How to Stay Visible When AI Decides What Shows Up When People Search with Bruce Clay

In 2025, most people still treat SEO like it's just a ranking game. Write content, optimize the headlines, stuff in the keywords, win the click. But what if ranking first on Google doesn't even get you seen anymore? What if the real game is getting into the AI-generated answers and not just in the list of search results? Today's guest has been shaping the SEO industry since the beginning, and today we are breaking down what still works, what's changing, and how to stay visible when AI decides what shows up. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you No Fluff Tips on how to grow. If you enjoyed the show, please do me a favor, hit that subscribe button and do send me your biggest growth questions at masteringthegrowth.com. I'd love to know what you're working on and what's getting in your way. Joining me today is Bruce Clay. Bruce is also known as the father of SEO. He's been helping businesses to get found online since 1996. He taught thousands of marketers, written go-to books, and led strategies for brands like Netflix, eBay, and Home Depot. Now he's focused on helping teams adapt their content for AI and stay visible as search keeps evolving. Bruce, welcome.

Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here.

So we love to, we love to open the show with this question. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

Well, obviously it's growing your business through the use of technology. I think of it because I'm of my background. I think of it in the way of search and how to provide information and convert people to be clients. That's the growth part that I think most people would expect in a search world, and that's what I focus on.

Okay, so if I would choose from all the things that influence growth of any tech business, which could be organic visibility such as SEO provides, it could be marketing, it could be being good at sales, it could be as well timing and the product-market fit and, you know, technology and all these other things which directly or indirectly influence growth. If you were to choose just one, like the most important in your view, would that still be SEO?

Yes.

Okay, I love that. Of course, that's what I do.

The answer to your question is absolutely yes.

100%.

And it's a reasonably broad answer. Especially since a lot of the AI stuff emerging right now is built on the back of SEO. So yeah, it's fundamental to the future.

I love off the back of the SEO. Give me more, Bruce. What do you mean when you say that a lot of AI has been built off the back of the SEO?

Well, the way the LLM is built is sort of a text grab.

Okay.

But the resolution of whether you have EEAT— expertise, experience, authority, and trust— is not being resolved by the LLM. That part isn't resolving that. So what is actually happening is that the AI modules are depending upon the ranking and process of the search engines to determine who is reputable, authoritative, who's trustworthy. And based on the fact that you are trustworthy, then they give you a boost up in the AIO type area. It's been shown that to rank in Chat Search, you have to be in Bing and typically in the top 12 positions. And if you look at AIO, you find that most of the quoted sites within AIO are also in the top 10 to 20. So it appears as if the qualifier to show up in AIO is that the search engine thinks you're worthy And then it's up to the AI module to build a composite response from multiple top-ranked sites.

Okay.

And, that gives it a little bit more trust, a little bit more juice, if you will, for, a reputable answer.

Okay. So we, we, we just jumped straight into authority. Let, let, let's keep dig— let's keep digging. So effectively we're saying you still need to be part of the top 12 to 20. So that's like one page first and second page of the search results to be even considered as a potential answer when it comes to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Is that discovery you guys have been made?

Yes.

Okay. So how does, so is it the same rules then which are previously applied and they still remain when it comes to actually building authority or being seen as credible by say Google?

No.

This has— these rules have changed? If so, like, how did they change then?

Well, uh, the search engines themselves are changing. They're changing all the time. And the current focus is, as I mentioned, EEAT, usability, uh, whether or not you are providing a good user experience for that visitor. That is still the, the thrust of most of the search engines.

Okay.

Understand that even in social media, what people will do is they'll go to social media and they'll search around and they'll get advice and they'll like, they'll like what they see. And then they go to Google as the gatekeeper for the conversion. So, you know, they go to Google for the reviews, they go to Google for this and Google for that. And then they take that information and make their decisions. But the gatekeeper is still the search engine, and we're not going to get around that. That's the way, you know, it's going to be for quite a while. So, it turns out, I'll go a little bit on a tangent here. It turns out that organic is going farther and farther down in the search results because Google keeps putting stuff at the top of the page.

Yep.

Impressions are up, which is a big thing. Ranking is steady or up and traffic is dropping mostly because Google's forcing you down the page. But what they're doing is they're putting other things on the top of the page. So the real shift in SEO is to figure out how to get in all those other things. How do I get in? People also ask, how do I get in all these nooks and crannies, if you will? And that is SEO. That is still SEO. The only way to get your site to behave differently is to change your site. That's what SEO does. So going— it's a long-winded answer, but SEO is still vital. Even in an AIO world, and it doesn't matter, all the LLMs are very similar. The differentiator between the different platforms is really the way they string the words together. They have different, slightly different technologies. I mean, it's all theirs. And I'm sure they just sit there all day long and pay attention to their competition and leapfrog where they can. But that is, in essence, what happens. They, they get the data and they somehow have to prioritize whether that is legitimate or hallucinating. Is it valid or invalid? There's a big concern in the marketplace right now that Somebody could logically bomb the LLM with a whole bunch of false data. And it is up to the LLM to look at search and say, do you trust it? And that is the way I think search is being dragged into the AI world because it's the only thing out there with, you know, 30 years experience, Google's 25 years, able to say we trust that. And I think that's a very important thing.

So, so you mentioned the other thing. So effectively, just to give the context to our listeners, when you go in Google right now, you put a query at the very top and even above some of the paid positions, you're going to see what is called SGE, which is effectively an AI-generated answer, right? Like that box will be the number one you see. You can, if you can expand it, and if you expand it, that's actually gonna take a lot of your screen fold. So it expands up to like, uh, 1,000 pixels or so. So effectively you're just gonna see this, uh, this AI answer, right? So now we're saying that if you're not part of that answer or you're not that answer, you, you really not receiving any clicks anymore cuz people will see that answer and they will be potentially happy with that. And they will just walk away. So we're seeing more impressions, as you mentioned, but traffic is dropping as you're not getting these clicks. So the challenge becomes like, how do you become the answer for LLM? And what we're saying effectively, you still need to have that authority to be part of first or second Google page, but how do you tactically approach the authority piece? So let's say, you know, I have a website, like I just want to be one of the answers they select. Like, does my SEO game change from what it used to be just because of that?

Yes, it does. One of the characteristics— put it in its niche. The AI world is focused on information queries, not commerce or transactional queries. And In the informational world, they have chosen to focus on questions. And it is important that from an SEO point of view, you modify your focus to be question-centric, right? And it isn't, in my opinion, and I'm, I'm just one of many voices out there. But in my opinion, just putting a whole bunch of FAQs, you know, the one-hit wonders, one paragraph, it's a definition, thank you very much, and you call it an FAQ, isn't going to do anything.

Okay.

