Barry Schwartz, SEO legend and automation evangelist, reveals how he juggles running a software firm and being the fastest news publisher in search.
In this kickoff to Season 5 of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark and Joe speak with Barry Schwartz — the legendary technologist behind RustyBrick and the prolific voice of Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. With nearly 45,000 posts under his belt and decades of SEO insights, Barry reveals how he's built an unstoppable publishing machine while running a thriving custom software business.
From automating billing at RustyBrick to maintaining an obsessive publishing schedule that starts at 5 AM, Barry shares how efficiency and passion drive everything he does. Learn how he's adapted to AI tools like Claude and Midjourney, his take on Google’s AI overviews, why automation doesn’t threaten jobs, and how he views trust, content longevity, and the future of search.
🤖 In This Episode
• Barry’s dual role as CEO of RustyBrick and SEO journalist
• How he manages 50,000 posts without SEO services
• Why automation empowers teams (not replaces them)
• His take on AI’s role in software and content creation
• Barry’s strict 5AM productivity routine & batching strategy
• Using Claude & Midjourney in real-world tech workflows
• Thoughts on AI overviews, content syndication, & traffic impact
• Why Barry won’t remove old SEO posts (archival value matters)
• The right way to become a speaker at SEO conferences
• The role of Feedly, social media scheduling, and A/B testing
• His honest view on LLM content usage and trust in search
This episode is a goldmine for marketers, SEOs, and technologists navigating the shifting landscape of AI, automation, and publishing in 2026.
👉 Subscribe to stay ahead of SEO & tech trends!
💬 Comment below: How are you using automation or AI to streamline your business or workflow?
Follow Barry Schwartz
• Search Engine Roundtable – https://www.seroundtable.com
• RustyBrick – https://www.rustybrick.com
• Youtube: @rustybrick
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/rustybrick
• Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rustybrick
Jon Clark (00:00)
What happens when one of the most prolific voices in SEO doesn't actually make a living from SEO? And how does he keep publishing faster than most newsrooms while running a software company? We're kicking off season five of the Page 2 Podcast with Barry Schwartz. He's the president of RustyBrick, a custom web software firm he started in high school and the founder of Search Engine Roundtable where he's closing in on 50,000 posts covering the inner workings of search. But here's the twist. His real job is building tools that automate other businesses.
This episode digs into Barry's dual identity, how he's optimized both a publishing machine and a web development firm without burning out. We talk about AI as a tool versus a threat, how Barry's daily routine is wired for efficiency, and why automation is less about replacing people and more about freeing them up. It's a fitting start to the season complete with some minor headphone chaos behind the scenes because podcasting like SEO and software doesn't always go as planned. Barry's challenge isn't just managing time,
it's managing two audiences, clients who expect AI to build everything and a search community that expects him to explain it all instantly. Let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:13)
Welcome to season five of the Page 2 Podcast episode 101. and I can't imagine a better guest to kick off season five than Barry Schwartz. Welcome to the show.
Barry Schwartz (01:24)
Thanks for having me. Wow, season five, that's that's consistency. Thanks for doing it. It's amazing.
Jon Clark (01:27)
Yes.
Yes, it's lot of work podcasting. I have to say didn't appreciate the amount of time that goes into it. And maybe some of the questions we can talk with you about is just how you manage your ecosystem. But so the last two years, Justin, in doing some of the research have been some pretty incredible milestones. You've reached 30 years at RustyBrick Software, which is an incredible milestone.
And I might get this number wrong, but I think you've posted at least posts on search Engine roundtable, which is also incredible. And then I saw you, wait more.
Barry Schwartz (01:58)
Little bit less, no. Yeah,
no, it's less. Searching around tables, searching the Land, and also back in the day searching to watch, it's almost at 50,000. I'm not there yet, probably in the next year or so.
Jon Clark (02:09)
Got it, got it. And then most recently, you want.
Joe (02:10)
And you were in
the sixth grade when you started RustyBrick?
