August 2026

Ben Wills ran one hotel-recommendation prompt over and over and changed a single word in it: the car he was flying to Los Angeles to pick up. Civic, BMW, Ferrari. The hotels moved with the car, across every ChatGPT model and every level of thinking. Twenty-six years between marketing and engineering, 13 of them writing crawlers in pure C, and he came back with the one thing SEO never had: a feedback loop you can actually test.

Jeremy brought Gert Mellak a query showing 10 searches a month in the keyword tools and 1,100 impressions in Search Console for the same month. Gert’s answer was bots, and he had already stopped reporting impressions to clients because of it. The rest of the episode takes apart search volume, SEO ROI math, and what to track instead.

Malte Landwehr of Peec AI joins Jeremy Rivera to cover PageRank’s survival, why bots are not reasonable surfers, consensus in LLM answers, query fan-outs, and detecting AI slop.

Greg Digneo of Content Guppy on tying SEO back to revenue fast, why most traffic is worthless, and spending the traffic you get on an audience you keep.

A practitioner framework for deciding what share of a site is dragging the rest down, and whether each audited URL should be pruned, redirected or rewritten.

Gareth Hoyle on the uncomfortable pattern in PR and content SEO: brilliant creative thinkers who never learned to think like business owners.