It’s an exciting time to be in SEO. Honestly, it feels like 2006 all over again – a period of rapid change, innovation, and frankly, a whole lot of fun. For a while there, things had gotten a little… predictable. Technical SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, schema… it was all necessary, of course, but if I’m being honest, it was starting to feel a bit like going through the motions. Dare I say, boring?
Then came the AI revolution, and suddenly, everything changed.
In a recent conversation with Garrett Sussman at SEO Week, we dove deep into the current state of SEO and what’s coming next. Google, it seems, is finally activated. They’ve tasted competition, and it’s lit a fire under them to innovate and improve search at a pace we haven’t seen in years.
Google is Waking Up – and That’s Great News for SEOs
My prediction, and I’m willing to be held accountable for this, is that we’re about to see some truly amazing things from Google in the next two years.
Their engineering teams are unleashed, and they’re rapidly improving search quality and adding new features. This isn’t just good for users; it’s fantastic for SEOs.
Why? Because we are now equipped with an arsenal of incredible technologies and tools to support our workflows. If you’re someone who thrives on innovation, loves building things, and is always looking for ways to streamline processes, now is your time to shine. The bar for SEO output is rising, and that’s a challenge I, for one, am excited to meet.
From Rank Tracking to Brand Representation in LLMs
This shift is leading us directly into the next chapter of search: conversational search and the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). Suddenly, it’s not just about ranking on Google’s SERPs anymore. People are turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools for information, and this fundamentally changes how we need to think about SEO.
My presentation at SEO Week will explore this very topic: how do we monitor and influence brand representation in LLMs? It’s a question that’s been organically bubbling up within my team for months. Initially, we might have dismissed ChatGPT as just a geeky toy. But with Gemini integration in Android, Apple partnering with OpenAI, and AI assistants becoming increasingly prevalent, it’s clear this is no longer a niche trend.
The New SEO Battlefield: Influencing the Machine
If your brand or your name is consistently mentioned in the right context within these LLMs, you’ll become an authority. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, a prophecy that becomes reality simply by being spoken into existence within the AI’s knowledge base. This is huge. Being promoted within AI answers is the new gold standard.
We’re talking about two key levels of influence:
- Core Memory: Ensuring your brand is embedded within the LLM’s core knowledge, its neural network, so it naturally surfaces your brand as an answer. This comes from influencing the training data itself.
- Fine-tuning & Augmentation: Leveraging techniques like retrieval augmented generation to feed external data sources to LLMs, further shaping their responses and brand associations.
Back to the Hacker Days
This new landscape feels incredibly… hacky. In the best way possible! It reminds me of the early days of SEO, back in 2005-2006. Technical SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis – these are still vital, the SEO hygiene that forms the foundation. But now, we’re back in a space where innovation and experimentation are paramount.
We’re essentially going full circle. We started with hacking Google, then shifted to focusing on user experience, and now we’re back to a new form of “hacking” – influencing the robots themselves. Or, as we might call them now, agents or operators.
The Challenge of Measurement (and a Sneak Peek at My SEO Week Presentation)
Of course, influencing is only half the battle. We need to measure our impact. Rank tracking is familiar territory, but how do we track brand representation in the conversational world of LLMs?
My SEO Week presentation will delve into this challenge and offer some potential frameworks and prototypes. I’m aiming for a single “representation score” that we can track over time, providing clients with a clear metric of their visibility in this new search landscape. It might be a bit of a simplification, but I believe a single, easily understandable metric will be incredibly valuable.
The Future is Now – and it’s Exciting
The future of search isn’t just about ranking on traditional search engines anymore. It’s about influencing the AI agents that are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers of information. It’s about shaping their training data and ensuring your brand is part of their core knowledge.
This is SEO in the age of AI, and it’s more exciting than ever. It’s time to embrace the “hacker” mentality again, to experiment, to build, and to innovate. Because in this next chapter of search, influencing the robots might just be as important as influencing humans.
AI Rank Tool: https://airank.dejan.ai/
If you want to dive deeper into this and hear about the frameworks I’m developing, join me at SEO Week in New York City this April 28th – May 2nd.
