G2 is the world’s largest software marketplace, helping millions of buyers research, compare, and select business software based on real-user reviews and market insights.

Advisor

Semify

Semify is a white-label digital marketing partner trusted by thousands of agencies and platforms over the past 16 years. With a team of 200+ experts, Semify delivers scalable SEO, PPC, and Paid Social Ads solutions that help partners reduce cost, increase revenue, and prevent client churn. Their proprietary software and API integrations allow seamless fulfillment within client ecosystems, eliminating the need for an in-house team while expanding service offerings. Semify enables agencies to grow faster, operate more efficiently, and retain more clients with best-in-class marketing execution.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt is the leading platform for discovering and launching new tech products, connecting makers with early adopters and a passionate community of product enthusiasts. With millions of monthly visitors and a global network of founders, investors, and creators, Product Hunt plays a key role in shaping the future of innovation. From daily product launches to curated discussions and events, it empowers entrepreneurs to validate, grow, and celebrate their ideas.

Glean

Glean is a workplace search and knowledge discovery platform that helps teams find the information they need across all their company tools instantly. Backed by Sequoia and launched by former Google Search engineers, Glean is trusted by high-performing companies like Canva, Duolingo, and Databricks to power internal productivity, reduce duplication, and streamline access to institutional knowledge.

Houzz

Houzz is a leading platform for home remodeling and design, offering a curated marketplace and collaboration tools for homeowners and professionals. With over 65 million users globally and a community of over 3 million active home professionals, Houzz bridges inspiration and execution, transforming how people imagine, plan, and create spaces. The company’s Pro suite empowers designers, architects, and contractors with project management, marketing, and CRM solutions.

Ironclad

​Ironclad is a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that enables business and legal teams to manage all aspects of the contracting process. Founded in 2014 by Jason Boehmig and Cai GoGwilt, Ironclad serves companies like L'Oréal, Salesforce, and OpenAI, facilitating collaboration and negotiation on contracts while ensuring compliance.

AirOps

AirOps is an AI workflow platform that helps marketers build scalable, AI-driven strategies. Founded in 2022, it enables companies to combine data, AI models, and human input to execute high-impact growth initiatives. In 2024, AirOps secured $15.5M in Series A funding to enhance its AI-powered content and go-to-market solutions. Trusted by brands like Anne Klein, Harvard Business Publishing, and dbt Labs, AirOps is redefining how marketers leverage AI for scale and efficiency.

hims & hers

Advisor to the Senior direct of Organic Growth

HyperGrowth Partners

Partner

Xero

Xero is a global small business platform that helps companies manage their finances more efficiently. Trusted by over 3.95 million subscribers worldwide, Xero provides cloud-based accounting software that streamlines bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll, and financial reporting.

Growth Advisor to Growth /Marketing executives at fast-growing startups | ex-Shopify, G2, Atlassian

I started my career in agencies helping global market leaders scale organic growth - when SEO was considered a "dark art." Agency life taught me how to work fast and juggle big clients, but I wanted to go deeper, own outcomes, and see strategy through to execution.

So I went inhouse, quickly growing in responsibility at top tech companies like Atlassian, G2, and Shopify. Over that decade, I learned how to build effective teams, define winning strategies, and create operating systems that last. I also refined the hiring, operating, and strategy playbooks I still use today.

But I learned something important about myself: managing large organizations doesn’t energize me. As a result, I leaned into consulting, where I could focus exclusively on what I'm great at.

Today, I advise leaders at Meta, Ramp, hims, Upwork, and others on Organic Growth. I also write Growth Memo, a weekly newsletter read by 22,000+ leaders at Amazon, Google, Meta, and the New York Times. And I've shared insights on stages from Sydney to New York to London.

What really energizes me isn't just chasing metrics - it's asking interesting questions, digging through data, and uncovering the stories hidden inside it.

If you're interested in working with me on advisory or sponsorships, please reach out.

Kevin Indig

I just saw a live test of Google's new Web Guide experience (in Germany!).
Much better mix of AI mode and AI Overviews, imho.

I could see Google rolling this out further before AI Mode. Also, more space for ads.

Don't love that it's harder to find the source for each stat.

