to share stuff with or that share stuff with me, I’ve met them in person. 

So like now’s the time, like we have fewer SEO-ish events than ever, right? In the sense of like, we had more separate events. A lot of things have shut down. And I think we’re at a time where we need more of these events so people can create the relationships to then be able to share data, to then be like, oh, when I made this change in my world, I thought this, you’re in this world and you’re seeing something totally different, got it. All right. Now that changes my next test, my next experiment, my next thing I tell my client. 

I think the most dangerous thing right now is working on single data sets. The most dangerous thing in a time of deep experimentation is being like, I work on one or two websites. Like for us, we took all of our clients’ GA data across all of our clients that allow us to store it and put it in a one big query table that now we’re auto running analyses across all these clients to be like, did this happen? Did that happen? And people are getting answers back in an hour or so, of like, oh, snap. Most of our clients saw this at the same time. What does that mean? That’s way different than if you see it by yourself and you’re going, but how do I validate that this is happening somewhere else? 

So get your ass to SEO Week, make real in-person relationships because you’re going to need to cash those checks in at another point. And we tend to trust people more when you see them and broke bread with them and sat down with them. 

Garrett: There you go. Okay. Come find Wil. He’ll be at SEO Week. It’s going to be awesome. We’ll talk to you then. Thanks, Wil. Appreciate your time, man. Thank you.