Guests

Xight Interactive, the agency Jason was running when we spoke, is now Avaris, and he's still co-founder there. It's a boutique SEO agency in the Philippines doing technical SEO, authority building and, these days, optimisation for AI search. He still writes up his strategies on Kaiserthesage, his long running SEO journal.

Jon has stuck with links. He runs Hyperlynx Media, a manual outreach and PR agency, and from Austin he also organises two local events, Tiny Talks and Pitch-A-Friend Austin. His now page says he's been building with Claude Code lately, rebuilding his site and writing marketing tools for the agency, which I can relate to.

Geraldine had just put out her first book, All Over the Place, when we talked travel and getting lost on purpose. Since then her writing has moved to the kitchen: she is now a James Beard Award winning writer, and her second book, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury, came out in 2024 with the paperback following in 2025. These days most of her writing goes to her Substack, The Everywhereist's Super Cool Email Club, about food and pop culture.

Gianluca is still doing what he was doing over that burger: strategic and international SEO consulting through I Love SEO, for clients like SIXT, Chess.com and MSC Cruises. The work now sits squarely in AI search, with audits covering retrieval as well as rankings, and his AI Search & SEO: Strategic Framework 2026 argues that AI will sit alongside Google rather than replace it. He's also still on the conference circuit, including HiveMCR in 2026.

Rand was just walking out of Moz and into SparkToro when we spoke, and SparkToro is still his main gig as co-founder and CEO. He has added a couple of side projects since: Snackbar Studio, an indie game studio, and Alertmouse, a Google Alerts alternative he launched with two friends in late 2025. He also wrote Zero Click Marketing with Amanda Natividad, which feels right for someone who has spent years telling us the clicks are drying up.

I caught Oli at MozCon when he was still Mr Landing Page at Unbounce. After 13 years there he has moved on, and from Victoria, Canada he now runs his own mix of landing page audits, speaker coaching and no-code app builds. He is also a co-founder of Outline, an AI tool built on Bubble that helps speakers shape their talks, and he is on the Turing Fest 2026 lineup. He still hasn't changed his name to Landing Page, as far as I can tell.

Lewis was my very first guest, and The School of Greatness was already a big show back then. It's grown into a public television series and a live event, the Summit of Greatness, and in 2026 SiriusXM renewed the podcast on a new three year deal. His latest book, Make Money Easy, is about fixing your relationship with money.

Gary is still at Google, still explaining how search actually works, now as an analyst on the Search Relations team. A lot of that happens on Google's Search Off the Record podcast, where in 2025 he warned that AI agents are going to congest the web and that indexing, not crawling, is what really eats resources. He's also written, pretty honestly, that the shift to AI in search is hard to accept even when you understand why it's happening. We talked about AI in search back in 2017, so I enjoyed that one.

Not long after our chat, WordStream was acquired by Gannett in 2018. Larry went on to found Customers.ai, where he's CEO. It identifies anonymous website visitors and feeds them into email and ad remarketing, so he's still doing what he told me about: writing software so nobody has to do the same dull thing twice.

When we caught up in part two Mike was running iPullRank and reviving UndergroundHipHop.com. iPullRank is now one of the agencies people point to for technical SEO and AI search, and Mike has been pushing an idea he calls Relevance Engineering. He started his own conference, SEO Week in New York, and in August 2026 Wiley published his first book, The Science of SEO, which gets into information retrieval and generative AI with actual code.

When Ian came on the show he was running Portent in Seattle. He has since sold the agency and now works for himself as a consultant, trainer and speaker, still banging the same drum about clear messages done well. Lately he has been helping agencies put AI to work and writing plain explainers about it on ianlurie.com, from Claude Skills versus Projects to a piece called "Teach The Shit Out Of Everything".

Dr. Pete is still at Moz, now as Principal Innovation Architect, tracking Google changes to steer where the product goes next. He still keeps MozCast and the Google algorithm history going, so people can keep checking they're not crazy. His recent talks have moved into AI, including "The Infinite Tail: Keyword Research for AI" at BrightonSEO in April 2026.

Paddy ran Aira, the agency he co-founded, for ten years as CEO before stepping back in 2025. These days he runs Founder Focus, advising and mentoring agency founders on strategy and the people side of running a business.

Nathalie was the web psychologist behind Webs of Influence when we talked about why people click. Since then she has written Business Unusual, on values and brand resilience, hosts the podcast In Conversation with Nathalie Nahai, lectures on AI at ELISAVA and runs the Flourishing Futures Salons. She spoke at London Tech Week in 2026 on "Are We Human? Or Are We Augmented?", and she is painting and making music too, with her first solo exhibition in London and a new album in the works.

Wil still runs Seer Interactive, the Philadelphia agency he started in 2002, and he's still the person on stage asking whether we are doing right by actual people. These days his talks are about AI search, and he is careful to separate visibility from credibility. His 2026 speaking schedule includes Content Marketing World and MAICON, with sessions like "AI Forward vs. AI Foolish". Same Wil who told me not to move someone's life's work around just for Google.

When Melanie joined us she was fresh off a road trip collecting business stories for her brand strategy work. She later moved into full time keynotes and retreats, and now, after 25 years of helping other people find their voice, she says she's reclaiming her own. She's stepped back from her business to put her energy into a healing nonprofit and a creative project, and she's writing about it in the open on her blog, The Reclamation, with new posts through 2026.

Marty is still running AIMCLEAR, still writing, and still not pulling punches. His 2026 posts are all about AI search, including a C-suite guide to AI measurement and prompt fanning and a very Marty headline: How Do I Tell a Real AIO, AEO, GEO Agency From a Rebranded SEO Poser? When we spoke he reckoned that by 2018 or so, machines would be writing more than a fifth of business content. He wasn't far off.

Jon and I spoke twice in 2019, first about building Raven Tools and then about Coywolf, which he was running as a company of one on the side. Since December 2024 he's been Director of Audience Management for Global News and Platform at Yahoo, looking after organic performance and technical SEO. He still writes every word of Coywolf News himself and builds his own apps, including the notes app Recollect.

In 2022 Lily was leading SEO and organic research at Amsive and was one of the clearest voices on E-A-T and how Google judges trust. In 2026 she launched Algorythmic, her own SEO and AI search consultancy, while staying on at Amsive as VP of SEO & AI Search. Her focus now is how brands show up across Google, ChatGPT and Gemini, and she's been direct about where she thinks the industry is getting AI search wrong.

When Jeff and I talked in 2023 the whole industry was scrambling to move from Universal Analytics to GA4, and he was teaching marketers how to do it from wherever he happened to be living. He now runs MeasureU, which trains agency owners and measurement consultants to build clean, owned data setups. His current work centres on his CLEAN framework and a live AI Funnel Measurement workshop, which fits what he told me back then: AI is a statistical program, and it's only as good as the data you feed it.

In 2019 Paul was running SEO at Catalyst in Boston and telling me that testing beats best practice every time. He went on to lead technical SEO at Shopify, including its big international migration, and is now a Lead Product Manager on the Web Intelligence team at Uber. He still talks about the gap between SEO myth and what the data shows, most recently on the ResultFirst podcast, and writes on his blog Search Wilderness.

When I spoke with Tim in 2018 he was deep in Ahrefs' crawler work and still talking about his drum and bass days. He's still CMO at Ahrefs, which has grown into a much bigger bootstrapped business since then, and he hosts the Ahrefs Podcast and advises early stage martech founders on the side. These days his focus has moved to how brands get found in AI answers, and he's speaking on where marketing is headed at Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego in October 2026.