My 2026 predictions just went out to +23k subscribers in the latest Memo:
1. AI visibility tools face a reckoning
2. ChatGPT launches first quality update
3. Continued click-drops lead to a “Dark Web” defense
4. AI forces UGC platforms to separate feeds
5. ChatGPT’s ad platform provides “demand data”
6. Perplexity sells to xAI or Salesforce
7. Competition tanks Nvidia’s stock by -20%

Premium subscribers get 3 more :).

Agentic SEO is advancing rapidly and adding significant value to the insights layer.

Congratulations to AirOps for raising a meaty $40m round!

I've had the pleasure of working with the team can attest to their excellence.

Here's to the series B, Matt Hammel, Alex Halliday, Eoin Clancy, Josh Spilker, Steven Male, Oshen Davidson, Nicole Guercia, Nicole Nearhood, Amr Shafik, Mike Kenler🥂!

AI shifts search from generic intent to personal identity.

Personas are critical for AI search

The real shift is how people search, click, and buy.

ChatGPT vs Google at Every Stage of the User Journey

AI search changed everything this year.
- Zero-click grew heavily.
- Classic authority signals shifted.
- Freshness and offsite mentions started determining who wins.

To help teams recalibrate, I’m joining AirOps for a practical breakdown of what worked in 2025 and the bold moves you’ll need to make for 2026.

You’ll learn:
 • The most impactful search stats of the year
 • How to build a visibility-first AEO strategy
 • Why recency bias reshapes content refresh cycles
 • How community + video mentions now rival backlinks
 • What was hype vs. what truly mattered

This session is for SEO and content leaders, growth teams, agencies, and brand managers who need to stay ahead.

If you want to solidify your organic traff for 2026, don’t miss it.

We looked at 80 companies and their collective $1.5 billion in venture funding. A distinct pattern emerged between where capital flowed and where value lives.

LLM Monitoring tools (average age: 1.3 years) raised $227 million. Agentic SEO platforms (average age: 5.5 years) raised just $86 million.

Why fund the newcomers over the veterans?
Because investors often conflate "frictionless" with "scalable." Monitoring tools offer instant onboarding and clean financials. They look like perfect SaaS.

But money optimized for ease of adoption often misses ease of cancellation. 

- Low pain: If a brand turns off a monitoring dashboard, they lose some historical charts.
- High pain: If a brand turns off an Agentic platform, their marketing operation stops.

That "messy" operational friction isn't a bug. It’s the moat.

My Slack community is a private space where I share early findings, data, experiments, and tools on AI Search, SEO, and growth before they make it into Growth Memo.

It’s also where I post breaking updates and real-time notes from the conferences I attend.

This interactive space is for operators, marketers, and founders to discuss what’s working, share new data, and connect directly.

Link in comments if you want to join.

A screenshot of a Slack workspace showing a discussion channel named ‘research.’ The screen displays several messages sharing links to articles, data, and insights about AI search, SEO, and industry trends. The left sidebar shows channels and navigation, while the main feed highlights posts with links, images, and reactions from community members.

Digital marketing budgets are growing 7.25% in 2026.

Most of that growth will be wasted chasing a metric that's on the decline: clicks.

Here's the problem: SEO teams are still budgeting like it's PPC. Spend more, get more traffic. But with AI cutting organic clicks in half (or more), traffic has decoupled from visibility.

Your SEO budget doesn't buy results. It buys capacity.

The ability to earn authority, build brand presence, and surface where people actually discover answers. In 2026, that's inside AI outputs, not just search results.

Stop budgeting for traffic forecasts. Start budgeting for capabilities: digital PR, technical excellence, content strength, foundational research, engagement.

Budgets are set to grow. The question is whether you'll redirect it toward influence or waste it optimizing for a world that's already gone.

More on how to do that in today's Growth Memo.

Although AI answers quickly, users validate slowly.

Trust Still Lives in Blue Links

It’s not a "lack of budget" that is killing your AI strategy. It’s a fear of risk.

We assume executives say "no" to AI initiatives because they don't want to spend the money. But recent data suggests we are solving the wrong problem.

According to a Deloitte survey of over 2,700 leaders, the biggest bottlenecks to deploying Generative AI right now aren't technical skills or funding. They are "difficulty managing risks" and "worries about regulations".

The problem? Most teams are still pitching AI strategies using the old playbook: Rankings → Traffic → Revenue.

But that event chain doesn't exist in AI systems. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic. You cannot promise a specific ranking or traffic volume from ChatGPT or Gemini.

