Michael “Buzz” Buzinski has been doing SEO since 2009. Asked on The Unscripted SEO Interview why anyone should trust him over a chatbot, he did the most Buzz thing possible — he refused the question until it was properly defined, then answered it better than it was asked.
“AI is a six year old toddler that knows all of the information in the world, but has no context in which it lives.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
From there comes the cleanest formulation of the expertise argument we’ve had on this show:
“Because of AI, knowledge technically is no longer power. It’s democratized. But experience is irreplaceable. And what people are paying for now is the wisdom, which is knowledge plus experience.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
If you’re a novice, you get novice answers
The failure mode Buzz keeps seeing isn’t hallucination. It’s the question.
“If you are not an expert in any particular field and you go to ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini and start asking questions, you’re asking questions that a novice would ask. So you’re going to get novice level answers because you don’t know what you don’t know. Therefore, you don’t know what to ask or how to ask it.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
Or, more bluntly: “the person or the entity holding your hand through AI is the blind leading the blind if you’re asking the wrong questions.” Jeremy’s version came from teaching a board game and logic class at his daughter’s homeschool co-op, where it took the kids three minutes to arrive at “ask a question” as the mechanism of learning — and then had no idea what they needed to know in the first place. Socrates, arriving early.
The path-of-least-resistance problem
Buzz’s mental model for why AI output converges is a watershed. A model guesses, gets affirmation, and grooves a channel:
“If you have some water going over a mountain and there is a path of least resistance, the next gallon of water that comes over the edge is probably going to take the same space because it is the path of least resistance — unless you tell it or dam the path of least resistance to then choose another path.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
You can watch this happen inside a single project: constrain a model to one folder of your own files, generate against it long enough, and it starts regurgitating itself. That’s a small-scale demo of what’s happening across the whole content web, because every LLM is drawing on substantially the same corpus unless you deliberately give it something else.
His practical workflow rule follows from the toddler metaphor: work in small chunks. Don’t ask for a book outline — ask for chapters, then subtopics of a chapter, then what you need to research to write each subtopic. “It will not write the book for you, but it will get you so much further down the writing process.” And the distinction he’s careful about: you write with it, not for you.
“SEO ain’t dead, it’s just got a different face”
Buzz has replaced Google as his browser’s default search — anything typed in the address bar goes straight to ChatGPT, because most of what he wants is an answer plus citations he can spot-check, not a stack of blogs to read. That, he argues, is precisely the point everyone declaring SEO dead is missing:
“We know that is acting just like a search engine because it’s using the internet like we would a search engine. It just happens to have its own bank that it’s going off.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
And when he asks why any of those systems chooses to cite one site over another, his answer is E-E-A-T — expertise, experience, authority, trust — the framework Google wrote to feed its own engine.
“SEO ain’t dead, it’s just got a different face.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
Jeremy walked through the perennial objection — Danny Sullivan saying E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor — and where that misreads what it actually is: a rubric handed to quality raters so their judgments can be fed back to engineers as training signal for the algorithm. Not a dial in the ranking system; the yardstick used to decide which way to turn the dials. Buzz’s response is to sidestep the argument entirely:
“If you’re not using it for the SEO purposes, use it for the marketability of the people you’re writing for.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
Because humans run on E-E-A-T anyway. We listen to people with experience in the field they’re talking about; experience produces authority; authority produces trust.
Domain authority, and what a backlink actually is
He’s less diplomatic about third-party authority scores: they’re a product of the toolmakers, not of Google. Jeremy’s counterweight was the patent literature — PageRank was never deprecated, TrustRank exists, and Bill Slawski spent a career surfacing what those documents imply — plus a live anomaly, a menswear client whose rankings rose after buying comment-spam links and changing nothing else.
Buzz’s read on why that worked is worth more than the anomaly itself:
“Your backlinks need to be coming from places where people actually click on things in the article or the blog. There needs to be engagement on that page. If it’s just a dead page somewhere, even if it has a high domain authority or page ranking, that’s going to start having less of an impact on your trust score.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
His definition of a backlink, meanwhile, deserves to be on a poster: “that’s all the backlink is, is that you’re saying that’s my friend and that’s my friend and that’s my friend. And whoever has the most friends has the most rank.” With the caveat that it’s potential rank — you still have to clear mobile-first indexing before any of it counts.
Technical SEO is not optional just because the machines are patient
The lazy new argument — AI doesn’t care how fast your page loads — gets short shrift:
“If it doesn’t load fast, people aren’t going to it. If people don’t go to it and engage with it, the engagement is something that creates its trustworthiness, its authority, because people are using it. If nobody’s used it before, that’s why it has no rank. That’s why I tell people traffic begets traffic.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
Both had scar tissue. Jeremy fixed a car dealership’s inventory page that was crushed by scripts and layout shift — nothing is more maddening on mobile than reaching to tap something and having it move — and sales went up because people could actually search the inventory. Buzz’s consulting example was a healthcare CRM whose most valuable pillar page wasn’t in the pillar list at all, whose H1 ran fifteen words at 72 points, and whose actual keywords sat underneath in 11-point text. His fix was to swap them: make the H1 say the product, demote the fifteen words to supporting copy or the meta description.
Write for humans, order it for bots
“A lot of people, they’ll go SEO first and I say, nah, you have to write your copy for humans. You optimize its order for bots.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
He’s equally impatient with the reflexive “write to a sixth-grade level” advice. If you’re selling bubblegum, write for the six-year-old doing the chewing. If you’re selling infrastructure to a data center, write at the level the buyer will appreciate — and let the copy disqualify the people who were never going to buy. Jeremy’s phrasing: talk at them, not down to them.
The example that made the point was a webinar Buzz sat through with 175 attendees where the vendor never once said what size of company the software was for. Rhetoric can communicate that even when a company won’t say it outright — and refusing to say it wastes everyone’s time, starting with the vendor’s.
Culture is the retention mechanism — and it starts in the content
The last third of the conversation goes somewhere most SEO interviews don’t. Buzz’s argument is that misalignment between marketing voice, sales voice, onboarding voice and the people actually delivering the work is a retention problem wearing a marketing costume.
“This is why your retention rate sucks, because you’re selling one thing and delivering another. Culture is what creates retention. If your marketing has the same culture as your product delivery, you’re going to have a much better time with the people you serve.” — Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
Which lands right back on targeting. No company in any industry has all of the business, so stop writing to the whole industry. Roughly 3% of even a well-defined addressable market is in a commercial or transactional state at any moment; the rest are informational, and the job of the content is to get them into an ecosystem that can nurture them until they aren’t. As Jeremy put it, people try to get the click and forget to get the conversion.
Connect with Buzz
Michael “Buzz” Buzinski hosts the Buzzworthy Marketing Podcast for B2B and professional-service businesses, runs Buzzworthy Marketing, and offers a free copy of his book on doubling revenue through your website at ruleof26.com. On social, he’s a LinkedIn guy — “come on, it’s B2B, dude.”
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword research tools at SEO Arcade.
