219: Your Homepage Is Not Your Homepage Anymore with Rand Fishkin

About this episode

Rand Fishkin discusses the inconsistencies of AI brand recommendations and the importance of brand building for AI visibility.

Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro and one of the most influential voices in digital marketing history, shares research proving that AI brand recommendations are wildly inconsistent. You'd need to ask ChatGPT 1,500 times to get the same brand list in the same order twice. We discuss why AI ranking tools are selling metrics that don't exist, why Google is still 210x bigger than ChatGPT, and why brand building (not digital marketing tricks) is the real lever for AI visibility. About the Gues...

People in this episode

Host: Slobodan "Sani" Manić

Guest: Rand Fishkin

Topics covered

• AI brand recommendations
• digital marketing
• brand building
• AI visibility
• Google vs ChatGPT

Keywords

• AI
• digital marketing
• brand recommendations
• Google
• ChatGPT
• visibility
• metrics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SparkToro, Google

More episodes of No Hacks: Web Strategy for the AI Age

• 226: Most Brands Are Chasing AI Visibility Backwards with Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive · June 3, 2026 · 47 min
• 225: Every Website Already Has An Agent Experience And Most Are Bad With Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann · May 20, 2026 · 45 min
• 224: Google's OS-Level AI Agent: Building Samantha Into Android · May 14, 2026 · 22 min
• 223: I Scored 33/100 on Cloudflare's New Agent-Readiness Scanner · April 22, 2026 · 22 min
• 222: AI Visibility Is a Vanity Metric with Wil Reynolds · April 1, 2026 · 52 min
• 221: Machine-First Architecture: The Framework for Building Websites That Work for AI and Humans · March 25, 2026 · 26 min