The SEO Podcast: Page 2 Podcast

https://page2pod.com - Agentic readiness starts with a business decision, not a code change: what should AI agents be able to access and do on your site?

Tory Gray, CEO of The Gray Dot Company, joins Jon Clark and Joe DeVita to explain why the technical side of agent readiness is the easy part. The standards exist; the hard part is imagining how people will actually use agents and choosing which actions to enable (purchasing, API workflows, account tasks) and which to block. She also warns against treating JavaScript as a wall: most AI bots don't render, but agents can render when a user pays for it, or simply take a screenshot.

Tory brings a product manager's lens to technical SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). She breaks down why pagination and infinite scroll still go wrong, the two-tier test for programmatic SEO, and how to build user-generated content systems so your site becomes the Reddit of your niche instead of just posting on it.

⚙️ In This Episode

- What should AI agents be allowed to do on your website?

- Can JavaScript keep AI crawlers out, and should you rely on it?

- Pagination and infinite scroll: engagement KPIs vs. conversion KPIs

- The two-tier programmatic SEO test: real user demand, then a moat

- Building UGC systems with automated indexing rules and human review

- Google's agentic guidance: accessibility tree, layout shift, and screenshots

- Title, canonical, and meta robots tags that move out of the head after rendering

A practical look at how websites are changing as agents become a third audience alongside people and search engines.

🔔 Subscribe for weekly conversations with the practitioners shaping SEO, AEO, and GEO → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922?sub_confirmation=1

💬 Has your team decided what AI agents should be allowed to do on your site, or is it still undecided? Tell us in the comments.

Connect with Tory Gray

✅ The Gray Dot Company → https://thegray.company

✅ Tory Gray on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/torygray/

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Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media, a Full-Service → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

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✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

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Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

- AI Difference Engine (Chrome extension) → https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eabfgiogeabkaekjkeocambpbgnjmfkk

- Rendering Difference Engine (Chrome extension) → https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rendering-difference-engi/dhcimplbimmmpjpiolnmdjdchnknmend

- The Gray Dot Company's user-generated content guide → https://thegray.company/blog/user-generated-content-seo

- Sitebulb Webinar: How to Build an AI Skill for Your SEO Workflow → https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/webinar-how-to-build-an-ai-skill-for-your-seo-workflow/

- Pagination SEO Best Practices → https://thegray.company/blog/pagination-seo-guide

https://page2pod.com - Local SEO for AI search: Andrew Shotland shares the experiments that moved Map Pack, Google AI, and ChatGPT visibility.

Andrew Shotland, founder and CEO of Local SEO Guide, has spent nearly 20 years doing local SEO for everyone from Walmart to single-location businesses. His short answer on what drives local visibility now is proximity, engagement, and reviews. In a Local Falcon study of roughly seven million local queries, a business's first 200 reviews did most of the ranking work across local packs, Google AI, and ChatGPT. After that point, additional reviews mainly expanded the radius where the business ranks.

Andrew also walks through the tests behind his thinking. He had people request driving directions to a business to see if map rankings moved. He recommends opening a legitimate second location instead of producing more content. He explains how review language maps to LLM conversation paths, which is where local SEO meets Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). And he describes a Reddit brand-mention test where AI visibility spiked, then disappeared as soon as the posting stopped.

📍 In This Episode

• Can driving-direction requests move Map Pack rankings?
• Why a legitimate second location can beat months of content work
• Local Services Ads (LSAs): service areas, lead quality, and rising CPCs
• Apple Maps ads: 25-character copy, images as copy, and tracking workarounds
• How many Google reviews do you need to rank?
• Review text, LLM conversation paths, and citation syndication
• The Reddit brand-mention experiment and AI visibility

A practitioner's look at which local SEO tactics hold up once AI systems are answering the "near me" question.

🔔 Subscribe for new episodes with the practitioners actually doing the work → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922?sub_confirmation=1

💬 How many reviews does the top-ranked business in your market have? Did reaching that number move your rankings? Tell us in the comments.