Barry Schwartz (02:14)
When we were starting
Rusty, we get into it, but yeah, we were 14 years old.
Joe (02:17)
Okay.
Jon Clark (02:19)
incredible. So, you know, I think maybe just to just to jump into that. So I think most people know you, at least in the industry from Search Engine Roundtable, search Engine Land. But, you know, you've mentioned you make your sort of quote unquote living through Rusty brick software. I also found it very interesting. I was hoping there was going to be this big elaborate story of the name, but it's basically your brother's initials, right?
Barry Schwartz (02:40)
Yeah, in high school, he was just coming up with some type of name and it was his initials and putting a couple words to it. And then later on, removing the S, the software part, just calling it rusty brick. So there's no big, people think it has to do like with bricks and construction, web construction and so forth. So that sounds clever and smart, but really no, like bricks can't rust and stuff like that. I don't know, but it's just two words put together really.
Jon Clark (03:01)
Love it, love it So I think one thing that makes Joe and I's partnership is great is that we are really good at different things. And so I was really curious. I hadn't heard anyone ask you how you and your brother sort of divide your responsibilities across Rusty Bricks specifically. It seems like, again, what I know of you is mostly from the SEO side. So how do you...
integrate into the software development side.
Barry Schwartz (03:24)
Yeah, so I pretty much do most of the billing and business aspects of everything. So business development, dealing with the clients, new business, business, HR. I go on to like the stuff that nobody really wants to do, maybe HR stuff. Back when we had a lot of our employees in the office, I used to take out the trash for fun. So it was basically all the business related stuff. And he handles all the technology stuff. So making sure the team
is working towards the project goals and so forth, the tech stack and all this stuff. So he's much more technical ⁓
Jon Clark (03:55)
you
Barry Schwartz (03:56)
building out the actual projects. I also have come up with some SaaS ideas and lead some projects and so forth in terms of internal stuff. But I handle more of the business side of things. He handles more of the technology side of things.
Jon Clark (04:08)
Got it, got it. I also found it really interesting that you guys primarily have grown through referrals. I think that's again very similar to Joe and myself much smaller eight years in business. my
knowledge of you is in the SEO industry and yet you don't offer SEO services. So I was really curious, like does your work at Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land has that translated into business on the software side or is it almost like a completely separate track of business development?
Barry Schwartz (04:37)
It's really separate. There are sometimes, like rarely, maybe like once every few years that somebody knows of us through what I write about in the search Engine stuff and says, hey, I realize you do software development in my company or I know somebody who needs software development, but it's very, very rare, kind of makes it hard to like say, why should I keep writing about search? Because it's not really bringing in that much money directly. But.
And I don't know, it does, I enjoy it. So I do what I enjoy. So it's a hobby. So luckily I'm able to be able to do both things at the same time. the beauty of the software side is that we really do a lot of automation. That's what we build. We build automated stuff to make companies more efficient. And because of that, I'm able to, even for internal processes, I'm all about like, how can you make this more efficient and so forth. maybe back in the old days, it used to take me a whole day to do billing.
that I could press a button and it takes maybe like 20 minutes, maybe less, build more customers for more billing and so forth than I ever have been, anything from making things more operationally efficient. that's what I kind of have a really big passion for, making things operationally efficient through to sell software. And because of that, we're able to streamline some of my operations and I'm able to focus more also on the SEO side.
Jon Clark (05:29)
Wow. Thank you.
Amazing. I'm sure Joe has the.
Joe (05:49)
You're an optimizer at
heart.
You may not be the search optimizer, but you're optimizing. like in your heart.
Jon Clark (05:51)
I was gonna say it.
Barry Schwartz (05:55)
That's a good way putting it, yeah. It's all about optimizing, not search engines, but all about optimizing the workflow and so forth of what we do internally, or for our clients too. It's like, how can we make our clients more efficient? So yeah, for sure.