I don't believe that's what an FAQ is. An FAQ actually answers a question. So what you're going to need to be able to do is take your website. Identify the theme and topic of a page, and then come up with a single FAQ that represents a question that page is supposedly answering, but very bluntly answer it. And even have a list of how do I do it, you know, tasks. And I have been doing that. You can go to, you know, my site, BruceClay.com. Go to my blog. On each of the pages, there's an FAQ. Search for that question. And over 50% of the time, I'm an AIO for it. So there's a way, just mimic what I'm doing. There's a way to be able to pose a question that's deliberate and blunt and an answer and a series of steps for implementation if appropriate, because remember, AIO shows up when it's an informational query, so steps are appropriate. You can put that on your page, get it spidered. And in our case, I did it to every page on my site. And over half the time I'm in AIO.

Okay, so the question-centric, is that the same as saying that your, your content needs to have an intent, which it's looking to solve something. So you have a question and then you're providing all the answer, which is effectively sort of like intent-driven. Is that the same question-centric, intent-driven content, or there's difference between those two?

Well, I think, well, the method we use is to, if you wrote a blog post, we analyze the blog post, derive a question, and then answer it. So, um, that isn't the same as just generating a question and an answer. It has to be contextual to your page. But yeah, it, it really does. It really does work.

Okay. So that's, yep.

Yeah.

Continue, Bruce.

I was going to say, so fundamentally, if you want to be considered for the AIO, you have to rank organically and you have to provide an answer that is deliberate. To the question. And if you do both, you perform better.

So the follow-up is, should you redo the content you have? If let's say you have a big blog post which addresses multiple questions but on the same topic, um, should you split that into like 5 different blogs and have one per question, or that's not necessary?

I don't think it is as necessary, but we have long ago decided that if it answers 3 questions or more, it's 2 blog posts. So you don't usually end up with, you know, a 5,000-word blog post that answers 10 things. I mean, that is a little excessive. Now we do have an alternate way of handling those questions. Um, there's, there's like 3 topics that are appropriate for all of this, and, uh, AI is just one of them. But what Google is doing is they're moving into AI mode, and AI mode, uh, is strongly moving into personalization, which means if I am the searcher, Google's going to use my Gmail to see what I've been emailing about. It's going to use my YouTube to see what videos I've been searching for. And it's going to take that information. So when I do a question for, and by the way, the difference is a question versus a keyword. When I do a question into Google and it is attempting to answer it, it's going to bias it towards my search history, my YouTube history, my Gmail history. And for a long time they've been using web history, but now it's broadened. And so when Google tries to answer that, that personalization is going to determine whether I rank or not for that person. I mean, ranking monitors are fine as a general ruler to say, okay, in the wild, this is how I would perform. But the personalization is going to totally change how AI answers a question. And that poses a serious AI extension problem that most people haven't even considered. The problem that a website faces is I might have tens of thousands of different personas that are using my website. They're all trying to solve different problems and they may want to go to my website. One of the actions— and your audience can do this too— what we do is we take the web page and in an attempt to figure out what do I do about 10,000 personas, my analysis was there aren't that many real personas when you think about why they're searching. There might be 10,000 things and you deal with gender and background and education and position. And all those are serious considerations. But what I have decided was that there's actually only 8 personas probably that we're going to care about. So we do 12 just to be safe. And for each persona, we can, and we do it by communicating with chat. For each persona, you can do something called a PAS. It's a pain, activate, solve sequence. It's a framework. And so what we do is we take a page, we determine what the personas are for the page or the keyword. We determine the personas, we determine what their pain points are. And I don't, at that point, I don't care what their gender is, right? I might care whether their title is likely to be top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel because a VP is bottom and an intern is top, right? There's a different urgency. But, and we also, by the way, figure out the funnel locations. But what we end up doing is modifying or inserting into the page call to actions appropriate to the personas within that page. So if I have a particular page at the top, I might insert a CTA for Persona 1 and in the middle Persona 2 because it's middle of funnel and then Persona 3 at the bottom, except there's 12. And it's not a CTA like you're used to. What we have done is we have decided it's a QCTA. It's a question. You see, people have learned to skip over CTAs just like they've learned to skip over ads. So what we have noticed is that if we change the CTA from a regular CTA into a question, then suddenly, uh, visitors will read it. And if it is actually addressing their pain— and by the way, that's how we determine what the question is, we take their pains and address it with a question— then they're likely to click on that and go to a, a more conversion-centric page. And so by doing a lot of that kind of legwork— don't get me wrong, there's like 30 steps there— by doing all of that legwork, we can actually take a page and target what I have as 12 personas, which means we're moving towards personalization. Because the CTAs are personalized. And it isn't that I have to beat Google's algorithm. I just have to beat my competition. My competition isn't going to be doing that. So, um, we have integrated all this into one of our tools, and the tool will actually, uh, do it. By way of helping the audience, we also probably need to spend 10 seconds on when the— when Chat builds your document, that entire process is focused on putting one word after another. And then what you do is you recursively take that particular article and ask ChatGPT to improve it. You say, until there's an article, it's just a sequence of words. If you ask ChatGPT to improve it, it gets better. For instance, there is a document published by Google called the Google Quality Rater Guidelines. I have gone through that entire document and made questions And these are self-test questions, and then I give it the ChatGPT and say, analyze this page using this list of tests. And if it fails, self-improve the document. And ChatGPT self-improves itself. So from what ChatGPT originally gives you, and then your, hi, make it better, and then you can apply tests. You go through a series of sort of evolutions to that particular page and it gets better and better and better over time. And that is really where we're taking pages now. One of the first tools we put into our Prewriter.ai product is a humanizer. By the way, humanizing your content is vital. You don't want to be last among equals, and people are getting pretty good at detecting that it reads like AI. And so we built a humanizer, uh, that'll take it from 98% AI to less than 10% AI, uh, and update your documents for you. So what you're able to do over time is we have about 190 steps. Even at 3 minutes a step, it's a whole day pack of lunch, right? I mean, 190, that's 6 hours no matter what you do, maybe 9. And so, what you really need to be able to do is understand how the search engine plays in getting you in AIO. That one of the things AIO is going to do is care whether you're personalized or at least addressing that audience that it is searching and that it comes out human. And there's like hundreds of things that have to happen. One of the best things, I think, for AI is that it can improve recursively. It can self-improve. You just have to know how to ask it to do that, but it will. It'll make itself better and to the point where you can't really tell the difference. You really can't tell the difference. One of the things that's interesting and just a data point, I've had pages that are 100% human and I run them through Grammarly, which improves them, and it comes out 94% human. If you make the page too good, it's not likely to be human written, right? So, uh, one of our approaches, uh, and this is, and excuse me for, uh, saying this, but so many people on the internet are looking for the easy way out. No labor. I just want to put in a keyword, take a page and publish it. Kiss of death. Kiss of death. So what we did in Prewriter is we made it so that we do not apply tone, voice compliance, or any of that. We make it so that your writer has to finish it. Whereas a lot of companies are giving, oh, tell me your voice and tell me your style and tell me this and tell me that. Because they're trying to target a finished document so that the writer is bypassed.