Full Transcript
Garrett Sussman: Okay, hey everybody, welcome to the next chapter of search presented by SEO week and iPull Rank. Today I am joined by Dan Petrovic, who is the managing director at Dejan. And I’m going to talk to him a little bit about the world of SEO. Dan, thanks for joining me today. How you doing, man?
Dan Petrovic: I’m doing very well, thank you.
Garrett Sussman: Okay, let’s dive right in. State of SEO. There’s a lot in flux over the last few years. Where can you share your perspective on the current state of SEO? Where are we at?
Dan Petrovic: Well, currently we are looking at a very activated Google, because they realized that they’ve got competition. So we’re looking at early days of them very rapidly improving the quality of search and adding a ton of new features that will be awesome to see in the next two years. I made a prediction on Twitter. I said watch this space, Google’s activated, they’re about to do amazing things. If it doesn’t happen within two years, you come back to this tweet and call me out.
Garrett Sussman: [laughing]
Dan Petrovic: I’m fine with being accountable for it. So, that’s Google. Definitely amazing things will come out of their engineering teams now that they’re allowed to do amazing things again. So that’s great. Amazing things will come out of SEO as well, because we’ve been enabled with a phenomenal amount of technology and tools to support our workflows. So everyone who has an appetite for innovation and building things and streamlining things can do that now. And that puts us in an interesting position where the expected output from a typical SEO is a lot higher. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but our clients will expect more and more from us and higher level of work. Which is fine with me. I’m comfortable with what’s going on. I’ve spent the last two years or two plus years studying machine learning and all across and couldn’t be more excited about SEO from just a bit of background. Around 2013 when my daughter was born, I went into kind of like a semi-retirement because SEO was boring. Same old things.
Garrett Sussman: [laughing]
Dan Petrovic: Right, yeah, technical SEO, keyword research, competitor research, a bit of link building content, schema, local SEO, snore. So now things are really fun. And I do these crazy 14, 15 hour days, and just feel like it’s, I feel like it’s 2006 again. It’s fantastic.
Garrett Sussman: I love that. You are a tinkerer, a builder, an experimenter and it kind of leads right into this next phase of search, which is conversational search, the way that people are interacting and actually searching on ChatGPT. For your presentation at SEO Week, you’re really going to tackle this next phase, which is how do you monitor brand representation in LLMs? Can you kind of give me a summary of what people would get excited about from what you plan to share with us?
Dan Petrovic: Yeah, well, I’ve been planning to implement this for the last six months. The idea popped up quite organically within our teams. Like, okay, so AI overview started and then people are discovering and at the time we thought ChatGPT is for geeks, but now we’re seeing it integrated, you know, Gemini’s integrated in Android, Apple’s got the deal with OpenAI. Things are happening, reflexivity is big, and it’s quite obvious that yes, there’s Google, but people are discovering brands, products, services, learning about new things and concepts and people. If your brand or name is constantly mentioned in the context of something, you will become an authority. It’s like a self-perpetuating prophecy. You will become an authority in that. It’s a huge thing for somebody to be promoted in AI answers. So, there’s two levels. One is that the core memory, the knowledge, the neural network just spits out your brand or your name as an answer because it’s innate. It’s in built, coming from the training data. And there’s various levels of fine tuning, knowledge updates, retrieval augmented generation. Basically using external data sources to feed the large language model to give those results. My job right now is to study all that, analyze what works, what doesn’t work and I feel like there’s a lot of things to do right now and we might, you know, in five years time, we might not be able to influence these things as easily. But right now, fertile ground for manipulation, for hacking, for tweaking. That’s what it feels like 2005, 2006. And I think now is the time to do that. So, but, you know, influencing is one part, of course, measuring is another. So, we need to understand when somebody types in a query or a product or service, we want to understand how frequently does a brand or product or name come up in those answers. And the issue is that there’s so many models right now. And how do you get, how do you get a balanced overview of what’s going on. Luckily we have this mentality of rank tracking, so we know how that works, you’ve got a query and then you have the rank tracker up and down and so for each query or a concept, you can have the representation percentage and have that sort of track of ups and downs, which we see in the rank trackers. So I’m hoping to have that and I’m hoping to have a score that I can give to a single score that I can give to my clients in a report that says your representation, overall representation score is 38%. Last month it was 35%. We’re doing well. We we’re going up. It’s a little bit of a dumb down factor, but I think people like a single score, a single metric, DA, PA, Page Rank, this that. And I think it’s going to catch on if I’m persistent with it enough. Obviously tracking is a technical challenge, so we’ll need to use some trickery. Uh, obviously we can’t tap into actual queries of people and their chats. So we’ll have to use things like synthetic data and querying of the models. You know, you know those when in China they have those white phone farms and you just do like a lot of interactions on TikTok and this and that, like I might have something of that type. Without an actual physical form, I might have like a couple of hundred instances of something querying models all the time for all the maybe even something on API from search console, querying top 5% of all the most important queries for my clients. And then monitoring those automatically without too much manual setup. So scaling up understanding of representation is what I’m busy with right now. I doubt that I will have this as a problem solved by April, but I will have surely some really solid frameworks and prototypes ready to share and excite people with.