Jon Clark (06:06)
I'm sure Joe might have some questions on billing automation. That's sort of one of the things that he owns, maybe for a different podcast. So I wanted to dive into your work on Search Engine roundtable, Search Engine Land. You've mentioned that it takes between like four and eight, maybe five to 10 minutes to write a blog post. And I'm sure just with your industry knowledge, it's much faster for you to do that directly, but how do you
think about the delegation of all of those daily posts and the syndication across the networks. Is that something that you're doing solely yourself or does it sort of lean into some of that automation that you talked about where you hit publish and then it's sort of syndicated dynamically?
Barry Schwartz (06:46)
So nothing, like I'll publish something, like I say a core update comes out. I will have two completely separate stories. One written for two different audiences. They're similar obviously audiences, but different. Search Engine Land is much more like a broader, like digital marketing, search marketing website. Whereas Search Engine Roundtable is much more focused just on Google search and Google ads and a much more. ⁓
Jon Clark (06:55)
Mm-hmm.
Barry Schwartz (07:07)
maybe like technically focus more in the weeds type of audience than searchers Land. Searchers Land is much more like higher level people. So I'm able to tailor the different content for different types of audiences that way I think. That makes sense. Does that answer your question?
Jon Clark (07:13)
Right. Got it.
Yeah, I think so. But maybe to peel it back a little bit more. So are you writing individual social content to go along with those? Or is that piece automated? just trying to understand. Because again, I get your RSS feeds and your emails and things like that. And there's just so much. I'm just fascinated that you're able to put that or have that amount of output while sort of having this as a hobby, right? I mean, it's very impressive.
Barry Schwartz (07:43)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so the social media stuff I do manually. I know Search Engine Land has their own people that also share stuff like through this official account. So I'm not sharing stuff on the official Searching Your Land Twitter or Facebook account, but I'm sharing the stuff on the Searching Your Roundtable and my personal account. So if I write something on Searching Land or Searching Your Roundtable, I'll share that on my personal, like RustyBrick handle's across all social. I'm not on TikTok. I apologize on Instagram. Nobody wants to see me doing a dance about a core update.
Jon Clark (07:54)
Cut.
This
Barry Schwartz (08:08)
⁓ And then, and most of those things, when I write the post, yeah. And basically when I write the story, I'll pretty much schedule the story. It goes out that day with the different social posts that go along with it. So it's really quick. mean, the social stuff maybe takes me another 60 seconds or so.
Jon Clark (08:09)
That might be your highest viewed post though.
Got it, got it. You've mentioned a lot about routine. Do you time block your day? Because I think the challenge with news is that it's 24-7. So how do you think about breaking out your day? Is there a section in the morning for business development and maybe marketing, and then news is just coming in all the time? How do you think about that routine from a process perspective?
Barry Schwartz (08:48)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, definitely segment out parts of the day for different things.
I definitely, you know, very into scheduling what I do. So obviously, making sure I have time slots for everything. Things come up throughout the day, of course, that have come up. But the first thing, obviously in the morning is making sure to go through the emails to make sure clients are happy and everything like that. I'm constantly checking like 24, like always like 24 six, know, checking my email. And then I generally focus a lot after that and making sure everything's good. I do a quick little bill of billing right away. RustyBrick
like really building stuff. So anything I check the bank accounts to make sure everything looks good every single morning and stuff like that, bringing any feeds and so forth. And then I go ahead and probably spend most of the morning, next hour or so over the morning outside of after I get ready and so forth for the morning. I pretty much do SEO related stuff, usually until about 8 30 ish or so, usually till eight. Then I record a quick 15 minute.
thing from 8.45 to 9. So everything's pretty scheduled. So I probably spend about like, if I had to guess, probably about two hours or so each day on the search stuff, if that makes sense. And the rest, more RustyBrick.
Joe (09:53)
You start your day at eight.
Barry Schwartz (09:55)
No, I start my day around 5am.
Joe (09:56)
Incredible.
Barry Schwartz (09:57)
Yeah.