Follow Andrew Shotland

✅ Andrew Shotland / Local SEO Guide → https://www.localseoguide.com

✅ Andrew Shotland on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/localseoguide/

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

🔗 Andrew's Apple Maps ads blog post → https://www.localseoguide.com/everything-i-know-about-apple-maps-ads-so-far/

🔗 Local SEO Guide Reddit study → https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/reddit-is-no-longer-just-a-nerd-forum-its-an-ai-visibility-lever/

🔗 How Reviews Influence AI Overviews → https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.localseoguide.com/how-reviews-influence-ai-overviews-and-local-rankings/

🔗 Yext Local Data Study → https://www.localseoguide.com/yext-research-shares-a-few-billion-data-points-with-seos/

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media a Full-Service AEO Agency → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast
✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922
✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast
✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/
✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod
✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark
✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark
✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

https://page2pod.com - Your primary Google Business Profile category is the most powerful local ranking signal you control, and most businesses pick the wrong one.

Greg Gifford, Chief Strategy Officer at SearchLab, joins Jon Clark and Joe DeVita to separate what's actually changing in local search from the noise. His position: SEO isn't being replaced, but the foundations now feed a second consumer. AI models pull from the same local directories, reviews, and off-site brand signals that local SEO has always depended on — Yext research found 86% of AI citations for local businesses come from local SEO directory sites — which makes accuracy and off-site presence more valuable, not less.

Greg also gets into why SearchLab reorganized its SEO team around specialists instead of generalists, why customer service became a retention lever, and why AI search is probabilistic rather than deterministic — so the recommendation matters more than the citation link everyone's tracking.

Plus a lot of automotive: OEM content pushdowns, the approved vendor program, and why dealerships consistently misunderstand service and parts search.

📍 In This Episode

- Why SearchLab moved from SEO generalists to specialist teams — and how they ran the re-org without losing people

- Is your primary Google Business Profile category costing you map pack visibility?

- Why dealerships lose service and parts searches to Jiffy Lube

- Separate department profiles for parts and service, and the eligibility rule Google waived for car dealers

- When do city and location pages cross the line into doorway page spam?

- Review gating, the FTC update, and why Google is removing reviews 400 at a time

- Recovering filtered Yelp reviews — a 15–20% return without earning a single new review

- Local citations as the ante, not the win: what directories actually do for AI search visibility

- Digital PR as off-site brand building, not link building with a new name

A practical look at where local SEO fundamentals still hold, where they've quietly changed, and what AI search is rewarding right now.

Subscribe for new episodes with the practitioners actually doing this work.

Comment below: what's your primary Google Business Profile category, and when was the last time you actually questioned it?

Connect with Greg Gifford

✅ SearchLab Digital → https://searchlabdigital.com

✅ Greg on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/greggifford/

✅ Greg on Reddit → https://www.reddit.com/user/BAMFOC

✅ Greg on X: https://twitter.com/greggifford

✅ Greg on Bluesky: ​​https://bsky.app/profile/greggifford.bsky.social

✅ Greg on Slidesshare: https://www.slideshare.net/greggifford?itemsPerPage=16

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Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

- Culture Index (hiring/personality pattern tool) → https://www.cultureindex.com

- Culture Index (hiring/personality pattern tool) → https://www.cultureindex.com

- Google Business Profile + the GBP Community Forum → https://support.google.com/business/community?hl=en

- Local Search Tuesday → https://searchlabdigital.com/local-search-tuesdays/

- G50 Summit (SEO Oktoberfest) → https://seoktoberfest.net/

- SEO Week Presentation → https://seoweek.org/greg-gifford/

https://page2pod.com - Why social and video now decide whether your brand makes it into AI Overviews — and why your own website is the last place to optimize.

Cindy Krum, founder and CEO of MobileMoxie, argues that video has moved from a digital marketing must to an SEO must. Her case: LLMs are consensus machines. They don't care that your site says you're the best at something — they're aggregating what social, reviews, publishers, creators, and video say about you. If the web can't agree on what your brand is for, you haven't done the work.

She also walks through why a long-form video with real chapters behaves like a set of separate blog posts, each section eligible to answer a different question, and why short-form vertical video still matters for discovery even though it isn't showing up in AI Overviews yet. Plus: entity-first indexing, query fan-out, People Also Ask as the testing ground for AI Overview inclusion, and where Google Discover, Merchant Center, and TikTok Shop collide.

