iPullRank

Content marketers, gather 'round! At SEO Week, Fajr Muhammad gave the most beautiful content crisis you’ll ever witness on stage, and honestly? We deserved it. She dragged us for drowning the internet in blogspam, exposed the click’s villain arc, and served a scroll-stopping sermon on why your “engagement metrics” are giving ✨delusional✨ Clicks are down. Attention is a finite resource. And no one’s bookmarking your “7 ways to optimize title tags” post. But there’s hope! If your content can actually resonate, interact, and matter. (Also, she said design > vibes, so fix your ugly blog) Go watch her full talk. Then go audit your entire strategy. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gFxRvWCR

Tired of hearing “AI is changing everything!” while you quietly Google how to unblock GPTBot and pretend you understand canonical tags? Will Critchlow is here to save your sanity - with actual SEO test results, real talk about what still matters (hint: title tags, not vibes), and a spicy side of CFO drag. He even tells the story of the worst year of his career and how it accidentally led to building an enterprise SEO testing platform. Spoiler: Removing meta descriptions can increase traffic. The machines are weird. But if you want bigger budgets, better results, and a shot at being taken seriously in your next strategy meeting, this one’s for you. Watch it. Take notes. Delete half your “SEO text”: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gEV9qX4G

Carrie Rose took the stage at SEO Week, metaphorically flipped a table, and politely screamed: “Brand is NOT the new SEO. Category is.” She then casually dropped a case study about Red Bull - yes, that Red Bull -who had 99% global fame and 0.05% share of search for energy drinks. Google didn’t even know they were a beverage brand. Ouch. Carrie broke down why most of your links are going to your blog (aka the digital junk drawer), why “just get brand mentions” is a lazy excuse, and how category signals win rankings, customers, and your marketing team's respect. You’ll walk away rethinking your entire off-site strategy, and probably begging your PR team to stop pitching your CEO’s latest podcast appearance. Great clip below, and you can see the full video here: https://lnkd.in/gwnCvz-z Prepare to build category kings, not just cute content 👑

🪦 🗞️ Claim: “SEO is Dead” (NY Mag) The era of SEO is over. Say hello to GEO. 🔵 Michael King: “SEO is Deprecated, Not Dead” Deprecated means you can still use it, but a better version exists. If all you’re doing is keyword research, content, and links... that’s deprecated. Period. Mike isn’t nostalgic. He agrees that traditional SEO tactics don’t hold up, and he's been beating the drum since Google moved from a lexical model to a semantic model. But instead of giving up or hand-waving GEO as vague hope, he lays out a replacement: Relevance Engineering. 🪦 🗞️ Claim: “GEO is Aspirational” (NY Mag) GEO is a new term to keep marketers and VCs optimistic in a collapsing search ecosystem. 🔵 Mike King: GEO Isn’t a Term. It’s a Stack. We’re seeing better performance across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and AI Mode when we align with fan-out behavior, sub-passage relevance, and semantic precision. The NY Mag article frames GEO as “snake oil” or a marketing rebrand. Mike treats it as a concrete technical evolution, tied to how AI systems retrieve and present information. 🪦 🗞️ Claim: “Traffic is a bloodbath” (NY Mag) Users stay in the chatbot. If you’re lucky, you get cited at the end. Websites aren’t the destination anymore. 🔵 Mike King: Traffic ≠ Value. Context needs to be calculated more explicitly into the conversation. The relationship isn’t click-based anymore; it’s context-based. It’s about being retrieved. NY Mag focuses on traffic loss. Mike points to a more nuanced layer of visibility being part of the model’s memory and retrieval process, even if there’s no click. That's a fundamental redefinition of success in AI search. 🪦 🗞️ Claim: “GEO content is just bot-flavored SEO” (NY Mag) The future of content looks like FAQ-flavored software documentation, built for bots. 🔵 Mike King: Structure for AI thinking, write for people. You need to align with how LLMs chunk and retrieve. That’s not writing like a robot, it’s engineering the content architecture they actually use. The article mistakes style for strategy. Mike focuses on mechanics: fan-out triggers, passage chunking, and retrieval relevance. This is system-level alignment, not writing style mimicry. 🪦 🗞️ Claim: “Marketers are flailing.” (NY Mag) The industry has responded with layoffs… it’s chaos. 🔵 Mike King: The future is already in motion iPullRank and our clients aren't purely reactive. We’ve been experimenting, building, hiring relevance engineers, and educating clients. While NY Mag offers a postmortem, Mike has been building the post-SEO framework and talent. He sees the transition not as chaos, but as opportunity for those willing to upskill. 🪦 🗞️ NY Mag’s angle: The old playbook is gone. No one knows what’s next. GEO might help, maybe. 🔵 Mike’s stance: The old playbook is deprecated. The new one is being written with fan-outs, embeddings, and retrieval logic in mind. The spicy hot takes continue in the full video...