Why is it a kiss of death, Bruce? Why, why it's a, why it's a kiss of death? Because that's interesting. Because you're absolutely right. I've seen many products which allows you to copy your sort of voice or style or your brand voice or whatever you put it. You're saying that's, that's a bad idea.

I think operationally. I do think it's a bad idea. What happens, there's like 5 or 6 or I don't even know how many products out on the market that can test whether or not a page is AI. And I can get into the differences between them because we've tested them all. And those tests, like the one I run is ZeroGPT. I take a page, I run it through, it's a simple little thing, it's free.

Yep.

And it'll say you're 98% AI. That I think is important. But if I can bring it down to being near human, what I still have is a problem is that if I actually allow somebody to set the tone, set the voice, set the style, set the compliance codes and do all that work, Um, if what you do is you bypass a writer, you're missing the art. You see, I viewed it, uh, a little differently than others. I think I viewed it correctly, uh, and it'll last. I think, uh, the writer is an artist. They tell your story, and a storyteller is not AI. Yeah, so the writer should be involved. The problem we have is the writer isn't a very good researcher. They often totally miss out on— they'll stare at a blank page for an hour. They will have blind spots. They won't have, you know, they'll get caught up in writer's block. They'll— and their experience guides their content, right? Whereas if you use AI for the research step, it doesn't have gaps. And, and in fact, in our tool, we actually go out, search for the keywords, pull up the top-ranked sites, and pull their keywords and do a content gap analysis and fill in keywords so that you're as complete as everybody else. Or more complete than all. And, uh, it really improves the quality of what you're writing, but you cannot bypass the artist. That would be, um, to me, that isn't the purpose. AI is a tool, not a solution, and you got to use it that way.

So, so that would just, uh, give you a good piece of content. So everything we just discussed where You start with the personas, you start with the PAS to get to the, you know, get the points. So you target the content well, you use the CTA as a question, which has a much better click-through rate, which potentially leads to a new page, giving you better conversions because the page is optimized. So that's just like generic SEO, right? Or is that what we just basically gave is that somehow aligns directly to the new way of people discovering content with AI. So I'm trying to make distinguish, Bruce, the information we just gave, is that how you just do SEO in general? Or is that how you should do right now because AI looks at the content differently if you want to be given as a result by ChatGPT or some other AI agents?

Right. It's actually all of them. Yeah, your question was, how is SEO changing?

Yeah.

And the answer is SEO has to change because personalization is there and AI is growing.

Okay.

So SEO has to accommodate, uh, anything that changes a webpage, I consider SEO.

That's right.

Okay. That's SEO. So yeah, you're gonna be modifying the content and inserting questions, CTAs, and inserting You know, using personas to address the audience for conversion and interest in sharing and everything that goes with it. Yes, that's SEO. The problem we face is AI. If you can rank well in Google, as an example, you're going to show up in AIO.

High probability. And high probability.

So that is really, uh, part of the goal. Now let me, uh, give an example. Um, part of what we generate is a brief, and in the brief I actually have a section called What I Think, and I added that into the brief because part of EEAT is experience. And I found that by adding a what I think section as the author, um, I believe that the EEAT score goes up. Can I prove it? No. Am I doing it universally? And I think that it's going to be the way, uh, I'm going to keep doing it. Uh, I believe it helps. So there's all these subtle things that you can do at an SEO level to improve different things. And by the way, it isn't just that I want to be in AIO. I want to be in all these other features. Google has 40-some features. The SERP visibility, which is anything Google shows, that SERP visibility is going to be the future of where a page has to be. I believe strongly, strongly that if you want to build a brand and want to get traffic, remember I said that Google is the gatekeeper. Well, when I go to Google and do the search, there's a lot of stuff at the top of the page. And yeah, I want to be there. I want people tripping over my site no matter where they look. Some people may care about the People Also Ask or Local Pack or any of the other things that are on the page. I want to be in their line of sight when they visit that page. Even if organic is farther down, I want to rank there. And to rank in People Also Ask, you really have to rank. And have the content on your page that answers the question, which is one of the components of FAQs. And I think that overall we have the technology. We've done a lot of analysis. So one of the data points that we've come up with is on my website, I've always had 550 keywords, the same 550 keywords for 10 years, because I want to see what's happening to my site. And part of that is when we ran them through our tool, we found that this keyword only had 8 Google features, but this other keyword had 12. So Google is based upon the keyword and probable intent. It's determining which features it's going to put on the page. And they're dynamic. If it puts a feature on the page and nobody ever clicks it, after a while they're going to remove it. So what we have is monitors that will figure out for all of these individual features whether you have presence on the top of the page. I only care about page 1, 96% of clicks. I'm analyzing page 1 and I can tell you if you have presence across all of the features appropriate by keyword. Now, that's what you're optimizing for. If you have a keyword that converts, you care that you have presence at the top of the SERP.

Well, let me give this, Bruce, as an example. So I don't even use Google, right? So, uh, okay, I lied. I use Google. Everybody uses Google, but my, uh, search behavior is rapidly changing. And, and there's, there's a lot of stats which as well shows that Gen Z behavior is changing. So they use, for example, voice-activated search, right? Google phone allows you to talk with Gemini directly, right? And they, they pushing that quite strongly now. People use Perplexity as well. People use ChatGPT for questions. You have Siri and Echo at home. All of these are question-answer type of searches, right? So you don't see, you know, the ranking of SERPs, right? Like you don't see search results. So you just effectively having a conversation with AI agent or chatbots and you're asking questions, you're getting an answer. So effectively, if you have not been selected to be that answer, you're not getting that click or that virtual click, let's call it like this. So the idea is that this behavior will just grow and grow and grow, which effectively will change the game in the sense that you have to be selected as an answer, otherwise you're just not getting seen. So like with that in mind, everything we just shared around how you sort of, you know, write the content to be selected as well by agents, we basically still saying that the ranking game is still a very real game, as in no one will, like, AIs will not select you as an authority to be presented as this potential answer if you're not really ranking in Google, right?

That is correct. They're relying on Google to determine if you're trustworthy. There, I mean, there's a lot of stuff. There's canonical tags and redirects and you know, all, all, all sorts of schema and there's all sorts of things. Um, AI is using schema now, right? But they weren't using canonicals and they weren't using, I mean, they weren't and aren't. So they're relying on the search engine to determine this. Here's a good example. The speed of your website. It matters. To Google. But when AI is building a composite answer, it doesn't care. So there are things that you need to be able to do to perform well in search and qualify for AI, but AI can just count on Google to have done it. AI doesn't have to recreate and be their own Google spider. I mean, Google has 25 years of spidering experience. AI is not going to rebuild that. They don't need to. They just look and say, you trust it? Yes? Okay, good.

