This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are SCRUNCH AI and JOLLY

I was in a client meeting recently and was taken aback when I heard a company leader talk about leaving his mark before retiring.

Nailing AI was just that. After pulling my jaw up off the ground, this stuck with me.

We talk about AI anxiety from the practitioner side all the time. Will AI replace my job? Are my skills becoming obsolete? What the hell am I supposed to be optimizing for now if SEO is dead (again)?

But your boss is nervous too.

Every board meeting mentions AI. Competitors are publishing case studies that make it seem like they have everything figured out. Vendors promise overnight results. Meanwhile, their own teams are explaining why half the shiny new AI tactics are bullshit.

Their biggest fear might not be losing their job. It’s being the leader who looks back five years from now and realizes: “I missed it.”

And for leaders who lived through the dot-com boom, there may be an even scarier version of that thought:

I missed it again.

Thank you to Scrunch for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Meet your most valuable new site visitor:
the AI bot

For 20 years, websites had two audiences to please. First humans, then Google. Now there’s a third—and when it shows up, it means a real buyer just asked AI about you.

Here’s the catch: AI isn’t persuadable. It skips your animations, it’s colorblind to your brand guidelines, and it cares about one thing—whether your content is clear, structured, and easy to retrieve. To a bot, your site isn’t an experience to navigate. It’s a dataset to mine. And if it can’t read you, it cites someone else.

Scrunch’s AXP gives AI the experience it came for. It spots agent traffic in real time and serves a structured, retrieval-ready version of every page—while your human visitors see the site exactly as you built it. (Not cloaking. Googlebot still gets your normal page.)

Roll out the red carpet for your newest VIP—and get cited.

See how your brand shows up

What are we doing about AI?” is not a tactical question

When a leader asks, “Are we tracking ChatGPT?” or “What are we doing about GEO?” most practitioners immediately hear a technical question.

So we answer technically.

We explain the flaws in prompt tracking (guilty). We debate whether GEO is even a thing (guilty). We point out that AI visibility is messy, inconsistent, and difficult to measure. (check, check, and check - guilty as charged)

But there’s a good chance your boss is asking a much simpler question:

Do we have this covered?

Tom Critchlow hit on this in his conversation with Ross Hudgens. Leading with “No, because…” can sound like resistance, even when your reasoning is solid.

Sometimes the better answer is:

“Yes, we looked at it. Here’s what we learned. Here’s what we’re doing instead.”

They don’t necessarily need agreement, but they need reassurance that somebody is looking into this and that the business isn’t missing out on the “next big thing”.

Unfortunately, fear creates AI land grabs

This is the issue I didn’t see coming, and I should have, and you too!

The problem is that executive anxiety doesn’t stay in the boardroom. AI gets attention, attention attracts budget, and budget creates ownership battles.

Suddenly SEO owns GEO, PR owns citations and LLM visibility, content owns AI content optimization, product owns the AI experience, and analytics owns measurement. And vendors, of course, own the magical solution they’re happy to sell you to support your internal performance narratives.

What should be a cross-functional effort to figure out where AI can actually improve the business can quickly turn into territory protection. Instead of asking, “Where can AI make this organization better?” teams start asking, “How do I prove my team is doing something with AI?” (or simply “why my team shoudl keep their jobs”)

That’s how you end up with dashboards, prompt trackers, experiments, and endless initiatives that create the appearance of progress without necessarily creating much actual value.

Tasks alone don’t offer reassurance

One of the easiest ways to calm an anxious executive is to show them “stuff”.

We’re tracking thousands of prompts. Monitoring six of the top answer engines. Measuring citations. Building GEO dashboards. Launching AI content workflows. Everyone can relax because we are officially “doing the AI things”.

Showing proof of progress against AI visibility is incredibly difficult. It's even messier because measurement itself is still evolving. Visibility, brand mentions, citations, sentiment, and how models characterize your company can all matter, but none of them automatically translate into business impact… aka DOLLARS.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t measure them. It means you shouldn’t confuse an action, task, or single metric being available with that metric being meaningful.

Sometimes a dashboard is insight. Sometimes it’s just reassurance with charts.

Nick’s Weekly Lunch Special

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, or any way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

If you want to go deeper on AI search, two of my friends, Crystal Carter and Ross Hudgens, recently released new books that are absolutely worth picking up.

Pick up Crystal's book on Amazon
Pick up Ross’s Book on Amazon

Saying “yes” doesn’t mean saying yes

And THIS is why I liked Tom Critchlow’s point about SEOs needing to adopt more of a “yes” stance with executives. If your default response to every AI idea is “No, because…” you’re choosing to fight an uphill battle. You keep beating the same drum while your executive walks away with no answers and nothing to calm their nerves.

Saying yes doesn’t mean blindly approving every shiny object or pretending the data is better than it is. There’s a huge difference between saying, “No, that AI visibility data isn’t accurate” and “Yes, we checked out those platforms. Here’s what we saw, here are the limitations, and here’s how we plan on using (or not using) the data today.”

Your leader's decisions might ultimately be the same, but their experience discussing AI with you and your team is completely different. Instead of hearing, yet again, that they’re wrong, don’t understand XYZ, and shouldn’t take any action, they see that you’ve looked at it, understand it, and are paying attention.

Your leaders don’t need you to pretend you’ve cracked the AI cheat code. They need someone who can look through all the noise and say, “We’re paying attention. We’re not panicking. Here’s what matters right now.”

The people who become most valuable during this transition might not be the ones with the longest list of GEO tactics. They may simply be the people who make everyone else in the room a little less nervous.

That’s the reassurance leaders are actually looking for.

Reassurance is the first step. But most leaders are still looking for that fully automated AI button to cut all costs and get rich overnight. <3 <3 <3

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Perplexity Cited Our Client on Day 1. Google Followed on Day 3.

Brought to you by Jolly, the team behind Own A Prompt.

The most persistent myth in AI search: that it’s slow — that getting cited takes months of “authority building” before anything moves.

So we timed a real campaign, for a real client, and published every screenshot:

• Day 1: our Reddit thread goes live — Perplexity starts citing it

• Day 3: #1 organic ranking in Google, and AI Mode starts recommending the client by name

• Day 19: all 7 major AI surfaces — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, AI Overviews, AI Mode — are recommending them

Total content required: one Reddit thread and one onsite blog post.

AI search doesn’t reward patience. It rewards the right evidence in the right places.

See the Timed Case Study

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.

A few weeks back, I joined Jeremy Rivera on his Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk about the SEO job market and the state of digital marketing.

At one point, I said something that has been stuck in my head ever since:

No, SEO still isn’t dead. But it has changed, and too many companies are still hiring for the version of SEO that worked five years ago.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

When the stakes are high,
AI citation patterns change

In everyday or commercial queries, brand-owned content earns citations. But when users ask AI about their health or finances, the rules change. Government and official sources dominate, Citation Cores shrink, and brand content struggles to cut through.

Semrush’s latest YMYL Mini Study maps the trends in AI sources when the stakes are highest, across 22 topics, four platforms, and millions of prompts.

If your brand operates in finance, health, or any high-trust category, this changes how you approach AI visibility.

Download Free Study

Stop hiring for the old version of SEO

I’ve already written about why most companies are interviewing SEOs wrong. The questions you ask absolutely matter!

But interviewing is only one part of hiring successfully.

The bigger issues occur before you even sit down with a candidate. Companies decide they “need SEO” or “be found in ChatGPT” without being honest about the business problem they are trying to solve. The FOMO is real!

Do you need more qualified leads within your specific industry? Better conversion from the traffic you already earn? Someone who can get work shipped across engineering, content, product, PR and legal? Or do you simply have a giant SEO backlog that nobody has prioritized in years?

These are not the same job.

So many job descriptions still seek one person to own technical SEO, content strategy, AI visibility, reporting, UX, CRO, link building, project management, and filing the patent for the next industry acronym. (joking…maybe I’m not)

That is not a job description. It is a wishlist for a role that allows the company to save money on payroll vs. hiring the multiple roles required to fulfill all asks.

What I would actually grade: judgment over jargon

A senior SEO/AI discovery leader needs a strong technical foundation. That is table stakes… and unfortunately, in my experience, technical SEOs are a small percentage of the larger SEO talent pool.

SEO- and AI-specific knowledge is valuable, but I value it far less (roughly 25%) in the equation for what it takes to win today. The real weight goes to critical thinking, communication, persuasion, prioritization, and business judgment.

• Can they diagnose and reverse engineer problems instead of jumping to their favorite tactic?

• Can they explain what the data means to someone who does not understand, let alone care about, crawl budget?

• Can they make a case that earns support across teams?

• Can they clearly say what not to do right now, mapping ROI vs. LEO?

Human-led AI and the traditional search playbook are already aging in real time. I don't need someone who can confidently repeat search engine and AI company announcements, share thought leadership, or bring up the “best practice” to-do list that still lives in the backlog. I need someone who can build a better playbook when the current one stops working.

That is the difference between someone who knows SEO and someone who can lead discovery.

The best answer may be “I need more information.”

One of my clients was hiring an internal SEO/AI leader. The problem was not a lack of candidates. The hiring manager and panel weren't deep in the weeds within the organic side of the search space, so they needed a way to separate someone who knows a lot about SEO from someone who can actually get shit done.

Enter me.

I coached the panel on what to look for, then built a candidate exercise around a fictional version of the client’s business. Organic clicks were down. Conversion and quality KPIs were up. I provided keyword and AI visibility trends, along with budgets, market-level capacity, and other smaller data points someone might appreciate.

Basically: enough information to make a recommendation, but enough ambiguity that a best-practices checklist would not cut it.

Weaker Candidate’s Response

A weaker candidate sees declining traffic and immediately pitches an audit, content refresh, technical cleanup, and an AI visibility initiative.

In other words: every SEO tactic they have used across their career.

Stronger Candidate’s Response

A stronger candidate does not immediately start prescribing tactics. They first question whether the problem has been defined correctly.

Did analytics or cookie consent changes make year-over-year comparison unreliable? Why are conversions and attended appointments increasing while traffic declines? Why chase visibility in location X if the business cannot serve more patients there, while location Y has unused capacity? And does that AI visibility score have any proven relationship to attended appointments, or does it just make a dashboard look exciting?

Then they recommend a path forward: validate measurement first, prioritize markets where demand can become revenue, and treat AI visibility as a hypothesis to test (not a KPI to blindly target improvements for)

“I need more information” is not avoiding the assignment. It is often the best evidence that you are speaking with a senior leader.

The difference is they do not stop there. They explain what is missing, why it changes the decision, and what they would do next while that answer is being validated.

They aren’t telling you why they can’t answer your questions; they are asking questions and, given clarification, providing recommendations and flagging what needs more info.

Test how they think—not whether they guessed your answer

Use a short panel interview and a realistic exercise. But do not grade candidates on whether their final recommendation matches your predetermined answer.

Grade how they think.

Do they challenge weak assumptions? Identify measurement gaps? Connect search work to actual business capacity and outcomes? Do they make real tradeoffs when resources are constrained? Can they explain their logic in language a CMO, CFO, and CTO can all understand?

If engineering gives them 40 hours this quarter and they label six months of work “critical,” they are not strategic. They have simply created a more polished backlog.

Nick’s Weekly Lunch Special

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, or any way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

Hire someone who can operate outside the SEO silo

Search is no longer a Google-exclusive ecosystem.

The person you hire should understand how broader search connects to product and UX, customer support, paid landing pages, brand reputation, conversion, and ultimately revenue.

Technical SEO still very much matters. However, sometimes the root problem is not crawlability. It is a weak conversion path, limited inventory, slow follow-up, or a product people simply like less than the alternatives. No, AI ain’t gonna save ya either.

If a recommendation only benefits Google, it is probably not worth prioritizing.

AI did not eliminate the need for SEO talent. It eliminated the excuse to hire someone whose entire role can be turned into a repeatable prompt or workflow.

Hire the person who makes your business smarter. Not the person who gives you the longest checklist.

Hire for judgment now, or prepare to hire again in 18 months.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

One Reddit Thread. Three Days. Four AI Engines.

Brought to you by Jolly, the team behind the new Own A Prompt service.

A Jolly client–a B2B equipment retailer in a delightfully unglamorous niche–wanted to win exactly one buying question: “equipment dealers that ship nationwide?”

We built the evidence AI needed to see. Within days of publishing:

— Our Reddit thread hit #1 in Google for the exact prompt

— Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews began recommending the client by name

— Perplexity listed them as the top pick, and Grok cited their site too

Same playbook, next prompt: their onsite blog is now getting pulled into AI answers as well.

That’s Own A Prompt. You pick the question your buyers ask. We make you the answer.

Check out Own A Prompt

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Airops and Jolly Search.

Quick Note: I’ll be at BrightonSEO in San Diego this week. If you are also attending, I’ll be the guy in the SEOJobs.com T-shirt. Wave me down and let’s chat!

Want to be an SEO expert? Congratulations, you are one!

The barrier to entry has always been incredibly low for our industry. There’s no required experience. No competency test. No professional standard exists that you have to meet before convincing a business guaranteed rankings to hand over its money.

The bar, unfortunately, is so low that you can literally decide you’re an SEO expert today and start charging for that “expertise” tomorrow.

That’s how we still end up with companies selling “guaranteed #1 rankings” and $499/month SEO packages to business owners who have no realistic way to know whether they’re getting screwed. (Hint: 99% of the time they are)

And now we’ve added AI search to the mix.

Suddenly we have AI, GEO, and AEO “experts” everywhere, even as platforms, tactics, reporting, and acronyms change by the week.

SEO has always had a trust problem. AI has now 100xed the issue.

Thank you to AirOps for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

A new conversation on how high-growth marketing teams operate

Marketing leaders are under increasing pressure to deliver more: higher pipeline targets, changing buyer behavior, and limited resources. But the teams growing fastest right now are operating under a very different set of conditions.

That’s why we’re sharing an upcoming conversation for marketing leaders: The New Rules of Growth.

Krithika S. was the first marketing hire at Stripe and at OpenAI, building both marketing functions from the ground up. She now leads marketing at Thrive Capital, working with founders across the portfolio on growth. She’s joined by Christy Roach, CMO at AirOps, who has held marketing leadership roles at AssemblyAI, Airtable, Asana, and Gusto. Together, they’re veterans of high-growth culture, having been early employees at companies like Stripe, OpenAI, Asana, Gusto, and Airtable.

On September 17 at 10am PT / 1pm ET, they’ll break down results from the Marketing Leaders Reality Index and discuss how high-growth teams are changing the way they:

• Hire and design their teams

• Allocate budget and resources

• Prioritize initiatives

• Measure success and report performance

• Make the case for additional budget and headcount

• Operate with greater leverage as growth demands increase

Go deeper into the operating principles that set high-growth teams apart, and what you can apply to your own team to accelerate growth and secure more resourcing.

The webinar is free
Reserve your spot today!

AI Didn’t Create Fake Experts. It Made Them Look Better.

Trust me, these bad SEOs aren’t new. AI just made it a hell of a lot easier to look like a good one.

