Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q the world of SEO. And so, uh, I'm excited to talk to you again about how to be successful in this new emerging world where AI is changing. How SEO works, the rise of AO and GEO. Let me start with just this question. How long have you been working on SEO at this point? And has anything come close to being this significant in changing the skill of SEO?
A Yes. So I got started in SEO in 2007. So it's been 18 years and the, actually the largest change when I got started in SEO, I got started in programmatic SEO and commerce SEO, like next tag and shopping.com and, and, uh, price grabber. And that was when you could do mass auto-generated landing pages. And, uh, that was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and, and similar things to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change. And then this is probably the second biggest change. I think that the main thing here is it is related to search, but it's a summarization of search and there's new inputs. So it's probably the second biggest change.
AI assessment note: “I got started in SEO in 2007... That was probably the biggest change.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q people understand when to focus on SEO, when it makes sense. As a growth channel and timing around when to invest in SEO. So question for you, what are just attributes of a product or a company that tell you that SEO could be a growth driver and or a massive growth driver? Because I imagine SEO isn't useful for everybody. How do you, how do you think about that?
A There's two big things. Uh, the first thing is, is the addressable market large. So is the addressable market for SEO large? And for most categories it is. The second is, do you have authority? Do you have existing traction? If you start from zero and you have no traction. So we, we, we talk with, uh, seed, seed stage companies and series A companies. Typically they don't have a lot of authority and it's too soon. And Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into the first signal I'll look at is what's your traffic, what's your current traffic. And your non SEO traffic is actually an authority signal. So I'll go into similar web. I'll put the domain in, I'll look at the total traffic and I'll want to see at least I would say 1000 visits a day, roughly for, for non SEO. At least you have five visits that that that's very little. And then the second thing I'll look at is the number of referring domains. So I'll go into Ahrefs or SEMrush and look at the total number of referring domains. I'll try to have at least 1000 roughly referring domains. You could grow with less than that and less than a thousand visits, but it's much harder. And the more you have, the easier it is to grow and the fas…
AI assessment note: “There's two big things. Uh, the first thing is, is the addressable market large.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q cool. I want to talk about that just like the actual platform, but this might be a good time to introduce this idea of topics you've mentioned a few times. I was going to ask you about that towards the end, but just this idea of, I think, topics versus keywords is, I think, the way you recommend people think about what to focus on. Can you talk about that?
A When I started an SEO again, it was keyword based. Every keyword had one page and now many keywords have one page. So if you're a commerce site and you have ten million pages, it has to be automatically generated. There's no way for you to afford to write ten million pages. So you have to automatically generate it. And that led to a bunch of low quality content. So since 2008 with Google pen, and there's been a bunch of other algorithm changes. Google wants to, again, find a page that covers many different keywords and the algorithm is, has improved. So for best cameras, they know that best digital cameras is the same as best cameras is the same as something else, some other variation of that. And so the algorithm has improved and it can, it has a semantic understanding. So the algorithm is targeting topics, whether that's our intention or not, you are targeting topics. And so there's typically about any given page is typically going to rank or be able to rank for about 200 to 2000 different keywords. And, um, this is important for a few different reasons. So the first reason is that the search volume for what we're targeting is not the search volume for one keyword. So for best cameras, the search volume is not just the search volume for best cameras, the search volume for 2000 different variations of best cameras. And so if you think the, the, if the search volume for best ca…
AI assessment note: “the algorithm is targeting topics, whether that's our intention or not”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q more questions I want to get through and then I'll let you go. One is I've noticed this proliferation of startups that are using GPT-III basically to generate pages and to win SEO through just auto-generated AI driven pages. Do you think this is an effective strategy for a startup? Do you recommend it? Do you think it's long-term going to last? How do you think about AI and SEO?
A I mostly don't like it and don't recommend it, but there are exceptions. So a couple of things on this. The first thing is the content should be good and it should be useful. And we've played around with GPT three. So GPT three is basically generating sentences that are similar to other sentences that have been written by somebody else. So GPT three takes common crawl and very large data sets. So a large snapshot of the whole web. So tons of sentences, and then it trains a model to generate new sentences that are similar to other sentences. That have been written. So they're grammatically correct. They're spelled correctly. Sometimes they sound like they are written by a person. Uh, sometimes they're not, but a lot of times they are. A lot of times it's indistinguishable from a human. The problem is that you want the sentence to be factual. You want there to be underlying wisdom in the sentence. So I'll give you an example. We were playing around GPT three to generate a description of a product of a, of a soap. And GPT three said the soap was oxide free, but it was not oxide free. Uh, but GPT three doesn't know that. And some other thing was oxide free on the web. And so it just said it was oxide free. So it made this false claim, but if you're a user, you would never know that it was written. Well, it was spelled correctly. It was grammatically correct. And it was just factual…
AI assessment note: “I mostly don't like it and don't recommend it, but there are exceptions.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Okay. Let me zoom out a little bit and let me just ask you this. What do you think are maybe the most surprising or under discussed topics when it comes to AI and SEO and AEO that we haven't already talked about?
A The first thing is that there's significant misinformation on, on AI and on AEO, and, and it's pretty extreme. It's unusually the percent of misinformation to correct information is, is pretty substantial. So one example is every two years there's news articles about how Google searches is going to die, or it is dying because there's a new thing. So that's happening right now with, with AI overviews and with AEO. Google's going down, which is not true. Before that it was TikTok search. So everyone is using TikTok now. Gen Z is using TikTok. They're never going to use SEO. SEO is going to be dead. And so you really need to focus on TikTok search, which is not false, but it's, it's not untrue. It's, but it's not taking share away from Google. It's just a new service. And then before that it was Instagram. And then before that it was Facebook and it was YouTube and people do search and discover on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Uh, but it doesn't take away from Google search. It adds on top of it. These are all new channels. So Google's slice of the pie stays the same. The pie gets bigger. And so misinformation about Google going down. Google is not going down. Google published something recently. Their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our, the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it is not down. It's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down. A…
AI assessment note: “The first thing is that there's significant misinformation on, on AI and on AEO”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q you want to look for. We talked about the programmatic person on the editorial side. What I think of there is I saw this story that Datadog hired an engineer and their job was to write blog posts and that Was really effective for them early on to build their SEO cred. Is that the right approach? How do you think about hiring someone to run your editorial SEO strategy?
A That's a part of the right approach. So that part of the approach is writing really useful content and information, which is probably the most important part. The other parts are what should I be writing about? What are the topics that I should actually be writing about? A lot of topics maybe nobody's searching for, maybe they're interesting, but are not searched for. So selecting which topics. We want to go after is important. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. What are the most searched for topics? So what's the search volume by topic? What is our topical authority? Where can we actually compete within that set of topics? Where is their conversion intent? All of that multiplied out equals expected conversions. And then we prioritize that way. Then we want to, so then we have our list of prioritized topics. Then we want to make sure that the article is comprehensive and we cover all of the subtopics. That is not intuitive typically to a writer. So the engineer of Datadog that you mentioned probably just had a really good intuition about what should be covered, but a lot of people don't. So a lot of times you'll have a gap. And so again, you won't, you won't cover health benefits of butter lettuce on that article and you have a gap. So having the outline and the subtopics is really important. And a writer is not gonna, a writer will guess that and they may …
AI assessment note: “That's a part of the right approach. So that part of the approach is”