🎥 In This Episode

- Why Google keeps pulling YouTube into AI Overviews

- Do engagement metrics matter for getting cited by AI?

- Scripting video so the transcript contains the actual search phrase

- Turning your help center and FAQ pages into video answers

- Where vertical video ranks today — and where it doesn't

- What should a video chapter structure actually look like?

- Entity-first indexing, MUM, and query fan-out, explained plainly

- Building an entity plus its modifiers into an AEO prompt set

- Who owns SEO when discovery happens on social and Reddit

If search has become a journey that moves across platforms, this is a practical map of where to spend your effort first.

Subscribe for weekly conversations with the practitioners shaping SEO, AEO, and GEO.

Drop a comment: at your company, who actually owns social video — the SEO team or the social team? And has that changed in the last year?

Find Cindy Krum

✅ MobileMoxie → https://mobilemoxie.com

✅ Cindy on X → https://x.com/suzzicks

✅ Cindy on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindykrum

####

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark Official Site → https://jonclark.co

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

Chapters

0:00 Search Beyond the Website

2:16 Cindy Krum and MobileMoxie

5:51 Why Google Cares About Video

8:49 How Social Drives Brand-First Search

11:47 Scripting Video for Keywords

13:56 Turning Support Content Into Video

15:42 Vertical Video and AI Overviews

17:40 How Should You Structure Chapters?

20:12 Sponsor: Moving Traffic Media

20:56 AEO as a Branding Channel

24:15 Journeys, Micro-Moments, and MUM

26:53 Entity-First Indexing Explained

31:44 People Also Ask as Query Fan-Out

33:53 Merchant Center, Discover, TikTok Shop

38:45 Where to Focus for AI Overviews

40:02 Who Owns SEO Now?

44:14 Rapid Fire and Career Advice

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

- OtterlyAI (Thomas Peham, previous episode) → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJsQ2qJho-M

- All About Fraggles → https://moz.com/blog/fraggles

- Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model) → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQDRL8MwVj0

- See Cindy at the Amaze Conference → https://amazeconference.com/

https://page2pod.com - Publishers with OpenAI deals get cited 48% more by ChatGPT. Thomas Peham of Otterly.AI on what AI search citation testing actually shows.

Most AI search advice is theory. Thomas Peham, CEO and co-founder of Otterly.AI, runs a team with two full-time GEO researchers whose only job is to test it. Across millions of citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, a consistent picture emerges: corporate and brand websites supply roughly 40–60% of all citations, niche and trade media outperformed mainstream publishers in 16 of 17 US industries studied, and publishers holding licensing deals with OpenAI pick up about 48% more ChatGPT citations than those without.

The uncomfortable findings are here too. Schema markup lifted Google organic and AI Overviews visibility but did nothing measurable on ChatGPT. Crawl data shows almost no activity on llms.txt files, while sitemaps get hit constantly. A fictional agency with no clients and no history got recommended by ChatGPT purely by earning mentions in the articles ChatGPT was already citing. And 25% of the URLs ChatGPT cites are dead links.

Thomas also shares Otterly.AI's own Claude numbers, which should make anyone in B2B re-examine their analytics: Claude accounts for 0.1–0.2% of their website traffic, but 10.6% of net-new leads name it as where they first heard about the company.

🧪 In This Episode

- Why hiring dedicated GEO researchers became the marketing strategy

- Does schema markup actually influence ChatGPT citations?

- The llms.txt crawl data — and why sitemaps deserve the attention instead

- Where AI citations come from: corporate sites, niche media, and publisher licensing deals

- The fake London SEO agency experiment and what it exposes about off-page manipulation

- Building brand sentiment through reviews, product content, and a central brand entity

- Why YouTube long-form gets cited regardless of view count

- What Claude's citation data reveals about B2B buying you can't see in analytics

A practitioner's look at what's been tested, what held up, and what marketers should stop doing.

Subscribe for new episodes with the people actually running the experiments in SEO, AEO, and GEO.

Which finding would change your roadmap first — the schema results, the llms.txt crawl data, or the 48% licensing gap? Tell us in the comments.