Today, anyone can use AI to generate an SEO audit (please don’t), keyword research, technical recommendations, content briefs, schema, competitive analysis, and roadmaps full of tasks to keep teams busy for months.

That doesn’t make the work bad. I use AI every day.

The problem is that you no longer need to understand the work to produce something that looks like you do, and this is how “expertise” skyrockets and actual performance drops harder than the stock market in the 1930’s.

We’re watching the same thing happen with AI search. Read a few LinkedIn posts about LLM visibility, update your headline to “GEO Expert,” establish your opinion on GEO vs SEO vs AEO, and you’re open for business.

AI didn’t eliminate expertise; it’s making it that much more important, and it eliminated many of the clues we used to identify who actually has it.

The People Most Vulnerable Have the Least Protection

Large companies aren’t immune to bad SEOs, but they at least have some protection: procurement teams, legal reviews, references, RFPs (I loathe these, but that’s another post for later), and experienced marketers in-house asking questions before signing a contract.

99% of the time, small businesses don’t have these security blankets.

They’re hiring an SEO specifically because they don’t understand SEO. Yet somehow we expect them to understand enough SEO to determine whether the person they’re hiring actually knows what the hell they’re doing.

That’s how a business owner ends up paying $500–$2,000 every month for reports, ranking reports, and a bunch of activity that produces little to no business value.

At $1,500/month, that’s $18,000 a year.

For a small business, this isn’t coming from an established marketing budget. It's likely coming from the owner’s personal savings.

And No, I Don’t Want Another Bullshit SEO Certificate

I can already see the collective industry eye roll. Great, another certification. I’m rolling my eyes with you.

Pay for a course. Watch a few hours of videos. Take a test based on the material they just taught you. Download your badge. Update LinkedIn.

Congratulations, you’re now a “Certified SEO Expert!”

That proves you completed a course. It doesn’t prove you can actually do SEO.

And here’s the kicker: make the materials actually hard enough that passing it actually means something.

If everyone is a credentialed expert, then I’d argue nobody is.

Here’s the SEO Credential I’d Actually Respect

So what would a certification I actually look like that isn’t the laughing stock of the industry?

Let’s call it the Certified Search Optimization Professional (CSOP)… Or whatever someone else smarter than me comes up with.

First, you don’t get to take the test just because you paid the fee. Hear me out; it would require at least two years of verifiable SEO work. That doesn’t prove you’re good at SEO. It earns you the opportunity to prove it.

If you do this successfully, you'll be in a position to take the actual exam. This is a hypothetical breakdown of what I would like to see.

40%: Proctored knowledge exam. Crawling, indexing, architecture, technical SEO, content, structured data, measurement, migrations, search systems, and AI search fundamentals. No Google. No ChatGPT. Just your nerdiness on full display!

60%: Live sandbox. Here’s a broken website with 20+ legitimate SEO problems. You have three hours and limited resources. Diagnose it, prioritize what actually matters, and explain to an executive what you would fix, why, and what you expect it to accomplish.

Finding 37 things wrong with a website doesn’t make you a great SEO. Knowing which three are costing the business money might.

OH, and the credential expires! Require annual updates and full recertification every three years.

Search changes too quickly for a test you passed ten years ago to mean anything today.

SEO Is Art AND Science

Which one of ya’ll want to say it first? “But Nick, SEO doesn’t have one right answer.”

Exactly.

SEO has always been part art and part science. Two great SEOs can look at the same website, recommend completely different strategies, and both be right.

So don’t try to certify the art. Test the fundamentals.

Can you diagnose crawling and indexing issues? Interpret the data? Understand canonicalization? Identify risk? Prioritize what matters? Explain why you’re recommending something?

The credential doesn’t need you to recite every Google update over the past twenty years. It simply needs to prove you have the foundational competency of a productive search professional.

A Credential Nobody Requires Is Just Another Badge

Of course, none of this matters if nobody cares whether you have it.

The credential becomes valuable when enterprise RFPs start preferring it, insurance companies recognize it, marketplaces verify it, and small businesses know to look for it before signing a contract.

Not having the credential wouldn’t mean you’re incompetent. Having it would mean your competency was independently verified.

Would I take it? Absolutely!

I’d submit my work. I’d prove my experience. I’d sit for the exam. I’d take the sandbox. Pain in the ass, sure, but one less company screwed by an overeager Instagram SEO/AI Bro? Sign me up!

And if I couldn’t demonstrate the SEO competency I’m asking companies to pay me thousands of dollars for every month?

I shouldn’t get the credential. Neither should anyone else.

That’s the entire point.

If proving you know SEO threatens your SEO career (or business), the test isn’t the problem.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

You’re Already Referring Clients. You’re Just Not Invoicing for It.

Brought to you by Jolly, the linkbuilding and Reddit team your peers already refer clients to.

Every SEO knows the moment: a client needs links, Reddit brand mentions, or AI search visibility that you don’t deliver in-house. So you say “I know a team” and hand it off. For free.

Jolly Referral Partners make the same intro - with commission:

• You earn 10–15% of every payment that client makes in their first year.

• Zero sales work: you intro, we run the calls, proposals, and delivery.

• Active partners clear $1,000+/month on autopilot.

Same intro you were going to make anyway. Now it compounds.

Become a Jolly Partner

P.S. Prefer a warm, personalized introduction over a signup form? Introduce new Jolly clients directly to greg@jollyseo.com and we’ll take it from there.

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.

Rewind to 2009: a young Nick started his first SEO role. No official training. Just an internet connection, message boards, Whiteboard Friday, and Twitter. Curiosity, testing, and a will to win were the original equation for finding SEO success.

Fast forward to ~2015, and starting an SEO career meant putting in the work to learn the Moz Beginner’s Guide and apply a fairly standardized checklist of best practices. There was still plenty of hard work involved, but knowing what to do (and doing it consistently) could take you to a six-figure SEO career.

Now, in 2026, we’ve gone through yet another pivot in what makes an SEO career successful. We now have AI. It will not replace SEOs, but the lazy ones are toast.

The complete SEO playbook from ten years ago is now table stakes for starting your SEO career. But the days when demand drastically outpaced talent are gone. That changes what it takes to build an SEO career today, and we are not going back.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

See who’s winning AI search
and borrow their strategy

Semrush has published our biggest AI visibility study yet. It now explores 7 months of data, alongside multiple playbooks and studies that unpack the trends and tactics for you. All completely free. Get insights built from:

• 126M+ real AI search prompts

• 22 industries

• 4 AI platforms

• Thousands of brands

Find out who made the leaderboards and why the winners are on top.

Explore the AI Visibility Index

The Old Career Formula: 20% Hard Work, 80% Checkbox Execution

“Checkbox SEO” is not an insult… (okay, not exactly a compliment either). But it is simply how many SEO roles were structured.

If you were fairly organized, understood the basic tools, could explain the fundamentals of SEO, and delivered decent work, you were considered useful. In plenty of cases, that was enough to get hired, retain clients, earn promotions, and advance your career.

Basic SEO—site structure, internal linking, keyword research, and content creation (okay, maybe with a sprinkle of paid links) nearly always led to directional success.

This “strategy” still took effort. You had to learn the craft, do the research, build recommendations, and implement them.

But the path to “SEOing a site” was pretty standardized. You could create enough value simply by fixing what was missing.

Today, the harder question is whether the business should do it at all.

Why That Formula No Longer Works 🫣

More companies now have the fundamentals covered, or at least have an agency, platform, AI tool, or internal team telling them what these fundamentals are.

AI can generate an audit, summarize a SERP, suggest a content brief, write metadata, identify schema issues/gaps, and create a 90-day roadmap before your morning coffee gets cold.

That does not mean AI replaces SEO jobs. It means “identifying obvious work” is no longer enough to make you valuable to a company

The biggest SEO differentiator is no longer knowing what Google says is best practice or ripping off dates for various algorithm updates. It is knowing how to make decisions and when best practices matter versus when they are just… best practice.

Examples:

• Which opportunity provides enough ROI to justify an engineering team prioritizing SEO over 200 other “to-do” list items?

• When should SEO accept “good enough” rather than holding up a release?

• Which content ideas will actually help the customer, the brand, or revenue?

• When traffic declines because of AI Overviews, what should change and what should not?

• When a stakeholder suggests actioning a dumb request they saw online, can you explain why it’s not the best option for the company without becoming “the SEO person who always says no”?

• Can you recognize when the problem is not SEO at all, but product, pricing, brand recognition, UX, or a broken conversion path?

This is where strategic SEOs separate themselves from checkbox task managers.

Effective Communication Becomes THE Revenue Skill

A great SEO recommendation that never gets implemented has the same business value as a bad recommendation: Z-E-R-O!

SEOs who want to grow their careers need to turn complex search issues into decisions a business leader or team lead can act on.

That means clearly communicating what is happening, why it matters to this business, what happens if nothing changes, what you recommend doing first, and the tradeoff you are asking the team to make. Then measure and show proof that it worked. (This is especially valuable for showing engineers and developers how their work creates value!)

“Add schema” is not a recommendation. “We need to improve our internal linking” is not a recommendation.

THOSE ARE TASKS.

The recommendation is explaining why this deserves attention ahead of everything else competing for limited resources.

Stop treating communication like a soft skill; it is your lifeline. It is how SEO gets funded, prioritized, implemented, and connected to actual revenue.

SEO does not fail because teams lack ideas. It fails because the person with the idea cannot effectively communicate and persuade the decision-makers.

The Checkbox Is No Longer the Job

The future of an SEO career is (and always has been) tied to business outcomes. Not keyword rankings, not organic sessions, and certainly not third-party AI visibility scores.

A shitty product, unclear positioning, poor customer experience, poor pricing, and little to no brand recognition cannot be fixed with another 2,000-word “skyscraper” blog post.

The fundamentals still matter. Learn tech SEO. Learn content. Learn distribution and analytics. Learn how search engines and answer engines work.

But don’t mistake memorizing a checklist of “best practices” or a list of “important” dates for career security. People who build successful SEO careers understand what the company actually sells, why customers choose it, what makes the brand credible, and where organic search can genuinely support the buying journey.

That is exactly what makes them stand out from the rest of the SEO industry.

Years of experience might look good on your resume, but they are not proof that you can make the business better.

The checklist gets you into the room.

Critical thinking, communication, and business judgment determine whether you’re a critical asset or top of the list for when cuts are being made.

Still using “years of experience” as your only trust signal? Don’t be surprised when your next experience is figuring out unemployment.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

One Warm Intro = $1,620.
Want the Job That Collects Them?

Brought to you by Jolly - this week it's not a guide; it's a job.

Jolly is hiring a remote Partnerships Manager to expand our referral network: recruiting the influencers, agencies, and consultants whose intros become clients.

The math is the interesting part. You earn 30% of every referral fee your partners generate.

One typical $36k/year client = $1,620 to you, from a single intro. Stack an active partner book and commissions can more than 5x the base.

• $1,000–$1,800/month base + uncapped commission

• Fully remote, global

• We measure results, not hours

• You: SDR/BDR-style outreach chops (email + LinkedIn), list-building with Sales Nav or Apollo, bonus points for an existing network in marketing

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already qualified.

See the Full Role

P.S. Not looking, but know the perfect person? Forward them this role - they owe you a coffee when the commissions start landing!

This week’s special #SEOForLunch (PART 2) sponsor is DoFollow.com

On Tuesday, I shared the story of the time I lost a client to an AI SaaS platform.

While it stung, the point wasn’t about losing business to AI; it was about how quickly businesses will trade away human nuance, risk management, and strategic context for the illusion of an easy-button solution.

If you missed Tuesday’s post, the core idea is this: when you commoditize expertise as automated deliverables, you inevitably commoditize the human behind it.

Which is why today, I want to extend that post a little further into something everyone in our industry is dealing with right now: the ghosting epidemic.

We’re not “just” talking about applicants being ignored after interviews (this is just rude). It extends even further: think prospects, partners, former coworkers, vendors, and the people who initiated the conversation in the first place…then disappeared.

Thank you to DoFollow.com for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Your Buyers Are Asking AI.
Will Your Brand Show Up?

Before a buyer ever books a demo, they’re already narrowing the list. They’re asking AI which products to consider and still turning to Google to compare options.

If your B2B SaaS brand isn’t showing up in those answers, you may be eliminated before the shortlist is even made.

Visibility+ from dofollow.com helps SaaS teams improve visibility across AI answers and traditional search through:

• Proprietary intelligence that shows where your brand is missing

• Targeted outreach to strengthen visibility where buyers are looking

• Clear reporting that shows what’s working

• A strategy built for both AI discovery and traditional search

The goal isn’t just more mentions. It’s making sure your brand is present when buyers decide who belongs on the shortlist.

See where your brand is missing →

A warm intro should NOT end in silence

A former coworker of mine recently introduced me to their company's CMO. We got on a call, talked through the opportunity, and to be honest, it was clear we were not completely aligned.

And that is fine.

Not every chat needs to turn into a long-lasting, perfect-match business relationship. Sometimes the fit is not there. Sometimes the timing is wrong. Sometimes both groups walk away realizing it would be more work than it is worth.

But because the introduction came from someone I previously worked with, I continued the conversation in good faith and out of respect for that connection.

Even though the call wasn’t perfect, the CMO (and my previous coworker) told me they would provide an update by “next Tuesday.”

Next Tuesday came and went. No email from the CMO. No update from my former coworker. Nothing.

I did not expect a signed agreement. Hell, I didn’t even follow up. I didn’t expect us to work together. But they set an expectation, and then both completely disappeared.

A warm introduction, in my experience, leads to my longest-tenured clients. Other times it’s just not a right fit. What it is not is a free pass to waste someone’s time. If anything, it should create more accountability (because someone put their own reputation behind the connection)

Then came the NDA that disappeared into thin air

Ready for the second round of “Tales from Nick’s consulting life”?

More recently, a decent-sized brand reached out to discuss my fractional SEO services.

We got on a call and talked through the business, their challenges, and what they were looking to solve. As usual, I had more questions than answers at that stage. That is kind of the point. A competent consultant should not hear a few surface-level problems and immediately pretend to know exactly what needs to happen and hand over a statement of work... but I digress; that’s likely a future topic to break down.

They said they could share more context if I was willing to sign an NDA. Fair enough.

To avoid jumping through corporate hoops and speed things up, they asked me to provide my own NDA. So I pulled up my standard agreement, reviewed it, updated it for this situation, and sent it over.

I even asked for confirmation that it would work to further expedite the timeline.

Then nothing.

I followed up a few days later. Nothing.

I sent another follow-up the following week. Nothing.

That was about a month ago now.

The weird part is that I was not chasing them. They reached out to me. They asked for the call. They asked for my NDA agreement. They asked me to take ownership of the next step.

At any point, they could have said, “We are pausing this.” “We went another direction.” “Legal is holding this up.” Or even, “We are not ready.”

All acceptable. All better than silence. But let’s be real, the ghosting is just plain rude.