Okay. So I've been noticing, especially with AI and when it comes to authority, that the market started doing or putting a lot of weight on the author pages or in general who wrote this article as in putting in a person's name, which leads maybe to an author page, or just after the blog post, put all the— not all, but some information about the author, which seems to attach, you know, the content to a person, and then the person's authority dictates a little bit of the content authority. Is that like a real thing, or is this just people imagining things?

No, I think it's real. I have One of the routine— Prewriter is really 30 tools. It's a collection. So one of them is testimonials and credentials and all sorts of things. So I can say, give me a quote from a trusted resource in the SEO industry, and I'll actually now get them. And they're individuals. And their quotes. So I would say for citations and things like that, it's important. Certainly is. And, you know, in certain industries it's vital. Like, for instance, if I'm trying to compare a medical item, you know, EEAT type things, then it matters that the person giving the advice is authoritative. That's going to be a big deal. So yeah, I think, I think it is there. We've done it on all of our posts and, and it, you know, I speak at conferences and I sponsor conferences and I'm around in all these locations. I've got almost a million inbound links. I mean, I've, I've got a lot of material about the business because it's almost 30 years old. All of that, I think, is contributing to how well we perform in AIO. And, you know, the part I really dislike is that Google ranks for so many things. I don't— I think that's unfair. But, um, I, you know, I don't want to go on a rant, but I mean, in the beginning, Google would take my content, but I would get traffic for it. Now Google's taking my content and not giving me traffic, and I think that's not a reciprocal agreement with the, with the search engine.

So we're saying basically they're taking your content for LLMs to train LLMs, but you're actually not getting any traffic back.

Correct. Just last night or this morning, depends on how you look at it. Search Console is now reporting AIO, AI mode links. So Google Search Console is just now reporting some tracking information that we could use to determine if it's valuable to us as a as a site. AI mode is the future. I think that, and you can see where Google's going with this. For instance, AI Overviews, AIO, has many times now become the answer for People Also Ask. If you took the People Also Ask question and expanded it, about half the time now it is an AIO-formatted answer. Yep. Right? And I think that's where Google's going. They want to keep you on the Google property as long as they can. That way, you know, they have a fighting chance of getting money from you. Of course. Your entire audience, raise your hand if you believe Google is in the business of making money. I mean, yeah, and they have to make more and more and more, uh, during this, uh, AI battleground. And, um, so Google's going to want to keep people on Google. Let people click.

Let me ask this, Bruce. Um, so we talked about the importance of, of, of a question-centric or intent-driven content. You want to have some personas, so you want to think how you're going to target and what people you're targeting with your content, structuring in a way that you have PAS and call to action. So let me ask this, like, how the HTML setup itself, is that still a thing in a sense that it was a big deal, like technical SEO? I think it still is a big deal, but with the AI, are we saying that AI agents is pretty much the same spiders, you know, what Google, like nothing changes over there. So technical SEO is still what it was, or are there new things coming up when it comes to AI bots and getting into your content, you know, different type of, I don't know, crawler TXT files you can create or different type of HTML. A technical way, you know, you're approaching your content to make sure that, uh, the AI gets what it needs?

In general, uh, there's a new llm.txt type file, and it's really more of a sitemap to direct, uh, the LLM as to what pages are important on your site. It's more of an importance, uh, file than an actual robots controller. The issue that you have with your website is that what you need, unconditionally, what you need is a site that can be spidered. So don't do, you know, stupid webmaster tricks with dynamic content that shows up when people click because a spider doesn't click, right? We constantly get people who say, Well, I click here and look at all my content. It's all dynamically loaded. Well, good, but the spider doesn't click. So the biggest issue is allowing any spider to spider. It's what they do. Make it easy for them to get to your content. That's all you really need to do at that level. Do you need to use the right words? Of course. You need to know enough about yourself and what they're rewarding so that you can build it the right way. For instance, if you go to ChatGPT and tell ChatGPT to spider for— to search for a word and analyze the AIO results, they'll say they won't do it. They won't analyze AIO results to determine what good keywords to use. It won't.

Why is that?

Because according to ChatGPT, that's a violation of Google's terms of service. And they have an arrangement with Google where if you say, go search for this keyword and give me the top 10 results, it will. It just won't give you the ability to analyze an AIO page. It'll tell you the top 10 results on the page, but you can't analyze the AIO. So there's things that obviously people are going to get around and how they do it is any number of things. But Google doesn't want you analyzing AIO. You want to have a really cool secret? So you take a page and you, even if you ran it through our tools and you got the questions and it's persona'd and it's all geared up correctly. One of the things you can do is you can say to analyze the page and make subliminal. When's the last time you heard that word? Subliminal changes to the content to improve the click-through rate. Right there, that's the whole command. Make subliminal changes to the page to improve click-through rate. And it'll change the page and you stare at it and you don't know what it did. And then you say, tell me what you changed. And it'll be like 20, 30 things. And they're all amazingly perfect. I agree with every one of them. So you can actually do a lot with this. Now, a bigger problem I think that people are going to face is picking their best LLM. Is it Claude? Is it ChatGPT? Which one? And the right way around that is to use Bedrock. Which is an Amazon structure. And so you have flexibility. I can pick any LLM with one interface and it, it directs it. It's an orchestra leader, basically. And I can do amazing things. And if it's transactional, I can use this LLM. And if it's informative, I can use that LLM. I can change whatever I want, um, to be able to do that. And, uh, you know, that's going to be a differentiator. I don't think a lot of people are going to upgrade to bedrock. We are, but, um, you know, it's a couple hundred thousand dollars to do it. But, um, when you do things like that, you're not dependent upon one LLM anymore. Most, you know, if you're using Chat, you're using Chat APIs and everything. I mean, you're Chat. To go to another one is going to be tedious, especially a year from now. One of the things that is vital that every one of your listeners has to care about is where is their brand going to be represented in a Google search result page in one year? Not today, in one year.

Why in one year, Bruce?

Well, we know that questions have gone from 6% to 16% of all queries. I believe in a year it'll double. It'll double. At least a third of all queries will be questions.

Okay, so we're basically saying people learning to ask the question instead of just typing a keyword, right? Okay.

And, uh, I believe that the questions will be compound, right? I mean, I ask questions like, take the keyword, get a search result, pull the top 10, and, and display the titles. I mean, that's a compound keyword. You can't do that in Google, right? So as things become more question-centric, the questions themselves will evolve. And that means that when I have to deal with personalization, I'm not dealing with one question, I'm dealing with 4 or 5 questions perhaps all at once, which is why personas is the only way to do it. Um, I will mention, and I think your audience needs to understand I don't like personas that worry about gender and age and stuff like that. I only worry about their pain. I want to know the persona to identify the pain, but I am here writing to solve that pain. And that pain may be— 8 personas have the same pain, but I want to solve that pain. In my content.