####

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

- Thomas Peham → https://thomas-peham.com/

- Thomas Peham on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaspeham/

- Thomas Peham on Twitter → https://twitter.com/tompeham

- Thomas Peham on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/tompeham/- Otterly.AI → https://otterly.ai - Otterly.AI's Agent Analytics → https://otterly.ai/blog/agent-analytics/ - Otterly.AI's Claude Citation Study: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thomaspeham_our-claude-citation-study-shows-reddit-activity-7477977546194849792-gu8-/

https://page2pod.com - Entity SEO finally has a number: Lidia Infante on tracking Google's confidence in your brand with the Knowledge Graph API.

Lidia Infante leads SEO and AI search at Pleo, following senior roles at SurveyMonkey, BigCommerce, and Sanity. She walks through the entity work most teams talk about but can't measure — querying the Google Knowledge Graph API for a confidence score, tracking that score in a Google Sheet, and using the movement to prove that third-party profile cleanup and consistent semantic triples actually changed something. That's the case for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) work you can defend in a budget meeting.

She also gets practical about the rest of the job: using LLMs to break a research library into individual tagged facts and place them inside existing content, correlating clicks on candidate brand terms against real signups to decide what your product should even be called, and why disagreeing with consensus may be the last cheap differentiator in a landscape full of AI-generated averages. Then the part nobody puts in a conference deck — legal approval layers, 16-market localization, and the business questions a growth leader has to answer before proposing any strategy at all.

🧩 In This Episode

- How do you track Google's confidence in your brand entity?

- The CORE framework: consistency, optimization, repetition, engagement

- Breaking research reports into tagged facts with Python and the Gemini API

- What should your product actually be called? Correlating brand terms to signups

- Why going against consensus still ranks when everything else is an average

- Getting content through legal without six-month lead times

- The questions a new growth leader should answer before proposing a strategy

A rare conversation that connects entity theory to the org chart, the legal queue, and the P&L that decide whether any of it ships.

👉 Subscribe for new practitioner interviews on SEO, AEO, and GEO every week.

💬 Have you run your brand through the Knowledge Graph API yet? Tell us what came back — and which entity Google thinks you are.

Find Lidia

✅ Lidia Infante on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidiainfante/

✅ Lidia Infante on X → https://x.com/LidiaInfanteM

✅ Lidia Infante on Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/lidia-infante.com

✅ Lidia's website → https://www.lidia-infante.com/

✅ Lidia Infante on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@LidiaInfanteM/

✅ Lidia Infante on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/lidiainfantem/

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Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned

- Lidia's Synthetic Research Pannel → https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lidiainfante_i-am-a-girl-with-a-claude-subscription-and-activity-7490867156474171392-xnRo/

- SEO and Brand Sitting in a Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G → https://speakerdeck.com/lidiainfante/seo-and-brand-sitting-in-a-tree-k-i-s-s-i-n-g

https://page2pod.com - Fan-out queries expose the exact words LLMs want to see about your brand — Peec AI's Malte Landwehr on how to read them.

Malte Landwehr is CPO and CMO at Peec AI, and he spent two decades in search before this — VP Product at Searchmetrics, then VP SEO at idealo, running enterprise SEO across roughly 130 million pages. His core argument: LLMs reward consensus. If your website, your founder's LinkedIn, your press release footer, and your G2 profile describe you three different ways, the model has nothing consistent to trust. Describing yourself identically everywhere you have control is the highest-leverage AI visibility work most brands still haven't done.

He also gets specific about what doesn't hold up. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) have picked up tactics that don't survive testing — schema markup can't carry facts your body copy leaves out, duplicate .md versions of pages went uncited across hundreds of thousands of chats, and llms.txt is guidance for AI agents rather than a visibility lever.

What works is duller: declarative sentences, concrete numbers, and content that answers what the fan-outs are already asking about you.

🔎 In This Episode

- Why LLMs look for consensus — and what happens when your site, LinkedIn, and G2 profile don't match

- How should you do keyword research when fan-out queries add terms you never wrote?

- What ChatGPT's site: fan-outs reveal about whether OpenAI has its own link graph

- Does schema markup still influence AI citations? What the testing actually shows

- Markdown copies, .md URLs, and llms.txt — where each one belongs

- Product feeds, Yelp/Resy/OpenTable, and how local visibility works inside ChatGPT

- Why the biggest lever is usually the wrong first project

A practitioner's map of what to change, what to measure, and what to ignore in AI search right now.