“No” is not the problem. Avoiding the conversation is

Nobody is entitled to a client, a partnership, a job offer, or even a response justifying the answer they gave you. (Remember when I wrote about Google not owing us shit clicks)

Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes a company goes another direction (like hiring AI over you). Sometimes the budget disappears, priorities change, or the fit just is not there.

That is business.

But once you invite someone into a process, especially one you started, you owe them the basic courtesy of closing the loop

I get it, “No” can be frustrating and disappointing. Silence turns someone else’s calendar into the cost of your indecision (or straight ignorance).

The consultant who held time for a proposal. The applicant who completed another interview. The former coworker who made an introduction. The potential partner who followed the steps you asked them to take.

Ghosting is not “meh, we weren’t going to move forward anyways”. It completely shifts ownership, follow-ups, and wasted time onto the person who did not create the situation.

You do not have to say yes. You just have to be willing to say something. It’s common decency. You can’t even imagine how often I hear reports like the above about ghosting post-interview — the “bad” part about running SEOJobs.com.

Efficiency should create more room for professionalism

This is really not complicated.

Do not promise an update by Tuesday if you have no intention of providing one. Do not ask someone for a proposal, paperwork, an introduction, or an interview process unless you are prepared to respond when they follow through.

If priorities change, say so. If the answer is no, say no. If you dropped the ball, own it instead of hoping enough time will make the conversation disappear.

You do not need a new workflow, an AI agent, or an all-hands company meeting to send a three-sentence email.

Efficiency is supposed to remove busywork, so we have more time for judgment, relationships, and the human parts of business. It should not become an excuse to start more conversations than we are willing to finish.

If you cannot close the loop, stop opening the conversation.

~Nick

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Profound and Jolly Search.

I lost a potential client to a $99 AI subscription. Here’s what the dashboard could not replace.

When you’ve spent years in SEO, you get used to losing clients.

You lose them to budget cuts, shifting internal priorities, redesigned sites that tank traffic before you can save them, or a new CMO who “has a guy.”

It hurts, but it’s business.

What hits differently is the first time you get replaced not by a competitor, but by a software subscription.

Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Do Claude and Claude Code Cite Different Sources?

To better understand the similarities and differences between Claude and Claude Code, we analyze two separate datasets:

• 24,135 Claude and Claude Code responses across a set of prompts from 11 randomly sampled categories, including a coding subset

• The top 1,000 webpages visited by Claude and Claude Code agents over a 30-day period, among a large collection of internally tracked domains

We found that Claude and Claude Code behave like different Answer Engines. In our sample where web search is enabled, Claude Code searches in 13% of responses, compared to Claude’s 93%. Even though they mention a similar number of brands in each response, those brands overlap by only 20% on average.

Read more on the Profound Blog

The Time I Lost a Client to AI Software

Earlier this year, a prospective client reached out to discuss working together.

We hopped on a call to talk through their goals, and they checked all the boxes: strong fit, clear expectations, and zero pushback on my pricing or process.

Before we hung up, they let me know they were speaking with a few other providers. I applauded them for doing their due diligence.

My approach to pitching is super direct (shocker, I know): no fluff, no games, no wild promises. That transparency makes me a great fit for some companies, but others simply prefer to be wined and dined.

After a second call to address a few follow-up questions, I received the dreaded email: “Thanks, but we went in another direction.”

Bummer, but it happens. That’s just business.

Except the email did not end there.

The “provider” they chose was not another consultant or agency. It was an AI tool that promised it all: automated keyword research, content briefs, technical audits, and execution for a fraction of my monthly retainer.

I won’t lie. That one stung.

But I wished them well and told them to come back if they needed further help down the road.

It was not just a lost contract. It was a front-row seat to an industry-wide shift: we are rapidly trading human expertise, nuance, and strategic context for the illusion of easy-button efficiency.

And as I soon realized, once an organization decides human judgment is an unnecessary expense, the way it treats human relationships can change just as quickly.

Breaking down the “AI promise”

To be clear, I am not anti-AI tooling. I use it, and I expect other good marketers to use it too.

It can accelerate research, organize data, build a first-draft brief, identify patterns across many pages, and reduce the manual work everyone hates.

That is the point: AI should make skilled people more efficient. It should not be treated as a replacement for the skilled person responsible for deciding what deserves to happen in the first place.

The promise made to this prospective client was not entirely wrong. The platform could likely help them find keywords, generate briefs, run technical checks, and produce more content than a consultant could manually create in the same amount of time.

A platform can tell you a keyword has search volume. It cannot tell you whether that traffic will attract the right customer, support the company’s actual revenue goals, or divert attention from a much better opportunity.

It can suggest creating another page because the query looks distinct in a spreadsheet. It may not recognize that the site already has several pages competing for the same intent—or that the right answer is to consolidate existing pages rather than publish one more URL nobody needs.

It can flag 100 technical issues in an audit. It cannot walk into an engineering planning meeting and explain why five of those issues are worth prioritizing, 90 can wait, and the remaining five are not meaningful problems at all.

And it can produce content at scale. What it cannot do is understand the political, legal, product, sales, brand, or customer-service context that may make an otherwise “SEO-friendly” recommendation a terrible business decision.

That is where the easy-button pitch breaks down.

The tool can create activity. It can make a dashboard look busy. It can even generate pages that rank. But none of that means it understands the business, owns the downside, or knows when the standard SEO recommendation should be ignored.

The True Cost of Commoditizing Expertise

The ideal setup is a skilled person using AI to maximize efficiency, NOT using AI as an excuse to eliminate the person accountable for the work.

For whatever reason, the reasonable middle ground has become hard to discuss. Raise concerns about quality, risk, or strategy and you are labeled “anti-AI.” Suggest automating everything possible, and you are innovative. (but you might also be out of a job in 6 months.)

The question is not whether AI can do work faster. Of course it can. The question is whether doing more work, more quickly, actually creates a better outcome for the business.

Ten years ago, publishing more content may have been a viable growth strategy (long live programmatic SEO). In 2026, turning five thoughtful articles into 50 mediocre ones at half the cost is not automatically an efficiency win. It may just be a faster way to fill your site with content that does not earn attention, trust, links, qualified traffic, or revenue. (Start with getting indexed for longer than a few weeks; that will be harder than you think.)

That is the easy-button trap: confusing lower production costs with better business results.

When companies reduce SEO to tasks like keyword research, briefs, audits, reports, and the creation of pages per month—they make it easy to compare a consultant against software. Software will almost always win that comparison on price and volume.

But you were never paying the consultant to open Semrush or Ahrefs, build a spreadsheet, or hand you a technical audit PDF.

You were paying for the judgment behind it all: what to prioritize, what to ignore, what creates risk, and what needs to change when the original plan is not working. You were paying for someone to own the recommendation, not simply check a box confirming the work was completed.

The Transition: From Code to Culture

Replacing a consultant with an AI tool is not automatically a bad decision. In the right situation, a good tool can absolutely help an internal team move faster.

But when every person becomes a cost center, and every relationship becomes an input-output transaction, something much bigger gets lost.

Once human expertise becomes just another expense to trim, it becomes a lot easier to treat the human relationship behind it as disposable too.

That mindset does not stay contained to SEO strategy or marketing budgets. It shows up in how companies communicate with agencies, freelancers, employees, and even candidates looking to join the organization.

Or, more often, how they avoid communicating with them at all!

Keep an eye on your inbox this Thursday.

In Part 2: The Ghosting Epidemic, I’ll cover more about what happens when this same automated, transactional mindset extends beyond the work itself….

… Think: clients disappearing mid-contract. Prospects going silent after asking for a proposal. Job seekers getting pushed through ATS pipelines only to be met with absolutely nothing.

Because apparently, basic professional courtesy is now optional.

Turns out keeping a “human in the loop” is only important when someone needs to take the blame. Everything else, though? AI it!

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Perplexity Cited Our Client on Day 1. Google Followed on Day 3.

Brought to you by Jolly, the team behind Own A Prompt

The most persistent myth in AI search: that it’s slow — that getting cited takes months of “authority building” before anything moves.

So we timed a real campaign, for a real client, and published every screenshot:

• Day 1: our Reddit thread goes live — Perplexity starts citing it

• Day 3: #1 organic ranking in Google, and AI Mode starts recommending the client by name

• Day 19: all 7 major AI surfaces — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, AI Overviews, AI Mode — are recommending them

Total content required: one Reddit thread and one onsite blog post.

AI search doesn’t reward patience. It rewards the right evidence in the right places.

See the Timed Case Study

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are AirOps and Jolly Search.

Over the course of this year, we’ve talked about the “easy button” and how many corporate leaders are blindly trusting AI to run their businesses.

Since we already covered AI scams, the legal consequences of using AI, and what happens when people are held accountable for their AI slop, I want to try something different.

I want to try to defend the AI “easy button”.

Despite my months and months of ranting about easy buttons, AI easy buttons absolutely exist. The problem is that companies keep pressuring AI, over and over, to make decisions that require experience, context, and accountability.

The best AI easy buttons don’t replace judgment. They eliminate the tedious work surrounding it.

Thank you to Airops for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

The Marketing Leaders Reality Index

We asked more than 300 marketing execs to share what’s actually happening inside their teams right now, not the polished version that shows up on LinkedIn. They gave us the real picture on budgets, headcount, AI adoption, and channel performance.

Some key findings:

• 86.6% are prioritizing AI search

• 75.4% got higher pipeline or revenue targets

• Only 43.0% got a bigger budget to hit them

• Only 23% feel confident measuring it

Our biggest takeaway was that the teams that are growing aren’t simply those with the biggest budgets. Teams that are increasing targets, headcount, and budgets are also changing their KPIs, shifting their channel mix, and building AI capacity inside their organization.

Go deep on how these marketing leaders are balancing increasing targets, changing channels, and AI pressure.

Get the full report ->

Turn Meetings Into To-Do Lists

This, personally, has been one of the most transformative areas of my consulting business. See, maybe it’s my ADHD brain, but I can either have a great conversation with someone OR take great notes. If I try to do both, I do a poor job at both.

For me, AI transcription and summarization may be the most obvious legitimate easy button. Who would have thought we could have our cake and eat it too!

I personally use Fireflies.ai (no affiliate relationship), but select your favorite note-taking app and have it start recording meetings and extract the following:

• Decisions made

• Questions requiring follow-up

• Assigned tasks and owners

• Deadlines mentioned — this is my favorite!

• Unresolved debates (I’ll come back to this one)

The person who owns the meeting (and sets up AI note-taking) reviews the AI's output and sends it to the team. AI isn’t deciding what the business should do; it’s documenting what people already decided and attempts to hold them accountable.

Measurable value:

• Time spent writing notes during the meeting.

• Percentage of tasks with an owner and due date.

• Missed or overdue follow-ups.

• Reduction in “what did we talk about last time” meetings.

Identifying Data and Patterns Before Analysis

Give AI access to exports from approved, non-sensitive datasets and ask it to categorize, summarize, identify efficiencies, or flag items that stand out.

SEO examples:

• Group thousands of Search Console queries by intent (Better yet, your competitor’s keyword data!)

• Categorize declining pages by template or content type

• Compare winners and losers after an update (good timing with Google’s spam update, rigght!?)

• Surface unusual changes requiring investigation

• Convert messy exports into usable tables and graphics

Measurable value:

• Number of rows reviewed

• Analysis hours saved

• Percentage of the dataset categorized

• Additional opportunities or data anomalies discovered

Transform Existing Work Into New Formats

Yes, I know we all want the easy button to take the prompt “take this idea and provide me a fully polished deliverable,” but that’s just not gonna happen, trust me!.

Instead, leverage AI to recreate formats!

Examples:

• Convert podcast/webinar video into LinkedIn posts

• Create executive summaries from detailed public reports

• Draft meta descriptions from existing page copy

• Convert documentation into FAQs or training materials

You get it by now; you're not asking it to THINK for you, just execute the grunt work you don’t actually want to do yourself. QA is the new superpower we need to adopt!

Measurable value:

• Production time savings (per asset creation).

• Number of assets created from one source (This was always the goal since day 1!)

• Editing time (but do not let it blindly rewrite; make it give you recommendations or challenge the structure.)

Use AI as a First-Pass Editor

Most companies obsess over using AI to create more. But handing AI the final draft is like letting the ball boy call the game-winning play.

Let AI review the tape. Your experienced people should still make the call. (Anyone else getting excited for football!?)

Ask AI to review your work for:

• Missing information

• Contradictions

• Unanswered customer questions

• Confusing language

• Requirements that weren’t addressed

This isn’t final approval. It’s an extra set of eyes that can spot missed opportunities before a credentialed or knowledge human signs off.

Measurable value:

• Issues (big or small) caught before submitting your final work.

• Revision cycles and general review time

• Post-publication corrections if content is online

• Stakeholder feedback

Eliminate Repetitive Technical Work

In my opinion, this is one of the best use cases for AI. Use AI to produce small, testable pieces of technical work such as:

• Spreadsheet formulas

• Regex expressions

• SQL queries

• Schema markup

• Redirect mapping

• Basic scripts (I especially love this for Apps Script within G Sheets!)

• Looker Studio calculated fields

The output either works or it doesn’t, which makes your QA pretty straightforward.

You still define the desired outcome, own QA of the result, and control the implementation. Nobody should deploy AI-generated code across a production site without reviewing it. (OK, I might have done this a time or two for SEOJobs.com, but let’s just say lessons were learned)

Measurable value:

• Time required to complete the task

• Manual steps eliminated

• Error rate

• Number of records processed

• Cost compared with manual execution

Delegate the Labor, Not the Accountability

The true concept of an AI easy button was never the problem. The problem was deciding what we were willing to allow the button to control and its impact.

Meeting notes, data organization, content transformation, editing/reviews, and repetitive technical tasks are all tedious, measurable, and relatively easy to QA.

Go ahead, press the button for all of these!

Strategy, expertise, prioritization, and final approval are 100% different. Those require context and someone willing to accept responsibility when the answer is wrong.

Use AI to remove time from the larger process. Use people to determine whether the work is accurate, useful, and worth acting on.

Don’t allow AI to push its own easy button. It shouldn’t decide what matters, simply what the options are and details surrounding them.

Press the easy button all you want. Just don’t act surprised when it mass-produces your incompetence.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

One Reddit Thread. Three Days. Four AI Engines.

Brought to you by Jolly, the team behind the new Own A Prompt service.

A Jolly client–a B2B equipment retailer in a delightfully unglamorous niche–wanted to win exactly one buying question: “equipment dealers that ship nationwide?”

We built the evidence AI needed to see. Within days of publishing:

• Our Reddit thread hit #1 in Google for the exact prompt

• Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews began recommending the client by name

• Perplexity listed them as the top pick, and Grok cited their site too

Same playbook, next prompt: their onsite blog is now getting pulled into AI answers as well.

That’s Own A Prompt. You pick the question your buyers ask. We make you the answer.

Own Your Prompt

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.

If you were anywhere near the internet last week, you likely heard that Anthropic announced machine-readable watermarks for Claude-generated text.