So should I give us an example, Bruce? Like, what's a, what's a persona? And what's a, like, a, like, persona plus pain, which you guys identify? You mentioned like 8 personas. Just sort of an example of what for you is a persona, which is a pain-driven persona.

Well, the persona is a role. So a CMO versus an SEO analyst in the same organization. A CMO is going to sit there and say, how do I solve my traffic loss?

Right.

An SEO analyst is, how do I pick the right keywords?

Yeah, okay, right.

Um, a CMO is going to say, uh, and we're seeing this every day and solving it, how do I get my IT department to implement the SEO, and how do I get my SEO department to talk to my pay-per-click department so they can determine what keywords we really want to emphasize, right?

Okay.

I mean, there—

I see—

CMO is across a lot of different functions, whereas some people are function-centric. So I think that it's top of funnel, bottom of funnel. I think if you can identify multiple funnel layers, and by the way, out of 12 personas, when we've done our analysis, the way the personas are typically grouped is top, middle, and bottom. There's a role that says the CMO doesn't care about keyword research. Folks, trust me, they typically don't. Yeah. And the analyst isn't going to sit there and say, um, how do I get the pay-per-click negative keyword list to help me? I mean, they're not going to do cross-organization. So, uh, but you have it once you identify the different personas and their pains. And correctly address them, then you can move forward. And all of this is in SERP visibility. I mean, it's—

Yeah. Okay. I get you. So is it similar to, you know, like when you write a good prompt with any AI agent, you're going to start by giving it a role. You're going to be like, act as something, something, something. So, so from your perspective, the persona is basically that is, it's a role which which really gives you a bubble of context to work from or to target from SEO perspective.

I think those are different.

Those are different.

I think, yeah, the role is typically for the author of the document, whereas the persona is the downstream person that you want to present it to.

Okay.

So Uh, there, there are different spots in, in the overall view. I want to write it like a college professor.

Okay.

But I want people to be able to read it that like academic documents. Right. So one is the target, uh, which is where I put persona and one is the role of the author, which is where you get to define that.

Okay, I see what I mean. Why PAS as well, Bruce? Like, why, why pain as well? How, how do you expand PAS?

You got pain, activate, and solution. By the way, that's a standard framework.

Framework.

And if you went to ChatGPT and say, uh, take this persona and identify for this keyword the top 3 PAS and just say PAS.

Yeah, chat knows, it will know. I mean, is that like a winning framework from all the tests you did? Because, you know, there's, there's more ways how you can do like a good copywriting. PAS is definitely one of these frameworks, and from your experience, like, that just works. Yeah, like, that's right.

I tried over a dozen different frameworks, and that's the one that is most adaptable to content creation in my, in my—

I love that. All right, that's excellent. So, um, uh, Bruce, um, just cautious, uh, you know, of the time, I got, uh, I got like a rapid questions round if you don't mind. It's like, uh, you know, so any question like a minute or so as an answer.

I'll try. As you, as you have probably sensed, I don't really 2-minute answers.

That's okay. I loved every bit of it. So let's go. What's one SEO tactic you see people still doing in 2025 that just doesn't work anymore?

Linking.

Linking as in backlinking or internal site linking?

No, internal site linking is very powerful. Okay. But going and getting backlinks and blog posts and you know, putting things on other people's websites. Yeah. Well, if they're a very high authority, makes sense. But if it's just a junk site, it's, it's a total waste. Too many people are advocating for backlinking. My belief is that what you do is you write something great, put it on your site, and then tell everybody about it instead of farming it out and one person at a time.

All right.

I think that's a mistake. And John Mueller from Google has actually said it's more an issue of quality than quantity. So let's understand that backlinking is— he also said it's not one of the top 3 ranking factors. Do people keep selling it? Yes. Why? Because that's all they know. But it isn't one of the top ranking factors. So you, you shouldn't fall prey to somebody that's just saying, oh my God, you gotta have backlinks. Well, sure. From authoritative sites and you gotta earn them, but you don't go out and buy them. You don't go out and barter them. That isn't working anymore. So I'd say backlinks are not as powerful. Flip it over.

Yeah.

Notoriety is powerful. Mentions are powerful. But you don't, but that's for, that's generally for the, are you trusted? If a lot of people just mention you, but they don't link to you, that's as powerful as a backlink from an authoritative site sometimes. So yeah, backlinks are the weakest link.

Alright, if you had to cut a 2,000-word article down to 500 words to help it surface in AI, what would you keep?

I would go through the article. I would extract out all the heading levels. I would resequence them based upon the learning sequence of a visitor, and I would have AI write 3 sentences heading level, and then I give it to a writer to finish. Okay. But it isn't hard to make things smaller. The problem is sometimes when you make them bigger, it's totally wasted. And it actually is wasted on AI. Having a ton of content doesn't help AI very much.

Yeah, I noticed that as well.

Yeah, yeah, it may, it may just be there, but, uh, it's a fallacy that length is required.

Okay, so effectively, uh, are we still doing the PAS if we're taking a big blog post, you know, it's 2,000, we're cutting down to 500? We would start with headings, uh, making sure we have a good question-driven approach. We're addressing maybe one Maximum 3 questions in that 500. I mean, it's probably going to be 1 question and then we're doing PAS with that content. Always like, like that's the approach we're doing. Okay. Is there still value in chasing featured snippet or has SGE replaced the game? As featured snippet, you know, like Google gives you like sometimes some, you know, like you put celebrity, you'll get that, you know, face appearing in a corner. Like, is there a point chasing that one to be shown like that if your name is put in, or, you know, like for authority?

Well, our experience with the questions with our FAQ format, like on the blogs, most of our blogs, we show up on the right-hand side of AIO as one of the listed elements. And we also are the featured snippet. For virtually every question from one of my blogs, if you just go down and highlight the question and search for it, in over 90% of them, we are both in the AIO and either a featured snippet or top 5. That our technology is killer.

Okay.

And so my experience is, as long as both show up, obviously you want both. but featured snippet is secondary to AIO. That's my belief. I think more people, okay, more people are, especially for information-based questions, they're going to be satisfied with AIO.

So, you mentioned FAQs a couple of times, Bruce, and what came to my mind initially, what I was thinking, FAQs is like a question and answer, 100%. But when it comes to an answer, I would imagine it's like a couple of sentences. Like I'm imagining a standard FAQ you get often, you know, below a big article where you just sort of, here's a question, here's a couple of sentences and answer. Is that what you mean when you say FAQ? Is it some type of different style FAQ?

It's an entirely different style of FAQ. Ours are typically 4 to 5 paragraphs. Answering the question and then a list of up to 20-some steps for doing it. So if the question was keyword research, we will have an article about keyword research and all the tools and everything else that goes into it. And then the FAQ would say exactly what is keyword research and why do you do it? And here's 20 steps to implement. Boy, that's a usability issue. And that's the way we define it. You can see it on the bottom of every one of my blog posts.

