Mark Williams-Cook

So it's like, it's a bad idea to give SEOs specific information, give them vague guidelines.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I mean, we found a Google exploit last year that gave us thousands of parameters they use in their search ranking, how they classify queries.

It gave us quality scores for websites.

And in the end, after having a good poke around that, we did report it to Google and get their bug bounty because I was just like...

If we released this, it's just, it's not going to be any good.

You know, it's not going to make the weather a better place, you know, and it's not going to help people that are actually trying to, you know, because although, you know, SEO has a, depending on who you ask, a varied reputation.

I am, you know, in Canada, we are generally trying to help people

make the best business decisions in the search environment we're not actually interested on in how i can trick the search engine or you know how we can manipulate it because they're short-term things generally the the overriding goals of these systems um will be in line with making a good business and there's lots of ways to go about that so even if we get

insight into how google's working specifically while that's super interesting and answers you know fills in a bunch of blanks giving away or publishing that data is only going to aid people who are trying to take shortcuts and then you know not the types of businesses to be honest i want rewarded

So you're talking about the tools that are kind of trying to look at AI visibility, right?

Yeah, so I've been grilling these companies.

So when they email me to say, oh, we've got this brilliant tool, and I'm like, great, come and explain to me how it works.

And then I ask them all the questions that they don't want people to ask.

And I'm like, okay, but what data and where does that come from?

And how are you getting that?

And it's a real mix.

So I think you've got the traditional SaaS tool companies that have worked in the SEO space a while that have existing huge databases of keywords and search volumes and stuff.

And some of them are just pumping traditional search terms, like straight into, um, into AI tools to, and then seeing who gets cited, which according to them, um,