CMON! Why do you really care about watermarks, or honestly, any other signal indicating that AI touched a piece of content?

Are you worried that people will discover you’re publishing crap? Or is the real “issue” that you think search engines and AI answer engines will penalize you for using it?

You should absolutely be concerned about the first question.

But let’s discuss why so many people are really panicking:

“Da rankingz, Nick!”

Thank you to Semrush Enterprise for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Steer the AI search conversations
around your brand

AI models don’t just cite brand-owned content. They build narratives from YouTube creators, Reddit threads, and LinkedIn voices. The brands that curate and show up consistently across these touchpoints shape their industry narratives.

Enterprise AIO gives you the capabilities to track and steer these third-party signals. Identify the creators, channels, and subreddits that matter to your audiences and AI models. Build prioritized actions to grow your authority. Answer the queries your potential customers are actually asking.

Explore Enterprise AIO

You’re Not Afraid of the Watermark. You’re Afraid of Being Found Out

For many people, the fear isn’t the watermark itself. It’s what others might assume after seeing it: that they lack expertise, didn’t do the work, or charged for an idea a machine produced.

You can’t control those assumptions. You can only control what you publish. (Don’t worry, people are working hard to not get caught)

If being “found out” would embarrass you, the problem probably isn’t the watermark. It’s that you don’t believe the finished work can withstand scrutiny.

There’s also a massive difference between using AI to organize your ideas, challenge your thinking, or improve a draft and blindly publishing its first response.

A watermark may indicate that Claude participated in the process somewhere. It cannot tell us who originated the idea, how much AI contributed, or whether the finished work is accurate or valuable.

Evidently, anti-watermarks are a business now too. I share, for example, but I know at least one of you is going to test/purchase it.

A watermark might identify part of the production process. It cannot evaluate the finished product.

But reputation isn’t the only concern. Marketers are already asking whether search engines will treat that signal as a reason to suppress the content.

Google Doesn’t Care That You Used AI. It Cares What You Did With It

Despite what some folks desperately want to believe, Google has never said that AI-generated content is automatically penalized or even “bad”.

In fact, Google’s own guidance acknowledges that generative AI can be useful for researching topics and adding structure to original content.

The issue here is when businesses use automation to create pages at scale without adding any meaningful value. The internet has enough copycats; if you're letting AI generate it solely on its own, it's going to copy all the copycats…

Google’s scaled content abuse policy aims to target large amounts of low-value content created to trick Google into achieving higher or better search rankings. This isn’t new; before AI, Google fought garbage content. AI just injected the SPAM with steroids.

AI content isn’t the problem. Unoriginal content created primarily to manipulate rankings is the problem. (I’m frothing at the mouth for the AI-Penguin type rollout crushing those who laid off their teams and pushed 100% AI content live)
* Update: funny enough, Google announced the August 2026 spam update today!

When given full autonomy, AI makes it easier to produce generic advice, unsupported claims, near-duplicate pages, recycled search results, and thousands of pages nobody asked for… let alone see value in.

Yes, creating garbage can definitely hurt your SEO. The watermark itself is not what causes this.

GEO Isn’t an AI Purity Contest Either

There is no universal rule that “Claude watermarked content will be excluded from AI-generated answers.”

Answer engines still need information that is useful to people.

The relevant question isn’t:

“Can the model tell that AI helped create this?”

It’s:

“Does this page contribute anything worth retrieving, citing, or synthesizing?”

Author bylines are a common starting point to build consistency for AI bots. However, by itself, it cannot make repetitive information “citation-worthy.” On the other end of the spectrum, an AI watermark doesn’t erase the value of original research, firsthand experience, or even opinions that generate human interest.

“A human wrote it” isn’t a competitive advantage if a thousand other humans already wrote the same thing. (I won’t even start on AI and copyright infringement.)

Go Ahead. Scan This Post

Substack will now let you scan posts on its platform using Pangram integration and get an idea of just how “AI” that content is. (They share how it works here)

So, go ahead. Scan this post. Here I’ll screenshot it myself.

8%, 18%, maybe it says 80% AI. (OMGz!)

I genuinely don’t care. (Although 31% feels very high for how many keystrokes I’ve added to write this post, but meh!)

You didn’t open this newsletter because I promised that every sentence was written in the wilderness with no internet connection. You opened it because the title caught your attention, you’ve valued my previous work, or simply get entertainment from my spicy takes on all things search/ai/business.

If you're learning that AI touched this (and other posts) changes your opinion, you're welcome to unsubscribe. We’ll miss you at the lunch table, but happy to welcome the next person taking your spot.

An AI score cannot tell me whether you finished the post, shared it, subscribed, clicked my sponsor’s link, or hired me.

“Eighteen percent AI” is a random number. Attention, trust, subscribers, and revenue are WINNING.

If this post produces those outcomes, it did its job. If it’s useless, a “100% human” score doesn’t instantly give me 10k more subs (bummer!)

Nick’s “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

---

Care About What You’re Willing to Publish

The rules never changed. Garbage, written by a human or AI, isn’t permission to scale to a gazillion pages. It makes your name/brand look like garbage, and you lose trust.

AI doesn’t negate your responsibility in providing quality work.

Before publishing, ask whether the work is accurate, original enough to justify existing, useful to its intended audience, and something you’re willing to defend with your name attached. (Now you understand why people are building the “remove whitelisting products)

If it is, publish it and stand behind it.

If it isn’t, manipulating the AI score won’t make it any better. (Cmon, we all learned in our SEO 101 days about “duplicate content,” and the rules aren’t any different for AI.)

You need to focus on WINNING.
I mean, don’t want the watermark? You could [gasp] write the entire content on your own!?

I use AI to generate #SEOForLunch hero images and help edit these posts. Otherwise, my rants would routinely exceed 1,500 words.

So, really, you should thank AI for making me shut up sooner.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly Search for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

One Warm Intro = $1,620. Want the
Job That Collects Them?

Brought to you by Jolly Search - this week it’s not a guide, it’s a job

Jolly is hiring a remote Partnerships Manager to expand our referral network: recruiting the influencers, agencies, and consultants whose intros become clients.

The math is the interesting part. You earn 30% of every referral fee your partners generate.

One typical $36k/year client = $1,620 to you from a single intro. Stack an active partner book, and commissions can exceed 5x the base.

• $1,000–$1,800/month base + uncapped commission

• Fully remote, global

• We measure results, not hours

• You: SDR/BDR-style outreach chops (email + LinkedIn), list-building with Sales Nav or Apollo, bonus points for an existing network in marketing

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already qualified.

See the Full Role

P.S. Not looking, but know the perfect person? Forward them this role - they owe you a coffee when the commissions start landing!

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Profound and Jolly Search.

A company contacts a publisher to correct an outdated author byline, job title, company description, or slogan.

The publisher agrees…kind of.

They’re happy to make the change…but only after the company pays an “editorial processing fee.”

That should be a red flag for all of us. Unfortunately, I can see a not-so-distant future in which “edits for AI” become the next publisher money grab.

…And we’ve seen this before.

After Google began cracking down on manipulative links, penalized websites were expected to show they had made a “good faith effort” to remove them before submitting a disavow file. Publishers quickly realized they had leverage.

“Want us to remove the garbage link we charged you for published? That’ll be $100!”

This time, companies won’t be paying publishers to remove links. They’ll be paying them to correct the information influencing how AI describes people, products, and businesses.

Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Where Do AI Citations Come From?

Profound analyzed 11.8 billion citations across 29 distinct industries and 8 models to understand how our customers are being cited in AI search.

The largest source of AI citations isn’t the press, Reddit, or YouTube; rather, it is a long tail of company websites. The median Profound customer gets more citations from brand sites (competitors, adjacent companies, etc.) than any other bucket across brand, earned, and social.

Read The Full Report Here

AI Builds Its Answer From Everyone Else

I have very little doubt this will eventually happen if publishers aren’t already doing it. But to understand the “why,” you first have to understand why companies would care enough to hand over their credit card.

Businesses can update their websites, schema, LinkedIn profiles, and other community properties they control. What they can’t directly update are the years of articles, interviews, directories, author bios, and company profiles scattered across the internet.

AI systems don’t simply accept a company’s preferred version of itself. They consume all the information they can find, retrieve, and somewhat verify.

When the same description appears repeatedly across the web, even outdated information can begin to look current or authoritative (the verification process)

A company may have repositioned its services three years ago, but if dozens of third-party websites continue using its old description, AI systems may keep repeating it. (Fun fact: many AI results still refer to this newsletter as a weekly snapshot of search updates… because that’s what it WAS for 6-7 years before shifting to what we see today)

Your website tells AI what you want to be known for. The rest of the internet tells AI whether it should believe you.

The Next Shakedown: Pay to Update

As companies invest more and more to be visible within AI engines, they’ll start auditing the third-party sources shaping how they’re represented online and, by extension, within AI answers.

That will uncover all kinds of outdated information:

• Executive and author bios

• Former job titles

• Company categories and descriptions

• Old slogans and positioning

• Products and capabilities

• Acquisitions, VC funding, ownership, and partnership details

• Statistics, quotes, links, and citations

Not all companies will necessarily be attempting to manipulate AI answers. It may simply want an author bio or company profile that is presented as current to stop describing a business that no longer exists in that form.

Let’s be real, though: Without the AI benefit, 99% of leadership wouldn’t give a sh*t about outdated information buried somewhere on the internet.

But once publishers realize these seemingly minor corrections can influence visibility (and potentially revenue) some will monetize the leverage they hold.

• A $100 author-bio update.

• A $250 company-description correction.

• A $500 description tweak with a conveniently inserted link.

Maybe they’ll even offer an annual “profile maintenance” package to keep every reference current. (If that didn’t send a shiver down your spine, you may have just discovered your next revenue stream.)

I’m not suggesting every publisher will do this. But I expect these “free” updates will happen about as frequently as publishers add links to the existing brand mentions you email them about today.

Hint: They don’t. Apparently, linking to the source they already referenced is “against editorial policy.”

The publisher already controls the source. AI visibility simply gives that control new financial value.

Correction or Reputation Laundering?

There’s an important distinction between correcting inaccurate information and rewriting inconvenient history.

An outdated job title, incorrect author bio, or evergreen company description presented as current should be updated. Publishers have an editorial responsibility to maintain accurate information.

But outdated information isn’t automatically inaccurate.

If a 2018 article accurately described what a company did in 2018, the publisher shouldn’t rewrite it simply because the business has since repositioned itself. The same applies to an embarrassing quote, failed product launch, critical review, or inconvenient piece of company history.

Those things shouldn’t disappear simply because someone is willing to pay.

That isn’t a correction. It’s reputation laundering—and companies already pay BIG money for it.

Legitimate reputation management can help a company correct misinformation or rebuild trust. It shouldn’t buy the company a cleaner version of history.

As I’ve written before, ethics have to play some role in SEO and AI. The standard should be factual accuracy, not whether the subject has enough money to influence the historical record.

Publishers can charge for advertising, sponsored content, and other commercial opportunities. But charging someone to correct objectively false information crosses a line.

Accuracy shouldn’t be an upsell.

When Accuracy Becomes a Revenue Opportunity

Shocker: People are greedy and mostly willing to do anything for a dollar.

The web has monetized access, placement, links, reviews, removals, and reputation. Updates are next.

AI companies will undoubtedly get better at recognizing conflicting information and prioritizing authoritative sources. But publishers will still control much of the information shaping those answers. (You see where this is going…)

Once enough businesses connect third-party sources to AI visibility—and AI visibility to revenue—publishers will recognize the money-grab opportunity.

By the time companies realize they need the internet corrected, someone will already have built a rate card for it.

When correcting the internet starts influencing revenue, correcting the internet will stop being free.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

End of Summer Gift: Buy 3 Links, Get 1 Free

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One catch, and it’s real: this deal expires Sunday night, August 16. No extensions, no “back by popular demand.”

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.

We’re well beyond the halfway point of 2026, and businesses are getting nervous. Me? I’m watching my 2026 predictions take shape.

Google is answering more questions today without sending clicks outside of its own platform. AI platforms are still the shiny object despite not yet delivering meaningful referral traffic. Attribution is still broken, and leaders are questioning whether SEO is still worth the investment.

Real talk: I’ve watched two clients of mine respond very differently to the current Google climate. One is taking its foot off the gas because it isn’t seeing the same ROI as it did in the past. The other is doubling down, seeing an opportunity to challenge a competitor that has dominated their market for more than a decade.

Both decisions, without a doubt, involve risk. The difference is that one business is focused on what it could lose by continuing to invest, while the other is focused on what it could gain while everyone else pulls back.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Explore changing behaviors in how people find, click, and buy

Our latest State of Search Q2 2026 report just landed. Built with Datos’ clickstream data, the largest of its kind, it tracks how search behavior continues to shift. AI adoption, changing click patterns, zero-click growth, and where Amazon, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube fit in. Utilizing real market-wide data from across the US, UK, and EU.

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Stable Markets Protect Market Leaders

Catching a market leader under normal conditions is insanely difficult. They have stronger brand recognition, larger content libraries, better backlink profiles, more first-party data, and years of customer reviews and third-party validation. Oh, they also have those large budgets, teams, and historical performance data to keep building on those advantages. GULP!

When everyone plays by the same rules, the leader’s head start continues to compound. Publishing a few more articles or improving several category pages won’t erase years of accumulated authority. At best, you may prevent the gap from growing.

To close it, you need more than good intentions and executing Brian Dean’s legendary “Skyscraper Method”. You need the market itself (and what it rewards) to change.

That is exactly what is happening now!

Doubt Creates Opportunity

Search behavior no longer exists entirely within Google’s ecosystem. Buyers have more ways to find answers, and no business has completely figured out how to win across all of them.

That uncertainty weakens some of the advantages market leaders spent years building. Their content libraries, reporting models, and proven playbooks were designed with scale (but also for a more predictable search environment).

Funny enough, the size and legacy that helped these companies dominate may now slow them down. They have more outdated content to reassess, more stakeholders to convince, stricter measurement requirements, and more existing revenue they’re afraid to disrupt. Investing in an unknown channel is difficult when every dollar must immediately prove a direct return.

The market leader is still ahead, and you won’t overtake them overnight. But we’re no longer running on a straight track. The course has changed, and everyone is learning it at the same time. (This should get you excited, unless you're the big company…)

That creates an opportunity to close the gap faster than a “stable” market ever would.

You Don’t Need to Recreate Their Last Five Years

Closing the gap doesn’t mean recreating everything the market leader did/does. You don’t need to match them article for article, backlink for backlink, or keyword for keyword. Much of what worked over the past five years will likely not deliver the same value over the next five.

Instead, invest in assets that matter! Get it in front of wherever your customers search, research, and make decisions:

• Original research and proprietary data

• Recognizable subject-matter experts

• Firsthand experience and credible opinions

• Strong product, service, and category insights

• Customer reviews, case studies, and other proof (yes, this is SEO!)