Joe (09:58)
Do you ever find you, because you try, you're so regimented, which is awesome for probably your own like personal, your physical health, your mental health, but do ever find that you missed something that's happening in real time because you've decided like, I'm not, I have to focus on this, I can't.
Barry Schwartz (10:14)
no, I could quickly, if something like a core update is being announced in the middle of the day, generally I could cover it. It's not like I'm just doing this and I can't stop. I could stop and do whatever.
Joe (10:25)
I have to say last year, felt like the level of information that was coming, new information that was coming at us felt like overwhelming at some times. And we work with some publishing clients.
We help them drive like online subscriptions to their news sites. And we've been kind of pushing them to be first in everything. Like you really want to be the first people to break a story. If you can get an opinion out first, other people will latch onto you. There's some benefit to being first. And the hard part about that is like everybody has to be on and ready in real time all the time, which is ⁓ not great for...
Not great for a lot of things other than search.
Barry Schwartz (11:07)
Right. Like you're saying, being on all the time is not a good thing. I'm sorry.
Joe (11:11)
Yeah,
for personal reasons, like it's not good for you personally just to be able to ready to react in real time to anything that's happening in the news. There's just so much of it.
Barry Schwartz (11:21)
I mean, I've been doing it forever, so I kind of like the thrill. For some people, it's probably not mentally healthy, but during the past two weeks of New Year's and Christmas, things were so slow, I'm going out of my mind. And that's also on the business side, our clients are off and so forth. I love the breaking story. I love rushing out those stories like that.
So I don't know, I'm not sure if it's like not good for me, to be honest, but for some people I could definitely see it now. I know that we brought in some writers to search the Land that, you know, it's not good for them. It's just that there's not their personality. Others like live off the thrill of covering these types of stuff.
Jon Clark (11:55)
let's talk a little bit about vibe coding as it relates to RustyBrick, right? So I think when ChatGPT was announced and just AI, the explosion of AI, Joe and I looked at it ourselves and we're kind of like, is the agency model sort of done for? And I think web development definitely falls in that category of
I don't know where there maybe is some potential challenges. Are you guys seeing any impact of AI or are you using AI tools in your development and your software creation or how are you sort of perceiving the market from that perspective?
Barry Schwartz (12:27)
Yeah.
Yeah, mean, so our developers are definitely using different AI tools like Claude and so forth to help. It doesn't replace them at all. It's just like a tool really for now. When you're building sophisticated systems to automate businesses and so forth, yeah, you can tell, go ahead and make me a game that, like the Tetris game, and maybe it'll come out with a cool Tetris game, but it can't really do all the stuff that you need to do that a business really requires. At this point, maybe in the future it will.
Some of our clients have reached out to us and said, can't you just like, you why, why is it costing so much? Can you just use AI to do it? I'm like, no, we can't not yet. We are using AI to make it faster so it costs you less, but it can't do everything. So yeah, I mean, honestly, it was a little bit nervous about it, but it doesn't seem to have impacted our business too much outside of it being a tool that we can leverage for our clients and make things a little bit more efficient and so forth. Maybe that's going to, you know, it keeps getting better. So
Jon Clark (12:58)
you
Barry Schwartz (13:19)
And early on it was really bad and we couldn't use it. But yeah, think it's, I think right now it's been a pretty productive tool for our employees to use.
Joe (13:26)
You're the guy who optimizes. You're the guy who really has a passion for tinkering with things to make them more efficient and better. Is there some tool or process that last year you guys came to, the whole company is using to help your company become more efficient or better optimized?
