Should you give away how you do it?

Jon Cooper once stayed up all night finishing a blog post, published it at 9am and went to bed at 11. The post laid out his whole scaled link building process, start to finish. It was the thing he sold.

When we got to it in episode 7, Bobby Bot asked the obvious question for me: "Why reveal a successful strategy to others in a competitive field? The returns for the effort just don't compute."

Jon had clearly asked himself the same thing. His answer started with the fear: "I didn't want to give away something that was too helpful because that's kind of my secret sauce, that's how I make money." Then he explained why he did it anyway: "if you give away something for free, there's a lot less likelihood people are actually going to put it in use."

That was 2014. The reasons for and against have both changed since.

Most people won't use it. The rest will call you.

Jon's point is a slightly cynical one and I think it's right. A free guide gets bookmarked, skimmed and admired. Very few readers carve out the days it takes to actually do it. "It's a psychological thing," he said.

Jason Acidre saw the other half. He ran Xight Interactive out of the Philippines and published his processes on his blog in detail. I asked him whether that transparency had helped, given clients could read it and decide it was too hard to do on their own. He said it was one of the main reasons they got good leads, because he was sharing "some really difficult parts to do on their own. So instead of copying the process I'm sharing, they're just hiring us." (The line is in our written interview too.)

A detailed method isn't a substitute for the work. It proves you've done it enough times to write it down, and it's an honest preview of the effort involved.

The ones who gave away more than a blog post

Marty Weintraub took it further than anyone I spoke to. Aimclear's thought leadership wasn't a plan, he said. He was so excited about keyword targeting that he started going to every conference and blogging from 2007, "just wanting to share."

Then he said the part that most agency owners would find frightening. Conventional wisdom says "you partition the knowledge and the relationships so that no single employee could leave, take clients and reproduce the secret sauce. To the contrary, what we have done is we've turned our relationships over to the employees from the very beginning." Aimclear ended up with seven people speaking around the world. Looking back, he admitted you could reverse engineer it into a strategy, but "in reality, we were just out there being honest and passionate about the world."

When I interviewed Jon Henshaw in 2019, he told me about the SEO Analyzer, a tool he'd built to grade any home page and turn it into a PDF sales report. It won him plenty of work. Then they gave it away for free, "and we had people just all over the world using the tool." Thousands of them put its badge on their sites. That story is in part one of his interview.

Some people share because of how they were raised. When I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022, she told me her father was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and "very much an open source guy... every approach to the internet was like wanting to share his work." She said that's why she likes "to share my findings very publicly." It's in our written interview, and it stuck.

The honest case for keeping quiet

It isn't free, though. Paul Shapiro put the tension best when I interviewed him in 2019: "in SEO, you share too much and you can give away a competitive advantage. So there's sort of a fine line between sharing and sharing too much." He still came down on the side of sharing, because the industry has so much bad information in it: "I almost feel like a moral obligation to share like good knowledge out there." The full answer is in his interview.

A few things can go wrong.

People copy you. Some will lift your framework, rename it and pitch it. Gary Illyes gave me the biggest example there is. Google was completely open about PageRank early on, and that's how link spamming started. "Was it a good idea? Was that not a good idea? We did start a new industry, I guess."

Clients do it themselves. A few readers have the team to run your process in house. You lose that job. It's still a job.

The machine reads it and nobody clicks. This is the new one. Ahrefs found an AI Overview now goes with a 58% lower clickthrough rate for the top ranking page. Your generous guide can now be summarised on Google without anyone visiting it. Lily saw it coming. She told me in 2022 she wanted Google to give "more attribution when things are pulled in from other sites... not putting like in four pixels light gray where they got it from."

Why I'd still publish in 2026

The click was never really the point. The point was being the name people thought of when they had the problem, and that part has got stronger.

AI answers mention and recommend brands, and the brands they mention are the ones the rest of the web talks about. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with appearing in AI Overviews (0.664), well ahead of backlinks (0.218). The top quarter of brands by mentions averaged 169 AI Overview appearances. The next quarter averaged 14. That's a cliff.

Publishing detailed thinking is how you get talked about. Jon, Jason and Marty worked that out when the reward was links and conference invitations. The reward now is being the name an AI answer reaches for.

Only some of it gets cited, though. Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson looked at which original research AI engines actually cite, and wrote it up for Search Engine Land in July. Pages with primary research earned 3.3 times more citations per page than everything else, but mostly when they answered a clear, measurable comparison. "AI does not reward 'original data' by default." Vague thought leadership gets ignored.

Rand Fishkin now argues that "zero clicks does not mean zero sales": people learn from you on someone else's platform, then come to you when they're ready to buy. When we recorded in 2016, he was already sure secrecy was the worse bet. "Anytime you see opacity or secretiveness, there's almost always something bad behind it," he said, and when you're open, "the harsh criticisms that you expect turn into words of kindness and praise."

He also told me the one thing that sits above transparency in Moz's values is empathy. He threw out the first version of a blog post about layoffs because it put transparency ahead of kindness.

What to publish and what to keep

Give away your thinking. Keep other people's business private, and keep the judgement you only get from doing the work.

If you want to have a go:

1. Write up one process you're slightly nervous about sharing. If it makes you nervous, it's probably the useful one.
2. Show the working. Put the method and the numbers on the page, in a table, under a URL that won't change. Indig and Johnson found 64 of the 365 cited URLs were dead, taking 203 citations with them.
3. Let your team put their names on it. At Aimclear, Marty's people did the speaking, not just Marty.
4. Check you'd be comfortable with it summarised. If an AI answer lifts your top paragraph and nothing else, does it still point back to you?

It's the same idea as create something people can link to, and it's why being copied matters less than it feels. Anyone can follow your steps. Knowing which step to skip on a Tuesday afternoon, for this client, is what they're hiring you for.

Jon's post took him about three days and one lost night's sleep. I still think of it whenever someone asks me whether they should share how they work.