• Traditional and Digital PR

• Clean technical foundations and accessible structured information

• Content people actively seek, reference, and recommend (no, not search volume. I’d be ok if we never talked search volume ever again)

These aren’t “SEO assets” or “GEO assets.” They’re evidence that your business deserves to be discovered, cited, and trusted. This is not an E-E-A-T play to improve SEO/GEO. Legitimate value that generates brand champions, with the result being organic visibility.

You don’t have to recreate the leader’s past. You need to build for where the market is TODAY!

Stop Using Referral Traffic as the Only Scoreboard

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI platforms may not send meaningful referral traffic anytime soon, and you can ignore Google’s claims about clicks being the same.

That doesn’t make visibility worthless. It makes referral traffic an incomplete measurement. Attribution has always screwed organic marketing, so not really anything “new” here.

Clicks still matter. But so do branded search demand, direct traffic, assisted conversions, mentions and citations, answer visibility, and sales conversations influenced by content. We should also measure whether the traffic we still earn converts at a higher rate because customers encountered the brand throughout their research.

The goal isn’t to invent softer metrics to excuse declining traffic. It’s to recognize that last-click sessions alone no longer capture visibility’s full impact on customer decisions.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

Conference and Networking Edition!

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

The Biggest Risk Is Waiting With Everyone Else

Waiting feels safe when your competitors are just as uncertain as you are. But when everyone pauses, even smaller (but very intentional) investments can create an outsized advantage.

Any Warren Buffett fans? His most quoted advice feels especially relevant right now:

This isn’t an argument for blindly going all in on AI, publishing 100x content, or paying someone promising you “AI rankings”. It’s about investing in the research, expertise, customer proof, brand recognition, and technical foundations your competitors will wish they had once the market becomes clearer.

By then, those assets won’t be something a competitor can beat by publishing a slightly longer article with one or two more data points. These become defensible resources that are expensive and time-consuming to replicate (which means 99% of your competitors won’t even try)

Uncertainty doesn’t eliminate risk. It gives you a choice between the risk of investing now and the risk of falling further behind.

Build for the Next Five Years

You probably can’t outspend the market leader or recreate what made them successful overnight. You certainly won’t close the gap by copying their playbook and seeking out easy button shortcut solutions.

You may never have a better opportunity than when customer behavior is shifting, proven strategies are breaking, and everyone else is waiting for certainty.

You don’t need to recreate their previous fifty years.

You need to start winning the NEXT five.

Sure, keep firing your marketing team for short-term P&L wins. Your competitors could use the help putting you out of business.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

SEOs You Know Are Earning $1,000+/Month in Referrals

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are AirOps and Jolly Search.

Raise your hand if you’re frustrated by how much traffic Google has clawed back with the launch of AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Admittedly, both of these can be crazy helpful for users (I know - it pains me to type it)

But across various industries, the response has been overwhelmingly negative. Publishers argue that Google is using their content without sending enough traffic in return. Some question the legal responsibility of AI answers. Others are pursuing legal action or considering opting out of Google altogether.

Fine. To avoid a 6,000-word detour, I’ll concede the point: it doesn’t feel fair.

But many of the same businesses demanding citations, links, and traffic from Google routinely reference another company’s data, reporting, or expertise without providing a clickable link. Sometimes they even write out the source’s domain while deliberately leaving it unlinked—all because someone is afraid of “giving away” link equity.

You can’t demand that AI platforms support the open web while refusing to participate in it yourself.

Thank you to AirOps for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Josh Grant Webinar - 30 day AI search pipeline recovery sprint

Why your top pages still miss AI’s pipeline

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Traffic from AI search is growing, but most teams haven’t figured out how to turn it into pipeline. Comparison pages, pricing pages, and feature pages either aren’t getting cited or aren’t converting when they are.

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If It Was Worth Mentioning, It Was Worth Linking

A citation isn’t a favor, and it isn’t an SEO handout. It allows readers to verify the claim, review the original research, understand its context, and discover the people or organizations responsible for the work.

Take the example below. SEOJobs.com’s data was valuable enough to reference directly, but apparently not valuable enough to link to.

I notice these examples because I own the site and monitor brand mentions. But don’t confuse SEOJobs.com as a unique target. This happens every day to researchers, creators, small businesses, newsletters, podcasts, and independent publishers.

If someone’s work helped strengthen your content, helping readers find the original source should be the default.

Why Publishers Withhold Links

Publishers usually justify withholding links in one of three ways. Two are based on misguided SEO thinking. The third can be legitimate, but often exposes another contradiction.

“We Don’t Want to Lose Link Equity”

Linking to a relevant source does not drain your website’s authority like water leaking from a bucket. (I desperately wanted to write that in all caps. I didn’t. You’re welcome.)

You aren’t protecting your rankings by trapping readers on your domain or omitting citations that would make your content more useful.

Refusing legitimate citations isn’t an SEO strategy. It puts a spotlight on a business that doesn’t understand how search works.

“We Don’t Want to Help Their SEO”

This is where the justification gets uglier.

Some publishers will reference a business, use its data, and even awkwardly write out its domain, just without making it clickable.

I once contacted a publisher that referenced SEOJobs.com’s 2025 job data and asked whether they would add a link so readers could view the full dataset. They declined. Instead, they offered to publish an “exclusive blog post” about SEOJobs.com for $500.

To be clear, I wasn’t asking them to sell me coverage. I was asking them to properly cite a source they had already chosen to mention.

If the link was withheld so its value could be packaged into something they could sell me, that wasn’t an editorial decision. It was a sales strategy disguised as editorial policy.

“We Don’t Want to Endorse the Website”

This can be legitimate. Nobody should be expected to send readers to an unsafe website or lend credibility to misinformation. Paid placements and user-generated content also require different considerations.

But for a standard editorial citation, the contradiction remains:

If you didn’t consider the source credible enough for readers to visit, why was its information credible enough to use in your article?

Nofollow Is Not an Editorial Safety Blanket

Even when publishers provide a clickable link, many automatically apply a nofollow attribute as if it protects them from some undefined SEO risk. (Someone, think of the children link juice!!!)

But nofollow isn’t a generic disclaimer for every external website.

Google already provides attributes for specific types of links. sponsored is intended for advertisements, sponsorships, affiliate links, and other paid relationships. ugc applies to links added through user-generated content, such as comments or forum posts. nofollow can be used when a publisher genuinely does not want to associate its website with the destination.

A normal, unpaid editorial citation doesn’t automatically fall into any of those categories.

In the example below, SEOJobs.com was mentioned organically within an editorial article and linked as the source. There was no payment, sponsorship, affiliate relationship, or user-generated content. Yet the link was still tagged nofollow.

Why?

If the publication trusted the source enough to mention it, considered the destination safe enough to send readers to, and received no compensation for including it, what exactly was the attribute protecting them from?

This isn’t about obsessing over a tiny piece of HTML. It’s about the editorial mindset behind it.

Automatically applying nofollow to every external link says: “We’ll use your work, and we may even send readers to it—but we’ll make damn sure you receive as little value as possible…”

Sound familiar?

Publishers Are Recreating the Same Problem

Publishers are understandably frustrated: someone invests time and money creating original data, another platform uses it to improve its own product, and the original creator receives little (or nothing) in return.

That is the fundamental complaint about AI Overviews.

But when a publisher uses another website’s research, reporting, examples, or ideas without linking to the original source, it creates the same problem on a smaller scale. The publisher strengthens its article, keeps the reader’s attention, and denies the creator even the opportunity to earn a visit.

To be clear, publishers doing it doesn’t excuse Google and vice versa. Two wrongs don’t make a right. (At least that’s what my Momma told me growing up)

But if publishers expect AI companies to properly credit and support the sources behind their answers, they should hold themselves to the same standard.

A Simple Standard for Editorial Links

This doesn’t need to be complicated. Before publishing, ask:

• Did this source contribute information, data, reporting, or an original idea?

• Would visiting it help readers verify the claim or better understand the context?

• Is the destination relevant, trustworthy, and safe?

• Was the mention unpaid and editorially chosen?

If the answers are yes, provide a normal clickable link.

• No need for a blanket nofollow policy.

• No imaginary concern about leaking “link juice.”

Just give readers access to the source that helped make your content better.

Give What You’re Demanding

The open web cannot function when everyone wants attribution, but nobody wants to provide it. Links allow readers to inspect claims, recognize original work, and discover the people and businesses contributing real value.

This isn’t about generously handing out SEO credit. It’s about giving readers the transparency they deserve and sources the recognition they earned.

If you want Google and AI platforms to cite their sources, start by making sure you cite yours.

Please continue to build a reputation for shitty link practices. I’ll be working over here to become less reliant on Google to win.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

One Warm Intro = $1,620. Want the
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Brought to you by Jolly - this week it’s not a guide, it’s a job.

Jolly is hiring a remote Partnerships Manager to expand our referral network: recruiting the influencers, agencies, and consultants whose intros become clients.

The math is the interesting part. You earn 30% of every referral fee your partners generate.

One typical $36k/year client = $1,620 to you, from a single intro. Stack an active partner book and commissions can more than 5x the base.

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.

Roughly 10 years ago, I worked in the digital marketing division of a company generating more than $5 billion in annual revenue. Our team included approximately 50 SEO professionals, developers, and content writers responsible for delivering the services its sales team sold.

It was my first experience working alongside a true sales organization and my first exposure to the disconnect between what salespeople were incentivized to promise and what the delivery team could realistically execute.

The sales reps (mostly) weren’t dishonest or incompetent. Most were doing exactly what the company rewarded them for doing: closing deals.

The problem was that once the contract was signed, the salesperson collected the commission while someone else inherited the promise.

Thank you to Semrush Enterprise for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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Salespeople Aren’t the Problem. Their Incentives Are.

Salespeople are generally rewarded for:

• Signing new customers

• Increasing contract value

• Renewing existing accounts

• Shortening the sales cycle

They are rarely compensated based on whether the SEO strategy worked, whether the AI implementation delivered meaningful value, or whether the team executing could deliver against his/her promise.

That creates an obvious conflict. The easiest way to close a hesitant prospect is to reduce uncertainty, but SEO and AI should be an asterisk in any dictionary definition of “uncertainty.” If the rep makes the work sound faster, easier, or more predictable than it actually is, they improve their chances of making the sale while transferring the risk to someone else.

The Good: Strong Salespeople Create Opportunities

It’s easy for delivery teams to complain about sales. Trust me, I’ve bitched more than my fair share. But selling services is difficult. Prospects rarely arrive with a clearly defined problem, a realistic budget, and an executive team ready to act.

Strong salespeople create opportunities by:

• Uncovering what the customer actually needs

• Translating the executing team’s capabilities into business value

• Building trust before specialists even enter the conversation

• Handling prospecting, qualification, and follow-ups

• Helping the company grow beyond referrals and reputation

Search professionals often underestimate these skills. Let’s be honest: our industry isn’t exactly overflowing with people skills or a willingness to compromise. Being capable of delivering great work doesn’t mean you can convince someone to buy it.

The goal shouldn’t be to restrain sales or turn every salesperson into a technical SEO. It should be to give them enough knowledge, structure, and access to specialists to recognize the right opportunity, and sell an engagement the team can actually fulfill.

Unfortunately, creating the opportunity is only half the equation. What the salesperson promises to close it matters just as much.

The Bad: The Delivery Team Inherits the Promise

The problems begin when the customer buys an outcome the executing team never agreed was possible.

The problems begin when the customer buys an outcome the delivery team never agreed was possible. This might mean:

• Guaranteeing rankings

• Committing to timelines before reviewing the website

• Downplaying the client’s role in implementation

• Selling the wrong combination of services

• Promising results the product was never capable of delivering

Sometimes the salesperson exaggerated. Other times, they simply didn’t understand what they were selling. That distinction didn’t matter much to the client—or to me when my phone rang unexpectedly in the middle of the day.

I regularly received calls and emails from frustrated clients telling me their boss was on their ass because they weren’t getting what the salesperson had promised. By then, the client had repeated those promises internally and put their own credibility on the line.

My job was to determine whether the salesperson had lied, misunderstood the product, or sold the wrong solution—and then explain the gap without throwing a coworker under the bus or making the client feel like an idiot for believing them.

The salesperson received credit for closing the deal. The delivery team inherited an angry customer, an impossible expectation, and a relationship damaged before the real work had even begun.

And if setting expectations for traditional SEO was already difficult, AI has made it considerably worse.

AI Makes the Expectation Problem Worse

AI has taken an existing problem in SEO sales and multiplied it by 100.

Organic visibility has never been something anyone could guarantee. Results depend on the client’s business, website, competition, implementation, brand and link authority, search demand, and the constant changes made by Google. Now companies are selling AI visibility alongside SEO despite having even less control over when (or why) a brand appears in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI experiences.

That uncertainty should result in more careful claims. Instead, AI FOMO has created an opportunity to make bigger sales and bigger promises with less proof.

A salesperson can now point to:

• A handful of prompts where a client appears

• An AI visibility score from a third-party platform

• A polished dashboard tracking mentions and citations

• A competitor appearing in answers where the prospect does not

Unfortunately, “We’ll help you understand and improve your AI visibility” is harder to sell than “We’ll get your brand into AI answers.”

AI hasn’t made organic visibility more predictable (or easier) to track. It has simply made FOMO easier to monetize. When sales is incentivized by ink on a contract while delivery is judged by results, the two teams aren’t working toward the same goal.

What Sales Reps Actually Need

SSales reps don’t need to become technical SEOs or pretend to be “the expert” during sales meetings. But they do need more than a pitch deck, a product sheet, and a few impressive case studies.

They need:

• Clear boundaries: What can never be guaranteed?

• Qualification criteria: Which prospects can realistically succeed?

• Approved claims: What can be said about outcomes and timelines?

• Customer responsibilities: What must the client provide or implement?

• Realistic case studies: What conditions and products made those results possible?

• A feedback loop: Which promises repeatedly cause problems after handoff?

• Shared accountability: How will sales be measured after the contract is signed?

• Access to delivery: When should an expert join the sales process?
  

That final point might be the most important.

Some of the best sales reps I had worked with would call or email me before pitching a solution. They would explain what the law firm wanted to accomplish and ask which of our products (or combination of products) gave the client the best chance of getting there.

Because I understood the available levers and the capabilities of our products, I could connect the two. Sometimes that resulted in a larger sale because the client genuinely needed more support. Other times, it prevented the rep from selling a cheaper solution that didn’t have a chance in hell of producing the results being discussed.

Involving delivery doesn’t prevent upselling. Most of the time, it makes the upsell defensible.

The execution team shouldn’t first learn about the client’s goals during the kickoff call. They should be involved early enough to validate the opportunity, shape the solution, and flag expectations that cannot be met.

Businesses should consider tying a portion of sales compensation to account quality or early retention. If an engagement collapses within 90 days because it was never viable, that wasn’t a successful sale. It was delayed churn.

The tension between sales and delivery will never disappear completely. But if your salespeople win when the contract is signed and everyone else loses immediately afterward, you don’t have a sales problem.

You have an incentive problem.