Would you still add the standard FAQs? Like you would write the whole blog post and then at the end it's like more centralized FAQs which comes out from the blog post itself or that's just a waste of time?

I don't do those.

Okay.

And to get ranked in uh, AIO, I don't need those. Now, so I am sure that if the blog post covers 10 topics, you're either going to split it up or you can put, um, by the way, the way an FAQ should be, the little FAQs, um, you should reword them to be tips. You see, people find it highly usable to have advice and tips. So you can take that little FAQ and reword it, uh, easily and insert it as a tip in the middle of your document. Yeah, and the usability goes up, the acceptability goes up, um, time on page goes up. I mean, it's a a wonderful thing to do if you must have the one-hit wonder paragraph FAQs. But to be considered an expert, we believe you need more. I'll tell you a little bit about my philosophy. I had, well, I had 5,000 pages on my website, a lot of which was old. I pruned it down to 3,000. And on all of my 3,000, I put that FAQ. My assumption was when Google walks through and they spider 3,000 pages and every one of 3,000 pages answers an SEO, an SEO question.

Yep.

Pretty soon they're going to think I know what I'm talking about. Expert goes up, usability of the whole website goes up. Trust goes up. And, uh, so I spent a lot of time and money, a lot of money, uh, on redoing my entire website in that structure of having that FAQ on all of my posts. And, um, it works. It really truly works a lot. Triple, triple impressions. I mean, that's a big deal. And showing up in feature snippets and AIO is a big deal. We've done very well with them and we encourage people to do it. It's— I'm not saying it's easy, understand that, but I go back to where do you want to be in one year? Do you want to be a dominant person in your industry or do you want to be sitting there saying, 'Oh, a year ago I should have done this.' Uh, which way do you want it to work? And, uh, so we, uh, we're finding that when we speak to prospects and clients and say, 'This is what we want to do. It's a bigger project. It, it's going to cost some money, but in a year you're going to still be in business,' and people are saying, 'Yeah, I got to do it.' You know, they've been posting on their website for years. They haven't invested hardly a bunch. They've been doing SEO to keep it alive. Their money goes into pay-per-click or, you know, some other ad mechanism. It's time, it's time to drag your site kicking and screaming to the top. And that's what our clients are doing with us.

So effectively we're saying that there's a, there's an element of content which you already have repurposing, which you have to do to be able to compete better today, and especially to be able to compete well in a year's time. Correct. Okay, uh, what's one non-obvious stress signal you think more teams should be adding to their site today? Non-obvious trust signal?

You know, it's hard. Usability and trust kind of go together. The easy thing is to have a privacy statement and an address at the bottom of your page. Okay. I can't tell you how many sites I go to, and I cannot find out even what state they're in.

Right.

There's no information at all. And That is not a trust signal, nor usability signal. One of the things that we have done that seems to be kind of out of mind, out of sight, all of our blog posts have jump links at the top of the page. That's a usability signal. And it jumps right to and identifies what's important. The heading levels are important because there's a link to them within the page. So it helps that usability, it helps that trust, it builds credibility for the content that I have. I would say jump links, privacy statements, address. And if you asked an SEO, are those critical things? They might say yes. And then if you look at their page, none of them have it.

It's very important. Do you have it? No.

Yeah, most pages, unfortunately, most pages, by the time it gets into templates and the IT department, they don't understand that. And therefore, it's not an important thing to implement. And I believe it is at a trust level. I think they're critical. If you can't tell people how to find you, you're dead. By the way, one more thing. National accounts have to focus on their Google Business Profiles. That's not just for local. That's a national issue. It's an AI issue. And most people that are national accounts don't consider it important.

Okay. I really love that. It's definitely non-obvious to add your, uh, address as in trust signal. Like, I mean, it's fairly obvious you should have some business credentials in your footer of your website or some type of like contact us or about page. Because if people don't know how to really contact you, that's really not a trust signal or it's lacking a trust signal. But I wouldn't assume that, you know, that would have like an impact of like AI or Google trusting you more. So that's a, yeah, that's a definitely non-obvious one. Uh, if you were launching a brand new site in 2025, what's the very first thing you do to prep for AI search?

Hire Bruce Clay.

Right. Second thing. Second best thing.

Well, the first thing, uh, generally you're going to have to understand your market. You say the market drives everything. Part of your problem is going to be you don't have a brand, so you have to develop a methodology for promoting your own brand. You're going to need to— usually you're going to need to identify a niche, but that isn't— you can't do it at a very, very high level. I can't just say law firm. Yeah, I have to be very specific about my practice area. Um, if you can narrow it down and understand it, you can win. Um, and by the way, I spend a lot of time, hours a day, hours following my colleagues and reading and understanding even the politics that are going on right now. And, um, the unconditional consensus seems to be narrow, very narrow. Build it, and then after you're breakeven or positive, then you can expand. But if you bite off too much, you're out of business. So be focused.

Okay. Right, I love that. Yeah, focus is actually— comes, comes a lot in our, in our episodes. It does seem that people who do best, they have their niche, um, very well defined. They understand their personas, they understand the content they're producing and what value that content drives, and then they just sort of get leads from that and convert that.

Even existing companies, they should identify what persona is buying their product. And you may want to create a focused area on your website just for that.

Mhm.

Identify the pain, identify the persona, identify what they buy, and then emphasize that as a, uh, almost a cluster or silo within your website because that's who's buying your product. But I think most marketing teams don't do that.

Not a great marketing teams. Hopefully the better ones do that. I mean, the pain points is, is really how you define, you know, define the problem solution space. As in, you hopefully you're providing a solution with your service or a product to a very clear problem your customers are having, which is expressed with a pain point they're searching for.

I'll give you a real quick one. Most people, they'll go to ChatGPT, they'll put in a keyword, generate 1,200 words, and then they'll work on that. What we do is we take the keyword and determine what persona would likely do the query.

How do you do that?

Who would actually search for that? Identify that persona, identify their PAS, and then pull the keywords from their pain with the original input keyword. And then we can write an article that solves the pain instead of just being a whole bunch of words in sequence that are about the keyword. Totally changes your conversion rate.

Is that all AI, Bruce? Like, is the whole flow which you described, which starts, I do have some keywords. And, and then what you just talked about, identifying the persona, the pains, and, and the content. Is that all AI?

Yes. We have, uh, our large application on Prewriter is 152 steps. That's one application.

Okay.

We have 30, but yeah, you have to start with the persona. You have to identify the pain. We have to extract out the keywords. We have to integrate it into the article we're building. If you're going to write an article, write it to solve the pain. Don't just write it to write it.

Yeah. Okay. I get you. What's— let's move to the next one. What's one AI era SEO practice that you have that— let me repeat that. What's one AI era SEO best practice that you would have seen pointless 5 years ago? Effectively, is this something which is being done today for AI discoverability that looked pointless 5 years ago?