Garrett Sussman: That’s so cool. And and to your point, it’s like people want that share of voice, that market share perspective for as consumer search behavior changes and they use these tools for search, executives need, you know, major clients, businesses need a way to report on that and ways to show up. What is a tactic that someone, whether you are an enterprise or small business right now could use to in this ecosystem of chatbots and LLMs to improve visibility or monitor visibility?
Dan Petrovic: Well, if you ask that a regular Joe, they will say, you do digital PR, generate buzz around your brand. And that’s a fair answer. I’ll say, I’ll jump on the bandwagon. I’ll say the same thing. Obviously, if there’s a lot of chat about your brand, discussions and you’re in the news and notoriety, you will surely pop up. But, you know, like I mentioned earlier, this is the hacker days, manipulated days. So I’m going to say one thing, getting to training data. Getting to training data. How do you do that? Well, that’s why I need to catch up on all this geekery and jargon that we use in machine learning space. What’s hugging face? What’s data sets? Training data sets? What are the training data sets for? Well, you use training data sets that are free and open source and I can generate a training data set synthetically using model like Gemma. In fact, I have one that’s maybe 100 megabytes already big because I just go on holidays and my computers are churning training data, just generating synthetic training data. So I upload that to Hugging Face or other, you know, Kaggle and other platforms. And what do you know, my client seems to be represented a little bit more than just a little bit in there and my training data is saying good things about them. Not necessarily good things, but like associating my client’s brand name with the things that they do and the things that we want. So I doubt that OpenAI will pick up that data set and train their models on it, but the little models will. And then one thing, like, you know, they get amalgamated and merged and joined and they make models and distilled. So you’ll always find value, value in that and it’s not to say that they wouldn’t. But I’m saying give it, give it every chance to get in there. For example, DeepSeek, wasn’t trained on like the billion dollar budget. They would have used small data sets from Hugging Face for sure, guaranteed to generate, you know, and structure their own reinforcement learning data sets and everything else. So if you happen to be now, that ship has sailed, DeepSeek’s out, but you know, any future little innovations like that, you could, you could, you know, get jackpot and end up in the training of that model and be, be the foundational element of it. That’s I think pretty exciting. So that’s the kind of stuff that I do and think about these days, while things are still quite in development, that we can influence it early on.
Garrett Sussman: There you go. There’s a lot to process. Thank you so much. It’s such fascinating stuff. We geek out over this stuff because like you said, it is one of the most exciting times in search, in machine learning, in the development of this tech. For any of you who want to check out Dan and see this killer presentation that you know he is concocting in his mad science laboratory down under, make sure that you sign up for SEO Week, which is the last week of April, the 28th to May 2nd in New York City. This has been the next chapter of search. My name is Garrett Sussman, produced by SEO Week and iPull Rank. Thanks Dan for joining us. This has been awesome.
Dan Petrovic: See you soon.
Leave a Reply