Barry Schwartz (13:44)
⁓ So a lot of employees are using cloud a lot, the AI tool for that, for coding help. It's hard to say. mean, we've been optimizing every, it's hard to say specific little details about that because we've been optimizing it forever and constantly making tweaks to stuff. So it's not like one little thing that makes it more efficient or less efficient. But the big thing is using AI for like specifically a lot of Claude stuff for coding from our developers. I use it.
on the SEO side more for like just generating images. Like I couldn't really find good stuff to like talk about Google bot. Like you don't have any good stock imagery for robots and so forth. So, you know, to make a fluffy, cute Google bot running across the room, indexing pages and paper all over the place, that's, cute and fun. But I don't use it for my content development. But we do use again, like I said, in the RustyBrick side, we do use it to help like debug some stuff, do some testing.
maybe streamlines some data migration stuff, but then you have to validate everything. sometimes it takes more time using it, but once you get it set up right, it could help a lot. But we use it, but we don't trust it fully because it could really mess things up if you're not very careful.
Joe (14:43)
Yeah, we treat it like an intern.
Jon Clark (14:44)
Yeah,
definitely.
Barry Schwartz (14:45)
Right now,
Jon Clark (14:46)
What's your go-to image creation tool?
Barry Schwartz (14:49)
I use a lot of Midjourney. Yeah, not using, ⁓ yeah, I find Midjourney has the most controls and it comes out looking pretty good. Maybe that will change over time, Midjourney is really known for their AI images.
Jon Clark (14:51)
Okay, yeah.
Joe (14:54)
Nano banana.
Jon Clark (15:02)
Yeah, yeah, I Well, maybe we can transition into some SEO and maybe AI related questions. So as a content publisher, I'm sure you are maybe in that bucket of publishers that are seeing impact from AI overviews and
you know, I guess potentially AI mode. You don't have to get into specific numbers, of course, but how are you, I guess, are you trying to find alternative ways to sort of keep traffic high despite maybe some of that click loss that you're seeing from overviews and things like that?
Barry Schwartz (15:36)
than what I've always done. I obviously, I'm not pretty diversified in terms of traffic sources. Google is obviously the line of every single news publisher for the most part. And that has been dwindling for a lot of websites because of AI overviews and other things. But outside of that, yeah, of course I'm doing YouTube videos, stuff like this. I'm doing ⁓ social media posts. I'm doing like what everybody else does in terms of trying to drive traffic to their websites outside of just Google search.
So you always have to diversify. I've been talking about that since like the early Florida days in 2003 with the Google Florida update. yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything specifically unique of what I'm doing. I know people are constantly testing different things, but I'm not producing certain types of content differently than I would previously outside of, you know, making sure to just to share that more widely and to distribute that more and more channels and so forth. But again, that's something I've been doing before AI overviews and I'll continue to do it after AI overviews.
Jon Clark (16:28)
I have a question about the content in general, but something just came to me, which is you know, with the diversification of content,
And just the way that social feeds work, right? They're sort of like a point in time and then they get pushed down the feed and I don't know, maybe depending on the algorithm, if you come back, maybe an old post might get served to you. But are you, are you publishing, let's use Twitter as an example, are you publishing on Twitter like multiple times for the same post to try to, you know, catch people at different points in time? Or is it sort of post goes out syndicated across social and then you sort of move on to the next one? Are you thinking about a strategy with like multiple posts?
images, maybe even headlines, things like that.
Barry Schwartz (17:07)
So good question. on LinkedIn, Facebook, and most of the social networks I post once and that's it. On X post, or Twitter post three times based on time zones. I asked, previously some people got annoyed that I posted so often, so I did a poll. Like, do you want me to post once or do want me to post multiple times in a day? And by far, every single time I do that, I've done it three times over the course of whatever. Most people say post multiple times, so I don't want to miss it.
So that was interesting. But the people who get annoyed by it might unfollow me or whatever. But again, most people want it more often. That being said, when I repost stuff, generally I use a different headline. And sometimes I use a different image. Not all the time, but sometimes I use a different image. On YouTube I also am doing a lot of testing around, the A-B testing on the thumbnail as well as the
title of the the supposed to do A B testing three different images, three different titles. So I do a lot of that. Generally, I know what's going to win, but not always. But it's always fun to test to see what gets the most click throughs. I don't look at the YouTube results often. I don't really look at the X results. Usually the first time I post on X is the most amount impressions, the most amount of clicks. Usually the second and third usually don't get as many clicks and impressions.