I don't— well, let's say that— is that COVID? Uh, what we really have to do is figure out what the behavior change was. I think that the biggest change is that sites are really wrapped around doing questions more than ever.

Okay.

Once you learn that your behavior is to ask, is asking questions, and you buy into that, then you almost, you almost know that questions is the way it's going now. As I mentioned, it went from 6% to 16% of searches.

Yeah.

Yeah, that, that's a bunch. And I would say You know, 10 years ago, nobody was really caring about questions and nobody was searching for questions. They were searching for keywords. They were preoccupied with ranking. And the way the future is, is that ranking is a useful measurement of where am I, but it doesn't address the personalization components. And I would say, by the way, you need to keep doing ranking because it's at least a ruler that says I was here, I'm now there. But for personalization, you really need to know a lot more about personas. You need to know a lot more about PAS and how to integrate the solution into your content, not just talk about the keywords. And that's a big deal.

I love that. All right. What's one old school ranking factor that still quietly works in 2025?

Proximity.

What does that mean?

It's a derivative of latent semantic indexing. If you put the words together, it helps bond them to each other. And therefore, it becomes more relevant in the AI world. So I would say, make sure that you have your main keyword in proximity to clarification words or other words that help define that word. And then you have a higher probability in an AI world of being considered more of a resource. So, okay, semantic indexing or proximity or whatever you want to call it, is basically an important consideration.

In practical terms, if I have no idea what that actually means, how do you express that? Is that just me writing in for a different, like, reading levels? Like, you know, I should not use any buzzwords which are coming from my niche, and I should write to something like a third-grade reading level or something like that? Like, what Like, how do I sort of solve this proximity situation if I don't really know what that actually means?

Well, the reading level, the Fogg, Flesh, Kincaid approach to reading levels is an entirely different approach. In general, you should write to an 8th grade, 12th grade level, depends upon your audience. But that is— that's not going to help you much with proximity.

Okay.

We have rules in there that what you do is you take your your entire article and you make sure there's no 4-syllable words and you tell Kat to remove half of the 3-syllable words and rewrite them. Because complexity is based upon the number of words per sentence, the number of 3-syllable, 4-syllable, 5-syllable words. You want to reduce that in general. Um, I think that that's a clear approach, but let me use an example. If I have, uh, my apple is a lemon, what am I talking about?

My apple is a lemon.

Okay, my apple is a lemon. Is that a fruit? Is right?

Is that Mac?

And it helps to say my Apple computer is a lemon. Yeah, right. Or if I say Mercury, do I have proximity to the word planet or element so that it clarifies the meaning of the word? And proximity like that helps AI. So I would say that that's going to be, uh, it'll be a just happening, uh, if not a topic soon.

Okay. Should SEO teams be thinking about how their content sounds in AI voice responses? So to give you some context, Bruce, is that we assume that AI will read your content. So let's say using like Siri or Echo or any chat-based AI and you ask a question and they will sort of come up with an answer and we're just assuming that your answer is going to get read. Should teams be thinking about this and like how that sounds, how it's easy to sort of read? Is it too long? Is it maybe short enough for voice answers and things like that?

Right. Yeah. Typically the ideal search voice answer is under 2 paragraphs, not a whole page. So you got to keep it short. Uh, and with some of the new things coming out by many, many, many people, um, which it isn't just they're going to read it to you, there's going to be an avatar talking to you, right?

Yeah, that's already taken place. Yep.

Uh, as a data point, I have a very large 300-slide training course. I couldn't keep up because every time something changed, I'd have to go do a green screen and re-record. So, uh, about 3 months ago, I converted the entire thing to an avatar.

Nice.

My entire training. It's— you're not there to look at Bruce, you're there to learn. Yeah, right. That's a different environment than entertainment. But I think if I were to ask you a question, I think there's going to be avatars talking to me. And I agree with you, but you got to keep it short. Typically, you know, it's hard to figure out how many words per sentence, but you can't have a lengthy sentence at all for search. If the sentence is over 10 words, it's too long. Break it into two. One of the things that I dislike about chat is it uses semicolons. There's no reason in the world to use a semicolon if you know how to write. Yeah, that's one of the things the writer would fix. Uh, em dash, I mean, that's one of the things the writer would fix. Um, we don't need to go crazy with these things. But, um, how, how do you do it for search? Keep the sentences short, uh, to the point. Um, here's a problem with, um, where we're at with reading. Too many times, and I've seen a lot of this, lot of this, too many times you're using a word that the, uh, even an avatar cannot pronounce, right? I mean, it's the wrong pronunciation. Or it's two consecutive words, but they treat it as entirely different thoughts. So it's gonna be a while. I think voice search is gonna be really big. It's the Star Trek computer approach, right? Where you talk to your computer and it answers you in voice. I'm expecting that, but short term, It's kind of hard. I'll give you a funny story. So my wife and I were out and we were looking for a particular restaurant called The Lure. L-U-R-E. It's a fish place, right?

Yep.

Clever name. Ask directions to The Lure restaurant. The Lord can be found at— did that to me 3 times. I gave it to my wife. Did it to her twice. Finally, I said, "Fish restaurant near me," and they were number 1.

Okay.

Yeah. So if you have something that's difficult to pronounce, work on it. That's— you have to listen to it yourself.

Yeah.

Because you could always rewrite the sentence to solve part of your problem.

Okay. I love that. Right. So if a page ranks well, but never shows up in the AI overviews, What's the first thing you're checking?

I don't think it fits the format.

Okay.

Most of the time, AI seems to prefer what we stick at the bottom or place at the bottom of the FAQ, which is a stepwise, how do I do this, right? The other thing is you have sections that are very long. Don't have any section with paragraphs over 4 sentences and use headers throughout the document. Now, to us humans, it may look like there's just a header everywhere, but to AI, those are the kinds of things that they look for when they're building your content block in the LLM. So, okay. I would say short paragraphs, section headers, it's always better than another, you know, 10-sentence paragraph.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, so effectively it's a little bit of like technical SEO that you're probably lacking, which becomes difficult for AI agent to make sense of your content and make that selection. I mean, it's sort of like a tricky question because I feel like I feel like that would not be the case. I feel like if you're ranking well in Google, you're probably ranking well with the AI overview. So like, it's hard to imagine that that doesn't go hand in hand. Or am I wrong there, Bruce?

No, it pretty much does. One is a clear signal, the other is likely.

Yeah. Okay. So do you think Google will start actually Ranking up the AI signals like Q&As, you know, question-driven content or intent-driven content, the technical elements which AI needs and some other factors in the sense that your page will be seen as better optimized for AI. So you will get ranked in Google better.

So that seems to be I have to rank in Google to get in AI, but if I'm structuring correctly for AI, that'll also support my Google ranking.

