AI search is fundamentally changing how people find information online, but it's also creating a Wild West of spam, manipulation, and brand impersonation. SEO expert Mark Williams-Cook joins us to discuss why he calls AI a "leaky bucket," how expired domains are gaming LLMs, and what the death of the link graph means for the future of search. We'll explore practical strategies for making your site visible to AI, the risks brands face from AI phishing, and whether SEO is truly dead or just evolving. Perfect for anyone who owns a website or runs a business.Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiGuest: Mark Williams-Cook - Director at Candour, Founder of AlsoAskedFind Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markseo Search with Candour podcast: https://withcandour.co.uk/podcast
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If you stand in the way of Google making money, they will flatten you. We're told, make good content. That's not what Google's trying to rank. That's what they require. One of the ingredients for their system goal, and their system goal is to make ungodly amounts of money.
Welcome, humans, to the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by my trusty co-host and good friend, Grant Harvey.
What's up?
Today, we're joined by Mark Williams-Cook, who is a, frankly, a prolific influence in the direction of modern SEO. He recently discussed how AI is creating what he calls a leaky bucket problem for search. And today, we're going to learn more about that and a variety of other things.
Mark serves as director at Candor, a Norwich-based SEO agency, and he's also the founder of Also Asked and the co-owner of Top Dog Harnesses. Mark, welcome to The Neuron. It's great to have you.
Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here.
Awesome. So opening question here, and this is probably the trillion dollar question. According to who you follow on social media, AI has either destroyed or resurrected SEO. What are your thoughts?
I mean, this is the running joke in the industry, right? So I've been working in SEO 22 years, and I think I've lived through, this is maybe my eighth death of SEO now. Someone actually made a really lovely graph of the value of the SEO industry over the last 20 years, kind of going up and then marked every time it had died.
So for me, there is a debate we could maybe get into later of a lot of people renaming what we do, SEO, as geo, generative engine optimization. For me, if we have to call it geo, which I hate, it would be a subset of SEO. Yeah. So I'm still doing pretty much the same things I was doing two years ago, five years ago. Just how I do them has changed slightly.
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