When you walk into a boardroom promising "certainty" in a random environment, executives see a massive risk. They say no - not because the idea is bad, but because the pitch asks them to fund an outcome nobody can guarantee.

To get buy-in for 2025, you have to stop selling performance and start selling risk mitigation.

Don't try to convince leadership that "it will work." Convince them that "the cost of not knowing is higher than the cost of finding out".

The winning argument sounds like this: "Competitors are already locking in advantages in AI search. If we wait for certainty, we lose the ability to shape our brand's entity authority. We aren't asking for a blind bet; we are asking for a controlled experiment to mitigate the risk of being left out of the next discovery channel".

Takeaway: Executives don’t need certainty about the impact yet. They need certainty that you are running a disciplined process to find the truth before the market decides for you.

Here’s how to make search personas drive revenue.

Making SEO Personas Actionable Across Teams

Ross Hudgens

SEO Manager

Siege Media

We drive organic growth with SEO, content marketing and PR. Past and current clients include Intuit, Zendesk, Casper, TripAdvisor, Shutterfly, Asana and more. 

Notable achievements: 
• Named to Inc. 5000 6x 
• Named to Inc's Best Workplaces 2x
• $100,000,000+ in Lifetime Revenue Generated
• Named a Fastest Growing Company in San Diego 6x
• Named Top 25 B2B Digital Marketing Influencer by Clutch
• Named Top 10 Most Influential Content Marketer by BuzzSumo

Founder / CEO

Member

Full Beaker, Inc.

•	Lead SEO initiatives for Full Beaker, developing web properties from initiation to generating thousands of search referrals monthly across several verticals, including but not limited to insurance and mortgage. Dictated keyword research, content strategy, and link building strategies for Full Beaker's portfolio of websites.
•	Integral part of a team that built Full Beaker from inception to a multi-million dollar, profitable company in under two years. 
•	Developed PPC campaigns in highly competitive mortgage industry.
•	Supported affiliate and business development strategy to rapidly scale the business in the course of two years, utilizing inbound marketing strategies to help improve profit-per-lead and overall lead supply-and-demand levers. 
•	Grew SEO traffic over 500% over the course of two years, leveraging scalable link building strategies to diversify efforts over many domains and still achieve results. 
•	Supplied recommendations for CRO strategies which improved site performance (cumulatively) over 500% across Full Beaker's portfolio of websites.

MediaBoost - Billy.com

•	Head of all SEO operations for MediaBoost. Leads the SEO development of MediaBoost’s multiple properties, from infancy into maturity.
•	Manages an SEO support team of two full-time content writers as well as two developers, half of which are located in Israel, in building out MB properties to match current SEO best-practices. 
•	In charge of all SEO processes as it comes to link building and SEO strategy, utilizing network contacts, creativity and experience to build links, implement best practices, and maintain competitive advantage.  
•	Oversees social media development, providing Facebook, Twitter and blog recommendations to provide growth and build community to meet long-term monetization goals.

Single Grain LLC

•	As Single Grain’s first employee, helped build the company from a base of three clients to a height of twenty. Developed all of Singlegrain’s internal SEO processes, including client reports, link building, scaling strategies, as well as all standard operating procedures. 
•	Analyzed search problems and formulated creative solutions to launch and build SEO campaigns. Performed link building, keyword research, on-site and off-site optimization, and other relevant tasks pertaining to an account’s SEO needs.
•	Managed other employees. Trained new hires on SEO and internal processes. Supervised new employees and nurtured growth and development in the workplace.
•	Wrote all content for the Single Grain blog and Twitter accounts, while managing a personal business-related account. Utilized these accounts to promote expertise and build the Single Grain brand.

Senior SEO Analyst

I’m the founder and CEO of Siege Media. We’re dedicated to helping great brands scale through AI and Google-first SEO, content marketing, and PR. 

Siege Media has been honored with inclusion in the Inc. 5000 list six times and recognized as one of Inc.'s Best Workplaces.

And we’re so proud to collaborate with some of the world's leading brands, including Adidas, Airbnb, Angi, Asana, Audible, Casper, Healthline, HubSpot, Instacart, Intuit QuickBooks, Intuit TurboTax, Norton, Quicken Loans, Shutterfly, The Zebra, TripAdvisor, Williams Sonoma, Y Combinator, Zendesk, and many more.