Jon Clark (18:13)
I know that Mr. B shared, I mean obviously his follower count's massive, but he shared something where if he smiled showing teeth, it was like a higher click through rate than if he smiled with his mouth closed. Are there any?
Barry Schwartz (18:26)
Yeah, there's another study done that said that,
yeah, there was another study done that said don't do that. It's interesting. So I don't know. You gotta test what works with your audience. I think that's the big, thing and see what your audience likes. If you have like, you know, a bad smile, like maybe myself, you probably don't want to smile too much. I don't know. ⁓ So it depends on your face, I guess. I don't know. But you definitely test it out. Generally what you see is like the more eyes wide open and brighter teeth and so forth, you do all those things.
Jon Clark (18:37)
Yeah.
You
Barry Schwartz (18:52)
⁓ And it's you know, it's there it works well some types of youtubers say that Having like big fonts make a huge difference as well. So it really depends on you have to just test it That's why YouTube gives us all these testing tools, which is great
Jon Clark (19:04)
We've definitely gotten more interested in YouTube just through the podcast and trying to generate some of that organic growth. Are you using any tools to, I don't know, inform tag creation or anything like that? How are you thinking about the optimizations and purely just riffing and just what you know about the algorithm to come up with these ideas?
Barry Schwartz (19:28)
Right, so I'm really not using AI tools for that. Early on when I was trying to work on my YouTube titles and YouTube descriptions, I used a consultant's AI tool for that. And then I really toned it down afterwards. I'm like, this is just too much. Like you won't believe what you're gonna hear. Like that type of stuff, it's not my style. know, yeah, the Beatty stuff, couldn't get my heads there. I couldn't publish stuff like that, which obviously...
Jon Clark (19:46)
click-baity headlines kind of thing.
Barry Schwartz (19:53)
didn't lead to as many clicks, I guess. But again, I'm not going to go ahead and make somebody click on a video and be like, this is not what I expected or whatever. yeah, so I really don't use AI tools to rework headlines or titles or anything like that anymore. I only did it a little bit to try and see what I recommended for some YouTube videos, maybe like four or five different YouTube videos. But generally, no, I would almost never use for any content, any AI tools.
Jon Clark (20:16)
Got it I wanted to talk about just the archive of Search Engine Roundtable and
specifically from the nuance of a lot of the content has a specific sort of point in time, right? So it's sort of like news focused. And so maybe there's an argument to be made that over time that content becomes less important, maybe generates less traffic. So how are you thinking about managing the archive?
from maybe a quality standpoint or sort of a search Engine quality standpoint point of view? Like is that content still generating traffic? Are you putting any strategies around how you manage for that content that's maybe 15 years old?
Barry Schwartz (20:53)
Yeah.
Yeah, so obviously there's a lot of legacy content I've been writing about search on the search Roundtable for 22 years now. So a lot of old stories there. And it's one of the topics that people have been talking about since the Panda update is like removing old content that doesn't get traffic anymore and so forth. And I refuse to do that. There's an archive of history there. Sometimes I'll link back to some stories. A lot of those older stories probably aren't indexed by Google anymore, but that's Google's choice. I'm not removing.
or improving or changing those articles that are part of like the SEO history of the internet. I'm gonna leave it, they're dated. And I spoke to Google about this, both on like John Mueller's podcast and so forth back in the day when he had those weekly, what they called back then, I don't know, they call them, whatever, had those weekly things where you had SEOs come on board and like ask questions. He used to do those in the days, he doesn't do that anymore.
Jon Clark (21:44)
Like office hours.
Barry Schwartz (21:45)
And he
agreed, like if it's dated and it's archived, then it's a little reason why you shouldn't, why you should remove that stuff. But I know a lot of SEOs, if you have like a page that you're trying to optimize for, like, you know, a brand page or a, you know, product page or whatever, or like a service page or whatever it might be. Yeah, sure. You want to keep that page updated and the best type of page as possible. But when you're writing news stories, that's archive, that's dated, and there's information there for a purpose and there's a date on there for a purpose. So I'm not changing any of those old articles.