Subscribe for new episodes with the practitioners actually doing the work → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922?sub_confirmation=1

Comment: what's the strangest term you've seen appended to a fan-out query for your brand?

Connect with Malte Landwehr

✅ Malte on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/landwehr

✅ Malte on X → https://x.com/maltelandwehr

✅ Malte's Personal website → https://www.maltelandwehr.de

✅ Peec AI → https://peec.ai

####

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

https://page2pod.com - Clicks are disappearing. Derek Hobson makes the case that direct traffic is the AI search signal most teams aren't measuring.

Derek Hobson — SEO strategist, writer behind SEO Humorist, and former Senior Director of SEO and AI Search at Brainlabs — argues that when organic clicks shrink, the proof of impact moves elsewhere: direct sessions, log files, and query fan-out data. On several of his accounts, direct and organic tracked in parallel for years until direct broke upward right as clicks fell and impressions climbed. His read: people research a brand inside an LLM, then go straight to the site. He can't prove it yet, and he says so out loud to clients — but directionally, it's the number he'd watch.

The second argument is organizational. Off-page SEO can't sit in an optional package anymore now that answer engines scrape, aggregate, and synthesize third-party sources. That means SEO, paid, PR, and social have to actually talk to each other — and most companies are still built around separate teams, separate budgets, and separate reporting.

Jon Clark and Joe DeVita also get into automating reporting with Apps Script, why LLM referral numbers in analytics are almost certainly wrong, and why Derek thinks every SEO should investigate a win as aggressively as a loss.

📊 In This Episode

- Is direct traffic the AI search signal most teams are ignoring?

- Who actually owns the direct channel — and why nobody claims it

- Why off-page SEO stopped being an optional line item

- Query fan-out and grounding queries: what the Gemini API and Microsoft Clarity now expose

- Why LLM referral traffic looks impossibly small in analytics

- Building a paid-and-organic gap analysis that starts real cross-team conversations

- Automating monthly data pulls with Apps Script and pattern-matching keywords with embeddings

- Investigating positive results the same way you'd investigate a drop

A practical look at what "proving the work" looks like when the click is no longer the unit of measurement.

Subscribe for new Page 2 Podcast episodes with the practitioners actually doing this work.

Comment: who owns direct traffic at your company — and have you seen the same uptick Derek describes?

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

Find Derek Hobson

✅ SEO Humorist → https://seohumorist.com

✅ Derek Hobson on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dereknhobson/

✅ Derek Hobson on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@seohumorist

✅ Derek Hobson on Reddit → https://www.reddit.com/user/SEO_Humorist/

✅ Derek Hobson on Instagram → https://instagram.com/seohumorist✅ Derek Hobson on Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/seohumorist.bsky.social✅ Derek Hobson on X → https://x.com/Seo_humorist✅ Derek Hobson on TikTok → https://tiktok.com/@seohumorist

https://page2pod.com - Sophie Brannon bans new hires from touching AI for three months. Here's how an SEO agency builds AI workflows without losing the thinking underneath them.

Sophie Brannon is co-founder and director of StudioHawk US, the Atlanta arm of the global SEO agency, which she launched from scratch and grew to $1.4M in its first nine months. Her position: AI is genuinely compressing agency delivery timelines — content briefs, IA mapping, and audits that took weeks now take days — but a junior who reaches for ChatGPT before they understand the work never develops the strategic judgment that becomes their actual job. So new StudioHawk hires do everything manually for their first three months, then earn access back.

She also lays out the commercial side nobody's solved yet: token budgets replacing headcount budgets, the possibility of agencies pricing retainers on estimated token usage instead of hours, and why AI visibility means very little until you can tie it to traffic and revenue — across roughly 100 brands StudioHawk surveyed, AI search accounted for about 0.07% of total revenue.

Jon Clark and Joe DeVita dig into the agency mechanics too: why StudioHawk runs direct-to-specialist with no account managers, why they refuse long-term contracts, how link costs get absorbed while digital PR runs on a points-based money-back guarantee, and what Sophie still won't hand to a model.