We grow great brands with SEO-focused content marketing. Past and current clients include Intuit, Zendesk, Casper, TripAdvisor, Shutterfly, Asana and more. 

Notable achievements: 
• Named to Inc. 5000 6x 
• Named to Inc's Best Workplaces 2x
• Named a Fastest Growing Company in San Diego 6x
• Named Top 10 Most Influential Content Marketer by BuzzSumo

Siege Media is excited to become an official partner of Women in Tech SEO!

For years, we've heard great things about their thriving community from Siege team members and also, direct members of the group.

As a company with a female-dominant team (leadership+company wide), it was a no brainer to support such a great group as we head into 2026 and beyond.

I'm a special fan of Areej AbuAli and Erin Simmons (they/them), two leaders behind the scenes who run the organization with class and polish.

We look forward to supporting their events and partnering on content initiatives (such as our upcoming trends report) as we head into the New Year. 

If you haven't heard of Women in TechSEO, highly suggest checking them out!

CEO, Siege Media | SEO for Google + AI, Content & PR

This is the exact process we use to prioritize content for LLM visibility:

First, input the core prompts we care about into a tracker, by creating “what is the best X” using our full set of products and solutions. 

For example, “what’s the best running shoe for wide feet”, or “best organic growth agency for fintech”.

Transactional terms are all that matters, and having those covered for our full product suite is the correct way of pushing visibility towards the things that convert.

From there, identify what URLs are sourced most often across that set of prompts. 

This set of URLs, and how often they’re sourced, is our prioritization scorecard.

We’re looking for “companies like us” in the list. If we see them, that means we can directly create content that has a chance of replacing (or adding to) what’s cited here.

Using this information, we can then weight the pipeline we’re seeing from LLMs so far against SEO data for these same topics. 

If a highly sourced URL – in an industry seeing significant LLM usage so far – is also in high demand on Google, it’s a no brainer to prioritize that content highly in our roadmaps.

“I've been there 10 years, have filed 1,000 JIRA tickets, and they’ve implemented maybe 5 of them.”

If you work in enterprise SEO, you’ve heard some version of that. Maybe you’ve said a version of it.

The thing is: that implementation rate isn’t destiny.

It’s usually a mix of misaligned strategy, weak business cases, and poor communication design. And sometimes, issues with company selection.

At Tech SEO Connect (Durham NC, Dec 4th-5th), I’m excited to be giving a talk on "The SEO Execution Gap: How to Get Recommendations Deployed in Complex Environments".

I'll be sharing a proven playbook from 13+ years of agency experience working with Fortune 500 companies and high growth startups.

See you in Durham in a few weeks?

Siege Media’s Digital PR department is growing fast!

We’ve been excited to bring on some talented, specialized resources around data journalism and PR in the last few months, with our VP, PR Carrie Van-Brunt Wiley leading the charge.

Some of the talented people we’ve brought on:

Lane Gillespie - Data Journalist 
Ryan Flanigan, CCC - Data Journalist
Taylor Lynch - Digital PR Specialist
Fontaine Gwynn - Digital PR Specialist
Abby Hartness - Senior Digital PR Specialist

… with more on the horizon! 

I’m excited to see how these specialists accelerate results for our clients in the days to come.

"Traffic is down for everyone."

This can be trumpeted as an excuse for a poorly performing SEO program in 2025.

Lots of AI-powered programs I see with a little less traffic than everyone else, but it feels good because publishing volume is up and there's a valid explanation.

If you check the metrics and you see:

- Organic sales are significantly down
- AI visibility is notably behind competition
- Rankings are declining (especially for BOFU terms)

Using that as an excuse is not a valid one.

Yes, it’s reasonable for traffic to be down, especially in B2B. 

But there are layers under that very worth digging into to verify your change is based on the macro, not your own strategy. 

And that's not a valid excuse for every business (or SEO) to make.

ChatGPT is the most popular LLM, but is it the best?

We analyzed more than 2.3 million user sessions across five leading LLMs to get a better sense of which LLM is most effective at sending high-quality traffic.

In our data, ChatGPT is actually the worst of the five, at least based on the engagement rate deriving from traffic it sent to websites we track.