If the signature is the only thing you reward, don’t act surprised when the promise is impossible to deliver.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

If You’re Not in the AI Answer, You Don’t Exist

Brought to you by Jolly.

Ask ChatGPT for the best tool in your category. If a competitor shows up and you don’t, here’s why:

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I debated publishing this more than almost any other #SEOForLunch post I’ve written. And if you’ve been around for a while, you know that’s saying something.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that the SEO community has supported SEOJobs.com. As a result, I receive quite a few direct messages from people looking for advice on landing their next job, breaking into freelancing, or figuring out what comes next in their careers.

After we get past the pleasantries, I almost always ask the same question.

“So... what makes you special? Why should someone hire you instead of the other 300 applicants?”

Unfortunately, more often than not, the answer is “I’ve been doing SEO for X years.”

That’s not a differentiator. That’s a timestamp.

If we were accountants, lawyers, or doctors, years of experience would carry much more weight. But I’ve met SEOs with two years of experience that I’d hire tomorrow over people with fifteen.

Ten years ago, simply knowing SEO made you valuable.

Today, it’s the minimum requirement.

Companies aren’t struggling to find SEO talent anymore. They’re choosing between them. And when there are hundreds of qualified applicants, being competent isn’t what gets you hired. Being memorable is.

Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Is Running the Same AI prompt once a Day Actually Enough?

Profound’s research team analyzed 1 million AI responses and 6.6 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews to answer this question.

The results:

- Running a prompt ten times improves precision by only about 10%.

- Citation share is the one place extra runs help a little.

Read the full methodology and see the results here

Check out more findings

You Don’t Need to Become Famous

Whenever I talk about standing out in your career, someone inevitably responds with some version of, “I don’t want to become a conference speaker.” I understand where that comes from because personal branding often gets tied to an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you quietly do your job, or you spend your life chasing followers, speaking engagements, and internet fame.

The reality is much less intimidating than that. I even wrote about my personal non-stage speaking journey to build my brand.

Standing out in today’s hiring market doesn’t require thousands of LinkedIn followers, keynote presentations, or becoming the next Rand Fishkin. It simply requires giving people a reason to remember you after they’ve interviewed twenty other candidates who all sound the same.

Competency Is Expected. Evidence Is Remembered.

If you’ve ever been involved in hiring, you know how quickly resumes start to blur together. Everyone is “passionate about SEO”. Everyone is “data-driven”. Everyone has experience with technical SEO, content optimization, stakeholder management, enterprise websites, and the same handful of industry tools. You get the point…

None of those things is bad. In fact, they’re exactly what I would expect from someone applying for an SEO role. The problem is that they don’t separate you anymore because they’re the baseline for getting an interview, not the reason you get the offer.

The same thing often happens during interviews. Candidates have prepared for the common questions, polished their success stories, and can explain canonical tags, internal linking, or crawl budgets (and now a bit of AI) without missing a beat. By the fifth or sixth interview, everyone begins sounding equally capable.

At that point, hiring managers aren’t asking whether you know SEO. They’re asking themselves a much different question:

What makes this person different from everyone else we’ve interviewed?

Show Me What You Chose to Build

This is where so many candidates swing and miss.

Resumes are full of claims. People love to attach themselves to big client names and provide high-level tactics without demonstrating ROI/growth or other business success metrics.

What stands out is what you chose to build and test when nobody asked you to.

Maybe that’s a small SEO tool that solved a problem you encountered. Maybe it’s a testing website where you document experiments. It could be a newsletter, a GitHub project, a detailed case study, a Looker Studio dashboard, or volunteer work helping a nonprofit improve its organic visibility. None of these projects need to become businesses or attract thousands of users. Their value isn’t measured by popularity or even success (dollars and or traffic), it’s measured by what they reveal about you.

Projects like these communicate curiosity, initiative, and follow-through far more effectively than another bullet point on a resume ever could.

It’s the same reason companies like to hire college grads. What you learned and grades matter a little, but the 4+ year journey takes commitment.

My Projects Aren’t the Point

For me, those projects include #SEOForLunch, SEOJobs.com, PPCJobs.com, writing for industry publications, and sharing observations (ok, and criticisms) on socials. None of them were created because I thought they’d help me get hired someday. Most started because I was curious about an idea, wanted to solve a problem, or simply enjoyed contributing to the industry.

Ironically, they’ve become some of the biggest differentiators in my career. Heck, I recently took on an SEO advisor role for a large job board. Guess what they liked about me vs others they talked to…

And while i’m in a fortunate situation to work for myself, if i talk to a prospect or need to interview in the future, they remember more about me besides my resume. Maybe they’ve read one of my newsletter issues. Maybe they’ve used one of the job boards. Maybe they strongly disagree with one of my opinions. Honestly, I don’t care which one it is. What matters is that there’s something tangible attached to my name besides a list of responsibilities from previous jobs.

That’s what I want more people to take away from this article.

Find Your Own Version

Please don’t read this and conclude that everyone needs to start a newsletter or launch a business. If anything, that’s the wrong lesson.

Your differentiator should reflect your interests, not mine. Maybe you enjoy writing detailed case studies. Maybe you’re fascinated by automation and build small internal tools. Maybe you help a non-profit with its SEO, contribute to communities you're passionate about (sports/working out/recipes/cars, etc.), or simply test ideas and document what you learned from them.

The project itself (or the results) isn’t what matters.

What matters is that you’ve created something that demonstrates genuine curiosity about your craft. Those experiences become stories you can tell during interviews, and those stories are often far more memorable than another discussion about keyword research or site audits.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

Give Them Something to Remember

Most hiring decisions aren’t made while you’re sitting across the table answering questions. They’re made after you’ve left the room, when interviewers start comparing notes and discussing who they’d actually like to work with.

That’s the moment you’re trying to influence.

You don’t want someone to describe you as the candidate who “seemed solid.” You want them to remember the experiment you ran, the tool you built, the community you helped, or the project you were passionate enough to create on your own. Those are the details that stick with people long after technical interview questions have been forgotten.

Today’s hiring market is way different from what it was even 5 years ago. Companies have more qualified applicants than ever before, which means they can afford to be selective. SEO/AI competency gets you into the interview process, but it’s rarely what separates the final two candidates.

The worst thing you can be isn’t inexperienced.

It’s forgettable.

This isn’t an argument for hustle culture. It’s an acknowledgment that employers have more choice than they’ve had in years. Standing out isn’t optional anymore

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

If You're Not in the AI Answer, You Don't Exist

Brought to you by Jolly.

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush + Jolly Search

I wanted Google’s Indexing API to be the cheat code for job boards. The equation was simply:

• New job goes live? Push it to Google.

• Job gets updated? Notify Google.

• Job expires? Tell Google to drop it.

For any job board owner, that sounds incredible, especially considering job postings are not evergreen assets. They are short-lived, high-churn pages that need to be discovered and removed quickly. If Google is slow to crawl a job URL, the opportunity may already be gone by the time the page gets indexed.

So when Google offers an API that appears to let you notify them directly when job pages are created, updated, or deleted, it’s exactly the tool that hits “mandatory” status for job board owners.

That was my assumption, too.

Then I spent hours reviewing the documentation, testing server responses, checking quota limits, and comparing what Google says the API does with what most SEOs probably assume it does.

The conclusion?

The API is not useless. That would actually be easier to write about.

It is worse than that. It works just well enough to make you think you accomplished something. But 90% of you using this tool (legitimately or not) aren’t getting what you THINK you are.

This week’s newsletter gets a little long. Go straight to the free tool to determine if your job indexing API is working the way you THINK it is.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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What Google’s Web Indexing API Actually Does

Google’s Indexing API lets site owners notify Google when certain pages are added, updated, or removed. But this is not a general-purpose indexing API for every URL on your website.

Google says the API can only be used for pages with JobPosting structured data or livestream pages using BroadcastEvent embedded inside a VideoObject. In other words, this is not for blog posts, category pages, location pages, service pages, product pages, or any other URL you wish Google would crawl faster.

For job boards, the API provides two primary actions.

You can send URL_UPDATED when a job page is new or meaningfully changed. You can send URL_DELETED when a job page has been removed and should be dropped from Google’s index.

That sounds powerful, and to be fair, it can be insanely effective.

The problem is that a successful API response does not mean what many people want it to mean.

It does not mean the URL was indexed. It does not mean the URL appears in Google’s index or in the Google Jobs experience. It does not mean the page will generate impressions, clicks, or conversions.

It means Google received your notification.

That’s it.

Job Indexing API Default Quotas and Limits

This is the part that really matters.

Google’s own documentation says that when you send an update request and receive a HTTP 200 response, Google may try to recrawl the URL soon. When you send a delete request and receive a HTTP 200 response, Google may remove the URL from the index.

That word “may” is doing a lot of work.

Not will. Not did. Not confirmed.

“May.”

And that is where many SEOs get into trouble.

A successful API response feels like progress because technical actions are easy to measure. The request was sent. The server response was clean. The script ran without errors. The JSON response shows that Google received the notification.

Great.

But submitted is not indexed. Received is not crawled. Crawled is not ranked. Ranked is not clicked. Clicked is not an incremental conversion.

You get the point.

These are different events, and treating them like one connected guarantee is exactly how people overstate what this API actually does.

The API gives you notification confirmation.

It does not give you indexation confirmation.

And yes, this is also why the API has been abused to death by people trying to force Google to index non-job-related content.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen someone use the Job Indexing API for something that very clearly was not a job posting.

Actually, never mind.

We all know the answer.

The Asterisk That Proves You’re Wasting Your Time.

You can have the API configured correctly. You can send the right payload. You can get a successful response. You can store the notification metadata. You can even show logs that prove your system is working.

And you still do not know whether Google indexed the page. That is the gap.

Introducing getMetadata and why you didn’t trick Google into indexing your spam after all

One of the more misleading parts of the API is the ability to check the status of a URL notification.

At first glance, this seems to answer the big question.

Did Google index this URL? Nope.

This raw JSON response is everything you need to understand what’s happening. Unfortunately, it is just not the information most people actually want.

“API accepted” and “indexed” are not the same.

Tell Me More About getMetadata and Google’s Sandbox

The JSON above shows that Google received your update or delete notification, but you cannot use that API response as proof that the job page was crawled, indexed, removed, or shown in any meaningful way.

That does not mean getMetadata is useless.

It is actually one of the most important parts of validating whether your Indexing API setup is working.

Getting a 404 error in your getMetadata request, like me?

You are sending the letter by mail, but the recipient has removed the mailbox from their house. Unless your API has been approved for real use, you are operating entirely within Google’s sandbox, regardless of whether the quota screen makes it appear you have room to send more requests.

And honestly, can you imagine how many spam requests Google has seen through this API?

People spent all that time trying to jam non-job content through a job-indexing API, only to get a clean-looking response that did not actually do what they thought it would.

Congrats. You got a receipt for wasted time.

But don’t worry. Google says legitimate job posting URLs can be submitted once you fill out a request form, which will be reviewed on average in 2–3 weeks.

HA!!!

The Approval And Quota Increase Process

Google’s quickstart documentation states that the API provides a default 200-request quota for onboarding and submission testing, but additional approval is required for usage and resource provisioning.

The process appears straightforward enough. Set up the API, prove your use case, submit the form, wait for review, and get approved.

At least, that is how it used to work.

A few years back, when I was working with a job board that had millions of jobs, I became best friends with that form. I submitted quota requests, showed that the existing quota was being burned through by legitimate job URLs, and within 2–3 weeks, Google would increase the quota.

That was my experience, and it worked.

I also set up the API for SEOJobs.com a few years ago, and I was fortunate enough to get proper functioning access there, too.

Then one thing led to another, and I made a bonehead move that deleted my API. (Booooo! Shame on me!)

So I set it all up again. This time, I submitted requests for both SEOJobs.com and PPCJobs.com.

That was six months ago. Yep. No response in 2026 at all.

Not an approval. Not a rejection. Not a request for more information.

Simply NOTHING.

Since my own data is limited, I’ve been talking with Alexander Chukovski, who has worked with hundreds of job boards and puts my job board knowledge to shame.

He told me that none of the job boards he worked with over a roughly 10–12 month span received a response after submitting the same form.

That is not one random site getting ignored.

Google, It’s Now Your Turn

Everything above shows a pattern across legitimate job boards that are trying to use an API that Google specifically says is for job-posting content.

Alexander also wrote about changes to the API documentation back in 2024, which aligns with the timeline during which successful quota requests appear to have slowed or stopped being reviewed and approved altogether.

Can I confirm the number is zero? No.

But based on my experience, Alexander’s experience, and the lack of responses from legitimate job boards, it sure looks like approval has become significantly less likely than it used to be.

And that is the frustrating part. If the answer is no, fine (I’ll just pout a bit in the corner.)

If the API is effectively locked down for new quota increases, that’s also fine.

If Google no longer wants to expand access because the API was abused to the point of exhaustion, I get that, too.

But then say that.

Do not leave the form sitting there like there is still a functioning review process.

Do not tell legitimate job boards to request more access if nobody is reviewing the requests.

Do not let people spend months waiting for a response that may never come.

Google does not owe us an indexing shortcut.

But if the front door is closed, please stop leaving the welcome mat out.

A Free Job Indexing Tool To Determine If You’re Actually Getting Service

OK, I’ve dangled the carrot long enough. I built a free tool for anyone with access to the API.

You can now find out in minutes whether it’s working the way you expected.

It offers two levels of service (both free).

1. Validate that your URL is marked up correctly with the job schema AND that it’s appears to be a supported job posting page.

2. The “full check” analyzes your job schema, your API responses, and Google Search Console responses.

All the results that matter, none of the technical hoops to jump through.

The full results after running this report will look exactly like this (but hopefully you’ll get a 200 metadata response!) Example via SEOjobs API credentials, GSC, and job listing URL.

The full raw JSON response is also available at the bottom.

Yes, the tool is 100% free. For folks submitting all content through this API, apologies, not really in advance if your non-SEO content never made it to Google.

~Nick

Today’s #SEOForLunch is brought to you by Jolly. Grab their free guide: The Hidden Layer of AI Search.

Reddit Decides What AI Says About Your Brand

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Those answers get pulled from a short list of sources the models trust… and Reddit is the loudest voice in that room!

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The AI answers your buyers read tomorrow are being written in Reddit threads today.

Grab the Free Guide

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Scrunch and Jolly.

Let’s get real. SEO advice often sounds completely made up. There, I said it!

A lot of recommendations sound ridiculous to people who do not live in search every single day. “Change this canonical.” “Don’t block that resource.” “We need this content exposed in the rendered HTML.”

This is exactly why SEO still gets labeled as black magic in many organizations.

I’ve been an advocate for “un-nerding SEO” for years, but that’s a different story. Today, we’re talking about something much more practical: using Google’s own documentation to win approval, build trust, and prioritize tasks for action.

Not because Google tells us everything. Not because every sentence should be treated as gospel. But because hard-documented resources are hard to blow off.

When you need buy-in, sometimes the best argument is not “trust me.”

It’s “Google already documented how we should approach this.”