But that's still not like—

I think Google is going to ultimately abandon search. For instance, here's my vision. You know how when you go to a Google search result page and you have the local pack, You have 3 entries and then you can click to see all of them with the map and everything else. I am fully expecting that when AIO and AI mode rolls out, I'm fully expecting that there's going to be a section of 3 organic, click for more. They're going to not do 10 entries anymore. They're going to do 3, click for more. Uh, I'm expecting that. Now, that's just me. I haven't heard anybody else talk about it, but I'm expecting that. Now, when that happens, um, clearly you want to be in the top 3 organically. And, um, you know, that's our target. Yeah, the reason people come to us is that's their target, right?

Yeah, because otherwise you're just gonna get left behind, isn't it? I mean AI mode is, to the listeners who maybe doesn't know, AI mode is rolled out as a sort of like a demo or trial to some accounts. I know that some people have AI mode in Google and it's an actual AI mode, as in it's not the Google search as you know it. It's a different approach to search, which is very ChatGPT perplexity type of situation. So once that becomes a norm, which I think we should all expect that to become the new way of using Google. Then it's just, it's just the AI answers, and then it's just a couple of, uh, you know, top 3, as Bruce mentioned, which makes the game very, very competitive in the sense of you being on that page. You're either the best, which means you have been selected for AI overview, or you top 3, and everything else will just be— I mean, what will happen with everything else, Bruce, like from your point of view? It will just, just— I mean Will they just die off or will they have to be forced to use PPCs? Like, what's your point?

Like, well, raise your hand if you think Google's in the business of making money.

Yeah, of course. They still have to make money.

Google has always been inclined to want to make money from what they do. They render a service to us organically. Yeah, but the, but the reciprocal trade agreement is you're going to send me traffic and I'm going to let you use my content. Yeah, right. Uh, what's going to be the 4th, 5th, 6th organic result if you click through and you can see a Google, uh, list? I think that, um, the number of people clicking through will be minimal, and I think that we're going to see anybody not in the top 3 take a beating. Now the value of the top 3 goes up. Yeah, right. But number 4, it's going to be a battle. It's going to be a battle. One of the things right now, and I'm not sure your listeners know, if you go all the way to the right-hand side of a Google search result page, I think it says tools and you drop it. The bottom line tells you how many results there are. So if it used to be it just displayed out of 12 million results, right? Yeah. Now you can see how many results there are, and what we're finding is the number of results are going up, not quite exponentially, but a lot, right? Because AI is coming in and more people are generating content.

Content, yeah.

Um, so being in the top 3 out of 12 million is quite a feat. But that's where people are going. That is going to be counterbalanced by the SERP visibility approach, which is, okay, I'm going to be as good as I can be organically. I'm going to be as good as I can be in pay-per-click. I'm going to be as good as I can be in AIO. And I want to be in the People Also Ask and the other sections that appear at the top of the SERP page.

Yeah.

And I, I think if you have to be able to focus on all of them, I want to make sure it's clear that is not for the timid.

Yeah.

That is, that is war.

I do agree. Yeah.

And it's not cheap, but you can do it. And if you do it, especially for some of your primary keywords, then this year and a half, year from now, yeah, you're going to be in good shape. Otherwise, you're going to be so far behind. You got to— everybody should right now decide whether it's worth it. And do you want any traffic from search or not? Yes or no? That's the question. And if the answer is, I, I need it. It's a third of my revenue. Well, then you better pony up and get on the program. Yeah, because that's where it's got to be.

Yep. We're seeing the same on LinkedIn as well. We're doing quite a lot of work. I mean, that's our, like, the main social media when it comes to working, you know, around the podcast. We're of course everywhere, but the concentration in a sense of effort and content production goes on LinkedIn and as well We did about like 5 episodes with LinkedIn experts around the content and timing and selections and niches and all that matters. And what we're basically seeing with LinkedIn is that LinkedIn had prioritized organic impressions and views effectively you're getting if you are the best of the best. So it's the same as the apex of like 0.1% would actually get shown. to a lot more people. And others are already suffering this, you know, tenfold drops in impressions. And you can, you know, you can see people complaining online. And all other spaces are effectively being used as ads. So, so, so effectively Microsoft can just make more money. So effectively, when you go on the feed, you only have that much of space. Majority will get filled with ads, as in, you know, paid traffic, and then very little will be organic traffic and that very little is given to the best content producers that there are on LinkedIn. So I feel like Google will be probably something similar because there's going to be just less space to show, you know, the results. And if you're not the best, you will be forced to buy that spot. I feel like that's where it's going.

And remember, Google doesn't care about us, the people that have websites. They don't care about us. They care about the searcher. The searcher is how they make their money. So all they want to do is satisfy that searcher, and if it costs us, it costs us. That's the way life is.

Yep, that's true. All right, so we had a time, Bruce. Uh, it's been almost like 90 minutes. There's ample amount of information and golden nuggets you gave us, uh, you know, along the way. Um, if people want to understand more, because you mentioned, uh, a service you have, a course you have, and as well you mentioned a product. So just where they go to just find out more about you and potentially, you know, get in touch if they would get interested, right?

Uh, well, you can always reach me on LinkedIn. Um, but, uh, my website is bruceclay.com. And, um, Prewriter.ai, uh, actually has a, uh, free program running right now.

Nice.

So people are to, you know, try it. Um, and SEO Training is my training site. So clever name, SEO Training for SEO training.

The best keywords. Yeah. Yeah. So does that still work, Bruce? Like, does that still work if your domain is exactly what the search, uh, people are looking for. Like, does that still put you at the top?

Well, uh, the technical answer is yes.

Okay.

As long as you don't, uh, there was a penalty called the, uh, exact match penalty.

Mm-hmm.

Where all of your inbound links were the, the same as your domain and there's no copyright on it. It's a generic word that got penalized. However, I mean, I've owned it for a long time and I never got caught up in it. So it has worked for me. But I don't know that you could create a domain tomorrow by keyword and rank the next day. I don't know if that would happen.

Okay, so sorry, I just jumped in because I remember that that was a thing. I remember people were buying domains just to sort of get the good keywords and, you know, linking, building link farms, you know, the old school SEO.

Yeah.

So, right. So you were mentioning courses, BruceClay.com, Rewriter as well. We'll have it all in the show notes, your LinkedIn as well, so people can reach out. If you have any of the campaigns running, we'll add it in the comments as well. So people can just sort of see that more. For our listeners, thanks for tuning in. If you have any business, any friends who are actually doing SEO or thinking about SEO, do share this episode with them. The game is changing very, very rapidly. You know, there's abilities to produce content. You need to know how to do that well. You need to know many of the things which Brew shared with us today of how to do this well to be able to compete and be at the top in one year, because in one year it's very likely when the AI mode goes out, you'll need to be top 3 to actually have organic traffic. And as always, guys, until the next time, stay safe, see you online.