ChatGPT notably had the highest sample size by far (~1.9M visits across our sample), but it's notable to see the other five heavyweights actually outperform from traditional user metrics.

This plays off something we've been seeing recently, as well -- ChatGPT's lead from a quality perspective seems to be shrinking, and this pairs with actual declines in traffic share as well.

It’s possible this engagement rate portends a slow shift to other LLMs. The way things are looking to me, I’d expect Gemini to take the lead.

From a business perspective, getting Pro access free for our entire team on G-Suite makes it a no-brainer choice, and the professional “feel” of the responses is something I personally prefer as well.

Do you need a content engineer? 

My take: no, but you do need content engineering.

What’s the difference? In content-driven workflows and SEO-driven workflows today, there are many opportunities for automation. 

But the name “content engineering” implies it directly (and significantly) flows through to the writing itself. 

A better definition, and one we have employed with our own version of this role, is a head of automation. 

This person can deploy leverage where it’s most impactful: communication, reporting, updates, competitive intelligence, and etc. But I’m not sure that is adequately summed up by the term “content engineer” in particular, which feels more precise to the writing workflow itself. 

Also, if that role were to exist in isolation, I’m not sure there’s enough work within that process to warrant that title in particular, *unless* it’s in aim of high volume, low quality writing.

This was the crux of the great podcast conversation I had with Josh Spilker of AirOps, which has a great tool that in many ways is building on that idea. 

Josh has been at the front of this “content engineer” movement, and like the GEO/AEO/AI for SEO debate, I think we’re all mostly caught in a naming convention back and forth here, while mostly agreeing on the same things.

Do you really need an SEO audit? Or did the market just move on without you?

We looked at a website recently with a market dominant position in a low price market selling information.

Their competition? A changing perception of expected cost and ChatGPT.

Their traffic (the blue line) has dwindled slowly over the past few years.

Their free SEO competition (the orange line) has slowly increased on the same timeline. And there's also ChatGPT.

Unseen, Reddit, a “frugal” disseminator of information, has only accelerated this discovery cycle as free competition has emerged around them. 

So they came to us wanting an audit. 

And like everybody, there’s generally room for improvement.

But when people want an audit, they are often trying to completely refill an empty bucket. Sometimes, only drops can be added back in rather than the original amount, as the competitive environment has been rewritten.

This situation is all the more common in the last two years, especially in markets where information is sold at low cost.

Part of being an SEO is reporting on and understanding the macro, not just a title tag or 404 that needs to be fixed. 

Good SEOs don’t just tell you what to change on the page.

They tell you when the game itself is now played differently.

Programmatic SEO is not a blog strategy.

Programmatic SEO successfully exists in a few forms:

1) Long-tail landing page use cases where the product brings the value, not the copy itself.

2) Situations where "the product" is the UX of the page, and that UX is world-class.

At least, those were the core points programmatic SEO expert Matt Bowers (ex-Zapier, Zillow) brought on our podcast discussing how this approach has evolved in the age of AI.

In short, AI (or programmatic), can do something useful when you give it something great. 

But it's not as useful supplying 1,500 words of copy on an undifferentiated blog design. That's not true programmatic. 

If we think about it correctly, programmatic is essentially the 80% in the equation -- product that took months if not years to build, that then has an extra 20% of value brought from secondary sources (AI, or third party data in situations like real estate) that fill out the equation. 

Even better when you bring this all together. 

A great product, great landing page UX, and a well-considered use of third party data or AI to scale up the operation. 

This was one of our most popular podcasts of the past few months, so the data suggests it might be worth checking out if you're considering a programmatic approach.

(There was a pie-in-the-face moment, too: we praised the AI-driven site Greg(dot)app and then shortly after realized it had gotten hit by a Google update.)

If you're nervous about employing "best X" strategies on your own site, "X alternatives" posts are a great place to start.

1 - You don't have to explicitly call yourself the best.

2 - The article doesn't have to be deeply adversarial, and can instead softly focus on the feature differences without being disparaging to the original site.

3 - There's little argument as to why these shouldn't exist on our sites beyond nervousness of controversy in mentioning competitors.

Given point two -- which can be lighter in tone than even "US vs THEM" posts, this is a great, high impact way for companies to wade their toes into a BOFU approach.

Once the company sees the potential impact (as well as additional lift on LLMs), that will likely open up the gates for scaling the strategy.

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The Battle

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