Thank you to Scrunch for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Meet your most valuable new site visitor:
the AI bot

For 20 years, websites had two audiences to please. First humans, then Google. Now there’s a third—and when it shows up, it means a real buyer just asked AI about you.

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The Buy-In Problem Is Usually Not The Recommendation Itself

Most SEO recommendations do not die because they are wrong. They die because they have to compete with everything else happening inside the business.

Dev sprints, product timelines, CMS limitations, legal concerns, brand standards, executive assumptions, and the ever-popular… (close your eyes!) “we’ve always done it this way”, it all has a seat at the table. SEO is rarely the only priority in the room, even when the recommendation is technically correct.

That is why “best practice says” or “from an SEO perspective” is simply not enough to close the deal. It sounds optional, especially to teams already managing risk, deadlines, and competing requests.

But “Google has official documentation to guide us” lands differently.

It may not automatically win the argument, and it definitely does not mean the recommendation gets prioritized tomorrow. But it does change the conversation from “the SEO gal told us…” to “Suzzie provided us official Google documentation explaining why this matters.”

Google Documentation Is Not Gospel

I know what some of you are thinking.

“Nick, are we really pretending Google tells us the full truth about how search works?”

Fuck No. I mean… absolutely not.

Google’s documentation is not the complete truth of search. It has omissions. It simplifies complicated systems. Sometimes it explains how Google wants site owners to behave, not necessarily every nerdy factor that goes into organic visibility.

Google also writes documentation for a very broad audience. That means nuance gets sanded down, edge cases get skipped, and the answer is often technically true without being the entire story. (Want proof? Log in to X, and you’ll read SEOs with too much time on their hands, complaining and “calling out” Google for this)

So no, I am not suggesting we treat every Google statement as if it were carved into stone tablets and carried down from Mountain View.

But that does not make the documentation useless.

It makes it a starting point. A receipt. An official reference point.

It moves the conversation away from “Nick thinks this matters” and toward “Google has explicitly documented why this matters.” That distinction matters a lot when you’re trying to get someone else to approve (and prioritize) the work.

Documentation Is Especially Useful With Developers

This is probably where Google documentation earns its keep the fastest. SEOs need developers, and the fastest way to lose their support is to treat every recommendation as a command rather than a requirement.

but… just in case this works…

Bummer, no dice.

Developers are not wrong just because they disagree with an SEO recommendation. Most of the time, they are optimizing for completely different (but valid) things, such as performance, code quality, technical debt, security, and let’s not forget, simply not being the person who takes the entire website down with one wrong push to production.

But sometimes they are wrong about how Google discovers, crawls, renders, indexes, or interprets content.

And telling a developer “you’re wrong” is a great way to make sure your ticket never sees the light of day.

This is where Google documentation helps. It removes subjectivity on the purpose/value. It aligns the conversation on how best to implement within your own ecosystem, rather than the recommendation being “right vs wrong”

• Canonical tags are signals, not directives.

• Robots.txt blocks crawling, not always indexing.

• JavaScript rendering has limitations.

• Internal links need to be discoverable.

• Structured data has eligibility requirements.

• Why status codes matter and a 302 doesn’t “do the same thing”

The point is never “SEO wins and dev loses.”

The point is that you now have an external source of truth to discuss. That is a much better conversation than two teams arguing from preference.

Documentation Is Also A Client Management Tool

For client-facing SEOs, documentation helps separate serious recommendations from “trust me, bro, I have a contact at Google” consulting.

This is especially useful when a client has been burned by bad SEO advice before.

Instead of saying:

“We need to change this because it’s better for SEO.”

You can say:

“Here’s what Google documents. Here’s where your current setup conflicts with that. Here’s the risk. Here’s the recommendation. Here is the estimated reward.”

That framing builds trust because it shows the recommendation is not reliant on 100% blind faith.

It also makes the SEO look less like a magician and more like an interpreter.

That is the real role of an SEO: translating Google’s needs from a website (confirmed via documentation) into business and technical decisions.

Less Black Magic, More Receipts

SEO has a reputation problem, and some of it is earned.

Too much of our work is still explained in vague terminology with low confidence. We say things like “Google likes this” or “this needs to exist for the bots” when we should be saying, “Google documents this behavior here, and here’s how it applies to our situation.”

That does not mean documentation alone creates buy-in.

Dropping a Google link into a ticket or Slack thread is not a strategy. You still have to translate what it means, explain the risk, connect it to business outcomes, and help the team understand why the recommendation deserves attention.

Google documentation will never replace experience, testing, or judgment. It will not tell us everything, and it should not be treated like the final answer to every SEO debate.

But it can make SEO easier to defend, easier to prioritize, and much harder for divisional leaders to dismiss.

The best SEOs are not just the ones who know what to recommend. They are the ones who can prove why the recommendation deserves to be taken seriously.

Less black magic. More receipts. More results.

Google documentation may not be the whole truth, but it sure beats showing up to a buy-in conversation with “my buddy from Google told me….” Suuuure they did.

~Nick

Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

PR Hack: The “SEO” Job Title?

Brought to you by Jolly.

We sent 11,238 journalist pitches in 6 months, landed 393 placements, and reached 1,450,000,000 monthly readers. Then we split the results by job title:

• Founders drove the most total reach (598M).

• CEOs came second (384M).

• But what about SEOs? 22 placements averaged 12.9M monthly readers EACH.

TL;DR: The “SEO” job title pulled in roughly 4x what the average Founder or CEO placement landed.

Your credential punches way above its pay grade. Worth knowing before your next pitch, or your next salary negotiation:

See the Full Breakdown

This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and North Star Inbound.

A client receives two deliverables…

Both solve the problem they were hired to solve. Both are accurate and useful, and they lead to the same business outcomes. The client is happy with the work and sees no meaningful difference in the results.

Then they learn that one deliverable took 20 hours to create while the other took 20 minutes. Now the questions start rolling in…

• Was AI involved?

• Should the faster deliverable cost less?

• Is the person who completed it somehow less skilled because they found a way to work more efficiently?

What’s interesting is that most of us have completely different reactions to AI depending on which side of the transaction we’re sitting on. We love using AI to save ourselves time, but many become uncomfortable when they’re the customer and discover AI was used to create something they purchased.

I recently ran a LinkedIn poll asking a simple question: If the outcome is great, do we really care how it was made?

The responses reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The biggest objections people have to AI often have very little to do with quality.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Meet the AI visibility leaders in retail,
plus new tactics

AI search is reshaping customer journeys and how shoppers discover and choose products. But many retail marketers don’t yet have a clear benchmark of AI visibility, who’s winning and why.

Semrush’s AI Visibility Index changes that. Our new study is built on a US prompt database of 126 million prompts, mapping exactly which retailers are dominating AI recommendations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews. As well as where the opportunities lie.

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The Time vs Value Fallacy

I think part of the discomfort comes from the fact that we’ve spent decades connecting value to effort.

• Long hours feel valuable.

• Fast work feels suspicious.

• Struggle feels like expertise.

The harder something appears to be, the easier it is to justify its price.

The story is about a ship engine that stopped working. After multiple attempts to repair it, the owners brought in an engineer with decades of experience. He inspected the engine, tapped it once with a small hammer, and the machine roared back to life.

His invoice was $10,000.

The owners were furious and demanded an itemized bill.

The response:

• Hammer tap: $2

• Knowing where to tap: $9,998

The debate whether this is a true story or just a fun tale that people like me use to validate value-based pricing. Whether the story is true almost doesn’t matter. The lesson does.

People aren’t paying for the tap. They’re paying for the expertise behind it.

That’s what makes AI such an interesting topic. It forces us to confront a question many of us have avoided for years:

Those aren’t always the same thing.

The Objections That Actually Matter

To be clear, not all objections to AI are bad ones. I certainly haven’t had an issue sharing my opinion.

In fact, I think some of the strongest arguments against AI have very little to do with how quickly something was created.

• Risk matters

• Hallucinations matter

• Bad recommendations matter

• Compliance, privacy, and security concerns matter

• Accountability matters

These are all legitimate concerns, and what’s interesting is that none of these concerns have much to do with how long it took to create the deliverable.

They’re questions of trust.

Can the output be trusted? Can the recommendation be defended? Can someone confidently stand behind the work if it’s questioned six months from now?

Because when something goes wrong, nobody gets to blame the AI. The employee is accountable. The consultant is accountable. The company is accountable.

That’s why I’ve always found the quality debate to be the least interesting part of the conversation. The more important question isn’t whether AI was involved. It’s whether the outcome is trustworthy enough for someone to put their name behind it.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

---

I want to shout out Nicole Ponce and Jo Cameron from Semrush and Moz.

This summer I’m doing a mini SEO internship with my 14-year-old son. Both Nicole and Jo hooked my boy up with swag and training/certifications from their companies.

If you (or someone you know) is just starting out, make sure to check out the educational content and certifications from both Semrush and Moz.

The Outcome Test

The more I think about AI, the less interested I become in whether it was used.

Instead, I find myself asking a different set of questions.

• Was the outcome accurate?

• Was it useful?

• Was it better than the alternative?

• Would you be willing to stand behind it with your name, reputation, and credentials on the line?

If the answer to all of these is yes, should we really care how it was produced?

I suspect this is where many people become uncomfortable because it shifts the conversation away from tools and back toward results.

Ironically, this is also where humans become more important, not less.

The future isn’t machines versus humans (I know, The Terminator and I, Robot movies will never be the same). It’s humans using AI versus humans who don’t. The premium won’t come from refusing to use AI. It will come from judgment, taste, decision-making, communication, and accountability.

AI can accelerate execution, but humans still decide what should be built, what should be published, and what risks are acceptable. More importantly, humans are still the ones responsible for the outcome.

The people who lose to AI won't be the ones using it. They'll be the ones still evaluating effort while everyone else is measuring outcomes

~Nick

Thank you to North Star Inbound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are AirOps and North Star Inbound.

The best and worst part of the World Wide Web is the ability to freely share your opinions regardless of whether they’re technically accurate (or not).

But imagine a scenario where you are held accountable not only for what you say on the internet, but also for whether it is human- or AI-written?

A recent report came out that a German court is holding Google accountable for just this. The court treated the AI overviews as Google’s own content and rejected Google’s argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

Let’s talk more about what this could look like for businesses and individuals.

Thank you to AirOps for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

Getting retrieved by AI search is not the
same as getting cited.

Strong rankings and clean pages still lose when AI systems decide which sources to reference. The gap is everything that happens between the prompt, the fan-out, and the final citation.

On June 25, AirOps Head of Research Oshen Davidson breaks down where citation wins actually come from, alongside Melanie Dell’Olio (AI Solutions) and Josh Spilker (Head of Search Marketing).

You’ll walk away knowing:

• Why many retrieved pages never make the final answer

• Which page elements get content parsed and reused (headings, lists, tables, stats, schema)

• How to find pages being surfaced but not selected, then prioritize the right fixes

• What to measure beyond rankings: citations, mentions, repeat visibility, refresh timing

Tactical, no fluff, built for teams who want AI visibility that moves pipeline.

From Research to Revenue:
5 AEO Actions to Take Now. June 25, 3:00pm EST.

[Save your spot →]

The “Disclaimer” Defense Is Cracking

For the last few years, nearly every AI platform has relied on some version of the same disclaimer: “AI can make mistakes. Please verify important information.”

Most users recognized this as the cost of using these tools.

But the German court essentially said that merely warning users about potential errors doesn’t automatically remove responsibility when those errors cause harm. If your system creates new claims that never existed in the source material, those aren’t someone else’s words anymore. They’re yours.

That’s a much bigger shift than many people realize. This is where legal AI ramifications start.

Why? Because it moves the conversation away from whether AI is useful (AKA *) and toward who owns the consequences when it gets things wrong.

What This Means For Businesses

Many companies are blindly trusting rapidly adopting AI across content creation, customer service, product descriptions, reporting, legal reviews, hiring, and internal communications.

• In many cases, the discussion centers around efficiency.

• Can we create content faster?

• Can we answer support tickets more cheaply?

• Can we automate this process?

Those are reasonable questions.

But the German ruling introduces another question:

Who is responsible when the output is wrong?

What if….

• AI-generated support response gives inaccurate guidance

• AI-written article damages a competitor’s reputation

• AI-generated report contains fabricated information that influences a business decision

The “AI wrote it” defense may become less effective over time. It darn near cost me 20 million.

The more people position AI as a trusted source of information, the harder it becomes to argue they shouldn’t be accountable for what it says.

The Situation Is Kinda Funny…

The irony in this is that most AI vendors already know this.

That’s why nearly every platform includes warnings, disclaimers, and usage policies.

Yet those same companies market AI as smarter, faster, more capable, and increasingly reliable.

You can’t, at the same time, tell users to trust the answer while arguing nobody should trust the answer.

At some point, those positions collide. We’re starting to see Google’s “solution”: an option to opt out of AI.

Germany may simply be one of the first courts willing to force Google (or any other LLM business) to take certain actions.

What SEOs Should Be Paying Attention To

Ironically, this ruling could end up benefiting everyone.

Today, the conversation is focused on whether AI companies should be responsible for the content their systems generate. But accountability could expand, well beyond AI.

The internet has spent decades creating distance between actions and consequences. Anonymous accounts, fake profiles, throwaway emails, and now AI-generated content all make it easier to say things without owning them.

That’s why I find this ruling so interesting.

Not because of Google. Because it introduces the idea that “I didn’t write it” may not be enough.

The image below shows a real email that Russell and Nina Westbrook received. A real person sat behind a keyboard and sent a message, hoping they would die in a car crash.

That isn’t free speech. It’s hate speech.

The internet, combined with AI, needs more confidence that the content is accurate and that people who create with it are held accountable.

You don’t get to claim the productivity gains when AI is right and blame the algorithm when it’s wrong.

~Nick

Thank you to North Star Inbound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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In a recent campaign, we generated 4,400 links for Preply over 20 months. If you want earned media that strengthens long-term discoverability, we can help.

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This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and North Star Inbound.

For the past two years, the SEO industry has been asking Google for two things: more visibility into AI traffic and more control over how content appears in AI experiences.

Last week, Google started delivering both.

They announced new controls that allow site owners to opt out of AI-powered experiences (AIO/AI Mode, etc.) and introduced new AI reporting within Google Search Console. (Note that both of these are in early beta and are not yet available for everyone)

On paper, this is a victory for things moving in the right direction for publishers.

Instead, the conversation immediately split into camps. Some focused on the new reporting. Others focused on the new controls and began debating whether to opt out of AI altogether.

What caught my attention wasn’t the announcement itself. It was how quickly the conversation shifted from gaining visibility to voluntarily giving it up.

Thank you to Semrush for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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What This Actually Means

Before we go any further, let’s clear up what Google actually announced.

The new controls do not turn off AI Overviews, stop people from using AI Mode, or slow AI adoption. Users are still going to search and ask questions, and increasingly do so through AI-powered experiences.