🤖 In This Episode

- Why new hires are banned from using AI for their first three months

- What do clients actually ask about AI search — and how to answer without jargon

- The AI search tracking stack: GA4 AI organic, Peak, SEMrush AI, Ahrefs Rank Tracker

- Which AI search metrics matter: visibility, citations, mentions, and the revenue line underneath them

- Digital PR's points system — a link is 1 point, an unlinked mention is 0.5, with a pro-rata money-back guarantee

- Will agencies charge clients based on token usage instead of hours?

- Automated content briefs and IA structure mapping built with n8n and Claude

- The three things Sophie won't automate: strategy, creative, and client comms

A rare look at the operating decisions behind an SEO agency scaling in the AI era, from someone 18 months into building one.

👉 Subscribe for new episodes with the practitioners actually doing this work: https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

💬 Would you ban your junior hires from using AI for their first three months — or is that training them for a world that no longer exists? Tell us in the comments.

Find Sophie Brannon

✅ Sophie Brannon on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-brannon-081bb294/

✅ Sophie Brannon on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/sophiebrannon_seo/

✅ StudioHawk US → https://studiohawk.com

✅ Sophie Brannon's Personal Website → http://sophiebrannon.com

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Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

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Follow Jon Clark

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https://page2pod.com - Content strategy that moves rankings: Angela Skane took her blog from page 3 to page 1 by optimizing what she already had — not publishing more.

Angela Skane is SEO & Content Strategy Manager at Newfold Digital, where she leads global content strategy for Network Solutions and a portfolio of brands serving small business owners. Fresh off her first SEO Week stage talk, she brings a framework most search teams never look at: the way TikTok Shop creators hook, hold, and convert an audience in under 60 seconds.

Her argument is that attention is earned moment by moment, in an article the same way it is in a video. Every page needs a job. Every section has to keep the reader moving. And a page that technically ranks can still fail if it doesn't speak to the person actually making the decision. Along the way: why traditional demographic personas are too thin, why environmental data about your audience changes how you frame every problem, and why her team allows zero AI-generated content on the blog while using AI heavily for research and synthesis.

🎧 In This Episode

- The four-phase creator arc — hook, name your audience, appeal to emotion, close the action

- Layering psychological triggers by journey stage instead of picking one and running it all year

- What does a "job" for a page actually look like, and how do you tell when a page isn't doing it?

- Page 3 to page 1 in 18 months by optimizing existing content over publishing volume

- Environmental-data personas: small business failure rates, cost pressures, and what else is on the buyer's mind

- Do 3,000-word guides still work? Her top-converting article says yes

- Where AI belongs in the workflow — research and data synthesis, never the paragraph

If your content is ranking but not converting, this one is about the gap between the two.

Subscribe for new practitioner interviews on SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) every week.

Angela says to name your audience explicitly in the copy. Have you tried it — and did engagement actually move? Tell us in the comments.

⏱️ Chapters

0:00 Intro: Attention Is Earned2:08 Meet Angela Skane3:36 What Is Newfold Digital?5:46 From Data Journalism to SEO7:18 Why TikTok Shop Caught Her Eye9:14 The Four-Phase Creator Framework11:40 Applying TikTok Signals to Articles15:07 Which Emotion Fits Which Stage?19:55 Every Page Needs a Job23:03 Are Traditional Personas Still Useful?28:16 How Do You Diagnose a Weak Page?31:09 Do 3,000-Word Guides Still Work?36:39 Should AI Write Your Blog Content?39:28 SEO Pods, Briefs, and Research40:59 How Do You Report Content Value?44:19 How the Teams Actually Collaborate47:11 Rapid-Fire Round

Connect with Angela

✅ Angela Skane on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaskane/

✅ Network Solutions → https://www.networksolutions.com

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources

- TikTok Shop → https://shop.tiktok.com - 2739 — the TikTok Shop coaching community Angela learned the framework → https://www.tiktok.com/discover/2739-membership?lang=en - Dustin Davis — creator who breaks down TikTok content through a psychology lens - Angela's article on the eight human desires in psychology → https://searchengineland.com/persuasive-content-human-psychology-478824 - "What to do after you buy a domain name" — her top-converting article (3,000+ words) → https://www.networksolutions.com/blog/bought-domain-now-what/