Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast

Under 50% of web page requests come from humans. Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, runs the platform behind NASA, News Corp, Salesforce, and NBC, and previously built more than two dozen CMS platforms, including Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget) and Crowd Fusion (TMZ). He maps media, marketer, and commerce customer journeys to determine whether to open or restrict LLM access, and he covers per-agent access controls that let each organization allow or block specific AI crawlers. He also explains how to structure sites so agents can qualify buyers and surface next-step prompts, why to plan for 100% agentic traffic, and why trusted brand authority outlasts AI-scaled content volume.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SEO job postings aren't shrinking; they're being retitled and redistributed. Tyson Stockton is COO and Co-Founder of Previsible, an AI discovery agency serving enterprise teams, and a former VP of Client Services at Searchmetrics who has hired roughly 80 SEOs and led Previsible's 2025 SEO job study. He covers repositioning legacy SEO experience for AEO and GEO roles, including crawl log analysis across multiple AI bots, experimentation, content chunking, query fan-outs, and off-page citations. He also outlines how to report on business KPIs rather than leading indicators when AI search attribution is limited, and how to screen candidates for adaptability.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Over 1,900 episodes have turned search conversations into compounding practitioner knowledge. Jordan Koene, CEO and Co-Founder of Previsible, the AI discovery agency serving enterprise teams, previously led Searchmetrics Inc. as CEO and ran SEO and content development at eBay. The conversation covers leading through AI search and treating every practitioner exchange as a source of strategic learning.Note: the transcript excerpt is a single comment from the producer and contains no discussion of specific frameworks or strategies, so I listed none rather than invent them. Send the full transcript if you want a version with 2-3 named frameworks.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Organic traffic down 30% while revenue holds flat points to an attribution problem, not a visibility problem. Jordan Koene, CEO and Co-Founder of Previsible, former CEO of Searchmetrics Inc. and former Head of SEO and Content Development at eBay, advises nearly 100 enterprise clients through the shift to AI discovery. He outlines why synthetic prompt-based visibility scores should give way to lagging KPIs such as revenue, conversion, and product-category attribution, with first-party revenue, sales, and signup tables as the source of truth for what drives brand selection. He also covers a brand-asset hygiene framework (help centers, pricing, and about pages, plus review volume and freshness, citation coverage, and backlink freshness) and a "follow the money" budget approach that keeps Google as the core channel while funding ChatGPT citation work.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Paywalled education filters out talent before hiring begins. Venkata Pagadala, AI Product Manager for Search at AT&T, argues that financial barriers to learning hide capable candidates from employers. He defines work as a profit-sharing exchange of human time and skills, and education as a separate good that money should not restrict. He makes the case for open-access education as a talent-sourcing strategy, because a public knowledge base widens the candidate pool and lets business owners hire the right person.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SEO, AEO, and GEO now compete as labels for the same enterprise discipline. Venkata Pagadala, AI Product Manager for Search at AT&T, leads agentic AI work for enterprise search. The conversation covers turning first-party data into deeper consumer understanding, applying agentic AI to enterprise SEO workflows, and treating search as the core discipline with AEO and GEO as facets of it.*Note: the transcript provided covers only the opening exchange. It has no statistics, results, or detailed frameworks, so I left them out rather than invent them. Share the full transcript if you want specific metrics and strategies added.*See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Google confirmed the August 26 spam update. Kaspar Szymanski, Senior Director at SearchBrothers.com, is a former senior member of Google's Search team with hands-on webspam enforcement experience, and he now leads penalty recovery for businesses. His first immediate step for impacted sites is to save and preserve server logs. Logs show how bots interact with the site, and on large sites with high landing page volume they become a critical diagnostic asset, though they do not replace the instant analysis the update demands.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Google Search Console gives no clear-cut warning of an impending manual action. Kaspar Szymanski, Senior Director at SearchBrothers and former senior member of Google's Search team with hands-on webspam enforcement experience, now helps businesses recover from Google penalties. He explains why increased crawler activity in specific site sections is the only potential warning sign, and why it produces many false positives. He also covers how to separate real risk from benign causes such as new external references, internal linking changes, and trending query demand.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Google's August 2026 Spam Update is being misread as an AI penalty. Kaspar Szymanski, Senior Director at SearchBrothers.com and a former senior member of the Google Search team, brings hands-on experience in search policy and webspam enforcement. He explains why sites using AI are being affected without production method being the trigger: Google flags low-quality sites based on the quality of their output. The discussion separates how content is produced from how it is evaluated.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Organizational silos remain the top barrier to AI search success. Siiri Lee, Senior Director of Global Direct-to-Consumer at MANSCAPED, brings over two decades of experience scaling DTC and omnichannel ecommerce operations to the conversation. The discussion covers reframing AI-driven search as a cross-functional organizational mandate rather than a single-department initiative, aligning GEO and AEO workstreams across traditional SEO team boundaries, and restructuring internal processes to match the pace at which search behavior is evolving.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI is changing the way people discover information online—and SEO is no longer the responsibility of just one team. This episode explores the future of search, including AEO and GEO, and how businesses can adapt to AI-driven discovery.The conversation dives into decentralized SEO ownership, cross-functional collaboration, agency partnerships, and the importance of building strong relationships across marketing, PR, engineering, content, and other teams. Discover practical insights on how organizations can move faster, make smarter decisions, and stay ahead as the search landscape continues to evolve.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The SEO versus AEO debate misses the point entirely. Alex Sherman, co-founder and CEO of Bluefish AI, previously built and sold PromoteIQ to Microsoft, giving him rare perspective on how marketing channels transform at scale. He argues that treating search and agent optimization as competing disciplines is a losing strategy, that historical marketing channel shifts consistently open doors for new talent and new market entrants, and that brands need to prepare now for customer journeys increasingly mediated by AI agents rather than waiting for the split between human and agentic traffic to fully materialize.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Most brands fight AI inaccuracies in the wrong place. Alex Sherman, co-founder and CEO of Bluefish AI and former co-founder of PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft), now helps enterprise brands close AI accuracy gaps across search and discovery platforms. He outlines why first-party content and direct data feeds to models outperform third-party correction efforts, how large language models increasingly weight brand-verified information over unverified sources like forum commentary, and the diagnostic framework brands need to identify where their AI accuracy gaps actually originate.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.