Annie Cushing came out of what she jokingly referred to as "witness protection" (aka, not speaking at conferences since 2018) and immediately started dragging AI BS like it owed her money. In her SEO Week talk, she covered: 🔹 AI saving whales and babies = good 🔹 Wasting millions on the wrong models = bad 🔹 Leaderboards = mostly vibes 🔹 Self-reported model scores = LOL 🔹 Sometimes the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze She even built three free tools to help you stop lighting money on fire and pick the right AI/ML models on purpose (see resources section in the link below👇) If you’ve ever nodded along in an AI meeting, secretly googling “what’s a convolutional neural network,” this is your moment. Watch the whole thing: https://lnkd.in/efZu2vj8 Then maybe rethink parts of your AI budget. You’ve probably been bamboozled.

Zack Notes accidentally made a video game. What started as bedtime “who would win” animal fights for his kids turned into Animal Matchup, a wild, scrappy, AI-fueled SEO playground with custom LLM interactions, fight stories, user-generated showdowns - and somehow, actual staying power in Google through 8 core updates. His SEO Week talk is a masterclass in: 🦍 Surviving with 99.85% AI content 🐊 Building better-than-ChatGPT UX 🦅 Sneaky fact-checking tricks + E-E-A-T on a budget 🐻 Turning LLM prompts into interactive joy machines If your “AI site” is just walls of ChatGPT text…Zack’s already 50 fights ahead of you. Watch the full talk here: https://lnkd.in/gDAmSf-P Bonus: There's a poll about grizzlies vs gorillas. Choose wisely.

Crystal Carter did not come to play. She came to serve, to educate, and to drag your tired content strategies into the LLM era by their broken meta descriptions. During SEO Week, Crystal blessed the stage with a Beyoncé-fueled teardown of reasoning models like DeepSeek: 🐝 She broke down Mixture of Experts like a pro. 🐝 She showed how websites become the experts inside reasoning models. 🐝 She explained why “what is X” content is basic now, and “why the hell is X happening” is the new gold. 🐝 She cited Levi’s jeans in a multi-layered LLM query about thighs. Yes, thighs. Key takeaways? Don’t make content for content’s sake. Make it for the models. UGC, hot takes, and timely gossip? That’s how you win in reasoning-driven LLMs. Citations are earned. And DeepSeek is out here handing them out. If your brand is not the expert on your brand online, an LLM will choose violence. And someone else’s website. See the full talk here: https://lnkd.in/g6zQezJE Read it, laugh, take notes, rethink your whole content plan, and maybe go add a favicon. Crystal said so.

New report just dropped from the ✨ always-entertaining, never-boring ✨ Garrett Sussman: 📌 AI Mode isn’t sticky. Yet. 📌 Most users try it once, then bounce. 📌 Google might be intentionally slow-playing it. The tl;dr 👇 Google launched AI Mode, hid it behind three clicks, sprinkled in zero ads, and now seems confused that people aren’t obsessed But here’s the kicker - early users are showing interesting patterns: 🗣️ Queries are getting longer 🗣️ Session depth jumped after July updates 🗣️ A tiny cult of power users is forming Garrett dives into all the juicy Similarweb data, user behavior trends, and whether Google actually wants this thing to succeed…or if they’re just beta testing us all in public. Full breakdown here → https://lnkd.in/geEVC5yr (Bring snacks. It’s meaty.)

Ever try to explain content marketing to your dad at a suburban bar and end up in an existential crisis? Devin Bramhall has, and she turned that moment into a mic-drop masterclass at SEO Week. Spoiler: She built a multimillion-dollar agency, then told us that content isn’t king, marketing isn’t the answer, and the “customer journey” is a weird, touchy maze we made up. Instead of following playbooks, she burned them. Instead of chasing KPIs, she hit them by firing people, fixing org charts, and building internal ad servers from scratch. Was it a talk about content? Kind of. Was it a blueprint for actually growing businesses without getting stuck in marketing theater? Absolutely. Watch it. Take notes. Question your entire strategy: 👉https://lnkd.in/grkUnX9a

Too many AI dashboards feel like a dead end. Cool charts, but now what? Been playing around with the new Visibility ➜ Actions release from AirOps, and it’s the first thing we've seen that actually closes that gap. It doesn’t just show where you’re losing ground in AI search, it helps you do something about it. Want to refresh a page, spin up new content, grab third-party citations, or jump into social convos? It’s all built in. No bouncing between tools, no guessing. Early signs are impressive - Webflow and Descript both sped up their workflows like crazy and saw real results (like 5× more signups or 9× faster refreshes). If AI search is on your radar, definitely worth checking out Airops.com