Google introduced a way for publishers to have more control over whether their content can be surfaced in those experiences. (Was this the plan all along, or was it exclusively because of the UK Competition and Markets Authority demanding it?)

That’s an important distinction because many people are treating this as a decision about AI itself. It isn’t.

• AI Mode doesn’t disappear because a publisher opts out.

• AI Overviews don’t disappear when a website decides not to participate.

The user experience remains largely unchanged. The only thing that changes is which brands are eligible to appear.

If Expedia opted out tomorrow, people wouldn’t stop planning vacations. If NerdWallet opted out tomorrow (like I did their stock), people wouldn’t stop researching credit cards. Google would simply surface someone else in its place.

This isn’t a decision about whether AI succeeds or fails. It’s a decision about whether your brand is present when customers choose to use it.

Why AI Opt-Out Sounds Good But Is Actually A Trap

I understand the appeal. Publishers are worried about losing more clicks, frustrated by changing search behavior, and concerned about how AI systems use their content.

Those concerns are beyond valid.

Where I disagree is with the assumption that opting out changes user behavior.

It doesn’t.

Users aren’t deciding whether to use AI based on your participation. They’re deciding whether AI helps them get answers faster. For a growing number of searches, it does.

That’s why opting out of AI inclusion and opting users out of AI experiences are two very different things.

A publisher can choose not to participate. Users can still use AI Mode. Google can still answer the question. The only thing that changes is which brands are eligible to appear.

That’s the trap.

The practical outcome isn’t less AI. It’s more visibility for your competitors. They gain citations, exposure, and the opportunity to become the trusted answer, while your brand becomes less visible.

If the concern is that AI is changing how customers discover information, disappearing from AI-powered experiences feels like a pretty dumb move.

The challenge isn’t finding ways to be less visible. It’s finding ways to remain visible as search behavior continues to evolve.

Google Finally Gives Us AI Data... And SEOs Still Complain.

The other part of Google’s announcement that received less attention was the reporting.

For years, the industry has been asking for more visibility into AI-driven search experiences. We wanted better attribution, better reporting, and a clearer understanding of how users interact with AI-powered search.

Now Google is beginning to provide some of that visibility, and almost immediately the conversation shifted to why it isn’t enough. Note that many of these screenshots are illustrative and are even from industry friends and well-respected search practitioners in our space. No shade intended to any one individual, simply wanting to illustrate the movement.

Maybe that’s true. The data isn’t perfect. The reporting doesn’t answer every question. I’d love more visibility into citations, AI Mode interactions, and better any sort of attribution modeling.

I especially agree with Dan’s post above, but waiting for perfect data has never been a winning strategy.

SEO has always operated with imperfect data. We’ve spent years making decisions based on estimated search volume, incomplete attribution, and reporting limitations. Some of the biggest wins in my career came from acting on directional signals rather than perfect certainty.

The same applies here.

The mistake is treating every reporting enhancement as either perfect or useless. We’re getting more visibility than we had six months ago, and we’ll likely have more six months from now.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

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My Reporting Approach: SEO+ Reporting

Part of the reason this debate exists is that many teams are still measuring success through a traditional SEO lens.

Traditional reporting focuses on clicks, rankings (ewww), traffic, and conversions. Those metrics still matter, and I don’t see them disappearing anytime soon. The problem is that they’re no longer telling the entire story.

Users are discovering brands across more surfaces than ever before, especially outside of the Google ecosystem. Traditional organic search still matters, but so do AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Reddit, YouTube, and a growing list of ecosystems users rely on in their purchasing journey.

That’s why I’ve started thinking about reporting as “SEO+” rather than just SEO. (Yeah, I’m lazy and used the streaming naming convention “+” because… yeah, lazy.)

The goal isn’t to abandon traditional metrics. The goal is to expand what we’re measuring. Alongside traffic and conversions, I want to understand where brands are being cited, how often they’re being mentioned, how many unique URLs are being cited, whether branded search demand is increasing, how AI platforms reference them, and whether visibility is expanding even when attribution remains borked.

This is where I think many organizations are making the same mistake they made with content years ago.

With one of my clients, a lot of our content influences revenue months before a customer converts. Looking only at last-click reporting dramatically understates the impact. That’s why I started reporting on “content assists” as a key metric in their reporting. AI visibility is creating a similar challenge. A customer might first encounter your brand through an AI Overview, revisit you through traditional search, and ultimately convert through a completely different channel (probably a paid channel… ‘cause everyone loves ROAS).

The influence is real even when the attribution path is messy.

That’s why I’m less interested in measuring traffic alone and more interested in measuring discoverability. The brands that consistently appear across search, AI, and recommendation platforms are building familiarity long before a conversion occurs.

The Wrong Question

Most of the discussion around Google’s announcement has centered on a single question:

Should I opt out of AI?

I think that’s the wrong question.

The better question is whether you can afford to be absent from the places where customers increasingly discover information, products, and brands.

Users aren’t waiting for the SEO industry to decide whether AI is good or bad. They’re already using it.

That’s why I view Google’s announcement less as an AI opt-out feature and more as a strategic decision point. Opting out doesn’t remove AI from the equation. It simply increases the likelihood that someone else becomes the answer instead.

Some brands will use it.

Their competitors are hoping they do.

Will you lean into change, or will you be another person complaining that Google owes them free clicks?

~Nick

Thank you to North Star Inbound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

North Star Inbound runs an integrated growth system:

• Strategic SEO and GEO

• Digital PR

• Conversion copywriting

Case study proof: our top 5 posts drove 144712 sessions in a 9-post pilot and led the blog for conversions, including 224 conversions and 217 phone calls from one post.

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The search industry is experiencing something many of us have never seen before.

The supply of search talent now exceeds the demand for search talent.

Blame artificial intelligence. Blame the economy. Blame years of checkbox SEO execution becoming increasingly commoditized.

Whatever the reason, the result is the same.

Search layoffs are up. Job openings are down. The market is more competitive than at any point in my 15+ year career.

The uncomfortable reality is that many of the skills that once made an SEO valuable are becoming easier to automate, outsource, or generate with AI.

Pull up a chair.

Let's talk about why this is happening, what skills are becoming table stakes, and what employers should actually be looking for when hiring SEO talent in 2026.

Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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The First SEO Jobs AI Comes For

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI is that it’s coming for SEO jobs.

I don’t believe that’s what’s happening.

What I do believe is happening is that AI is changing which SEO skills employers are willing to pay a premium for.

Historically, a significant portion of SEO work revolved around gathering information and generating recommendations. Technical audits, content briefs, keyword clustering, schema markup, metadata recommendations, and competitive analyses all required time, experience, and effort.

Those activities still matter today.

The difference is that they are becoming dramatically easier to produce.

An SEO can now use AI to generate a first-pass audit, content brief, or optimization recommendation in minutes. What once took hours can often be accomplished in seconds.

This doesn’t make the output worthless. It simply changes where the value resides.

For years, many organizations treated recommendations as the deliverable. The audit was the deliverable. The roadmap was the deliverable. The deck was the deliverable.

But recommendations were never the end goal.

Recommendations only create value when they lead to prioritization, implementation, and measurable business outcomes.

AI helps solve the problem of idea generation.

It does very little to solve the implementation problem.

That’s why I believe the first SEO jobs AI comes for are those centered around producing recommendations rather than driving outcomes.

As the cost of generating recommendations approaches zero, employers naturally place greater value on the people who can determine which recommendations matter and implement them.

In other words, AI is commoditizing parts of SEO execution.

It is not commoditizing judgment.

What AI Still Struggles To Do

As AI becomes better at generating recommendations, the value of SEO talent shifts elsewhere.

Prioritization. Testing. Communication. Influence. Judgment.

These aren’t new skills. They’ve always mattered.

The difference is that they are quickly becoming the primary differentiators.

Most organizations don’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. They suffer from a shortage of alignment, execution, and good decision-making.

Finally, there is judgment.

A few weeks ago, I found myself disagreeing with Gemini about a topic I know extremely well. The answer sounded reasonable. The explanation was polished. The problem was that it was wrong.

As AI becomes more capable, the ability to identify when it is confidently wrong becomes a skill in itself.

The future SEO isn’t the person who can generate the most recommendations.

It’s the person who knows which recommendations actually matter.

The New SEO Career Framework

For years, the career progression of an SEO was fairly straightforward.

• Learn more about SEO. Get promoted.

• Learn technical SEO. Get promoted.

• Learn content strategy. Get promoted.

• Learn analytics. Get promoted.

While those skills are still important, AI is rapidly reducing the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The ability to produce SEO recommendations is becoming more accessible every day.

That doesn’t mean expertise no longer matters. It means the skills layered on top of that expertise matter more.

Today’s most valuable search professionals understand search. They understand AI. They understand how businesses operate. Most importantly, they know how to align people, priorities, and resources around a common objective.

The higher you climb within an organization, the less your success depends on your ability to identify problems and the more it depends on your ability to get those problems solved.

AI scales execution. People scale vision.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

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What I’d Look For If I Were Hiring Today

If I were hiring an SEO in 2026, I wouldn’t spend much time asking about canonical tags, title tags, or XML sitemaps.

Not because those topics are unimportant, but because I can quickly determine whether someone understands the fundamentals.

What I’d really want to understand is how that person operates when things become messy.

I’d ask them to share a recommendation nobody agreed with.

Years ago, I argued that H1 tags provided virtually no ranking benefit. People laughed. Some openly disagreed. Eventually, John Mueller echoed a similar position, and Bill Slawski had been discussing the concept for years.

I don’t care whether the candidate was right.

I care whether they had the conviction to challenge assumptions and the communication skills to navigate disagreement.

I’d ask about a failed test.

Every experienced SEO has watched a seemingly great initiative die somewhere between recommendation and implementation. The difference is what happened next. Did they move on to the next project, or did they find a way to remove blockers and maintain momentum?

I’d ask about a project that stalled.

Every experienced SEO has watched a seemingly great initiative die somewhere between recommendation and implementation. The difference is what happened next. Did they move on to the next project, or did they find a way to remove blockers and keep the momentum going?

I’d also ask where AI gave them bad advice.

The common theme across all of these questions is simple.

I’m not looking for someone who knows SEO.

I’m looking for someone who can turn SEO knowledge into outcomes.

The easiest part of SEO has always been knowing what to do.

The hard part is getting it done, generating tangible results.

AI Won’t Replace SEOs. But The Lazy Ones Are Toast

~Nick

Thank you to North Star Inbound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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Imagine working in SEO for years, researching a problem you know inside and out, only to have an LLM confidently explain why your experience is wrong.

That happened to me. Actually, it happened three different times last week with Gemini.

The scary part wasn’t that the answers were obviously bad. It was that they sounded good. The responses were polished, believable, and directionally accurate enough that most people would never question them.

And if you aren’t deeply familiar with the topic, you probably wouldn’t know how to challenge the answer.

Funny enough, I caught it twice.

The third time cost me money.

All within the same week.

Thank you to Semrush Enterprise for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

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EX1:
Gemini Educates Me on Technical SEO

Let me give you some context.

I’m currently helping migrate a client’s FAQ hub from a provider-hosted subdomain to a self-hosted implementation.

The FAQ lives under a /faq/ folder, but individual Q&A pages are parameter-based URLs. Normally not an issue... except Shopify forces canonicals back to the root /faq/ page, effectively preventing those pages from being indexed.

While researching Shopify-specific solutions and duplication considerations, Gemini gave me this response:

EXCUSE ME!?

You will absolutely NOT be penalized for conflicting SEO signals.

At best, Google indexes what it wants. At worst, it ignores directives it doesn’t trust.

The bigger issue is the wording.

“Penalty” is basically the magic word in SEO. The moment leadership hears it, priorities shift, momentum dies, and recommendations become harder to implement.

Then Gemini doubled down.

I asked whether removing the canonicals and allowing the parameter pages to exist independently was an option.

Gemini responded:

“Google generally ignores query parameters.”

Wow... just wow.

Below is an implementation I worked on with the Saatva team, where we intentionally indexed parameter URLs within the shopping experience.

Search Console and URL inspection confirmed those pages indexed just fine.

Parameter pages can absolutely rank, index, and generate value.

The problem isn’t that Gemini was wrong (as in it’s a more difficult implementation).

It’s that the answer sounded believable enough that someone without SEO experience would probably accept it and move on.

EX2:
Gemini Says Solve The Issue With a $3,000 Part

This one hit differently because I’m not a mechanic.

I’ve been troubleshooting an issue on my Jeep SRT and spent hours outside in the sun collecting data, testing fuses, reviewing OBD2 logs, and trying to narrow down the root cause. After reviewing everything, Gemini confidently concluded the issue was likely a rear differential failure and suggested a full replacement.

Estimated damage? Roughly $3,000 in OEM parts alone.

The response sounded fantastic. It was detailed, logical, and even complimented my troubleshooting process.

The problem? It was wrong. Really wrong.

After pushing back and sharing additional OBD2 data I had been tracking during diagnosis, Gemini completely reversed course and admitted it jumped to a worst-case scenario without enough evidence.

In other words, I almost spent thousands replacing parts I didn’t need.

That’s what makes these examples interesting. In SEO, I immediately knew Gemini was wrong because I had years of experience to challenge the recommendation. Here, I didn’t have that advantage. I had to rely on skepticism, continue testing, and avoid treating the answer as fact.

Same AI. Same confidence. Completely different outcome.

Nick’s Weekly “This Doesn’t Suck” List

A short list of things that stood out to me this week. No affiliate links, hidden angles, and certainly no way to buy your way in. If it’s here, it was earned.

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EX 3:
Gemini Cost Me $20 million dollars!

Ok, technically, this was video game money.

I was playing Madden, working through team logistics, and trying to optimize salary cap spending to re-sign key players and keep the roster together.

At some point, I got lazy and tagged in my partner, Gemini. I shared a screenshot of the team finances and asked for a roadmap to restructure contracts and optimize the cap situation.

Gemini gave me a detailed plan. I followed it.

And it put me $20M over the salary cap.

The funny part is this perfectly mirrors the earlier examples.

The answer looked good. It was organized, confident, and gave me a clear player-by-player action plan.

So I trusted it. Then I called Gemini out.

You’ll notice in the second screenshot that Gemini essentially points out that I blindly trusted the recommendation without validating the math.

Honestly… fair.

The difference is that this mistake only cost me fake money and a Madden franchise. The Jeep example almost cost me real money, and the SEO example could have cost implementation momentum and trust.

The value of expertise was never memorizing answers. It was knowing when something feels off, asking better questions, and recognizing when the answer smells like bullshit.

AI didn’t remove that skill. If anything, it made it more valuable.

AI isn’t replacing experts. It’s replacing people who stopped thinking.

AI isn’t replacing experts. It’s replacing people who have stopped thinking.

~Nick

Thank you to North Star Inbound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch

North Star Inbound runs an integrated growth system:

• Strategic SEO and GEO

• Digital PR

• Conversion copywriting

Case study proof: our top 5 posts drove 144712 sessions in a 9-post pilot and led the blog for conversions, including 224 conversions and 217 phone calls from one post.

Book a call