Jon Clark (22:11)
Yeah, we had Marshall Simmons on, I don't know, toward the middle of last season, and he talked about his work with the New York Times and sort of exposing that archive and how it was actually a massive lift in traffic, right? They go back to like, Civil War years. But maybe, so I think that that approach is the right one, right? It's the historical archive of SEO, of Google, of all these search engines, and I think has a ton of value.
Maybe a different question. So there's been a lot of debate around like the content that LLMs get trained on. You know, certainly your corpus of content is, I don't know, a treasure trove for these models to train on around SEO search in general. What's your point of view the...
blocking or not blocking of LLM crawlers and sort of their usage of the content. Love to get your perspective there.
Barry Schwartz (22:58)
Yes, I actually tweeted about this like a while back when everybody was like, oh, they're just Google stealing and these LLH ChatGPT stealing my content and not sending me traffic. Yeah, that's true. But for me, I don't get I don't really make that much money on my writing. I'm there to really try to like share the most I don't know, the best type of answer. Now, I'm not saying I always have the right answer and so forth, but I like to share the sources.
what I think is the answer. I write what other people think are the answers to the question. So I like to share stuff. And as long as the LLMs are citing me over maybe some really low quality stuff, I'm fine with that, even if I don't get traffic. So I'm like, just eat it up, take it, do whatever you want with it. Assuming the community benefits from it, I'm happy. But that's not always going to be the case. So I'm not blocking anybody. I get why news publishers are nervous about this. And they're like, we can't just depend on you to take our content and not give us traffic. I get that 100%.
And I'm glad I'm not in position where I have to depend on that traffic for revenue. But I'm in a different position than most people in this space of writing. So I'm able to say, you know what? It doesn't really impact me. But I do understand the struggle about letting these bots crawl your website so you can be discovered. And at the same time, maybe it's not sending enough traffic where it's not worth it. So you might want to block it. But Google doesn't really give you a good way to do that with AI overviews or AI mode.
You know, so it's just a tough position for a lot of publishers. But for me, I don't really, it's not a revenue thing.
Jon Clark (24:16)
I was also curious around the UGC aspect of your site. You know, there's been algorithm updates that specifically targeted, you know, sites with a lot of low quality comments and comment spam. Do you have, you know, guardrails to that you sort of put around that to prevent, you know, a bunch of, I don't know, nefarious links getting dropped into comments and things like that? How have you changed your
maybe your community guidelines around who can comment, what can be commented, etcetera.
Barry Schwartz (24:46)
Yeah, so the search Engine round table gets a lot of comments. We always have, especially around the whole time with the health of content update and so forth. It was a very, very heated time for the search community. People were losing their jobs and businesses and so forth, and traffic was dropping like crazy. And there's a lot of heated stuff out there where certain types of people were hit were taking it out personally on different individuals at Google and so forth. And I get why they're upset.
but I kind of made a rule like, can't call out individual Googlers. don't want them to, know, it's not that they're that individual doing anything specific. You could be angry at Google as a company, but don't take it out on individuals. Maybe the CEO is okay because that's like the CEO, but outside of that, you really cannot go after like a specific individual. So while I use Disqus, which is like a commenting platform on Search Roundtable, while that was pretty good at getting all the spam.
There are things that slip through, I manually check that stuff later. I do also try to manually remove any targeted attacks against any individuals. I said, if you want to target anybody individually, go after me. I'm fine with it. But don't go after individual people just because I understand why you want to, but it's just not right. So that's the biggest challenge. It's not really the spam. It's more about the attacks.
Jon Clark (25:58)
Yeah, That is one thing that's probably easy to say about this industry is there are a lot of opinions, some more aggressive than others. So I guess maybe a couple of these questions have been sort of teasing out the concept of E-A-T. You mentioned that, you know, TRUST is probably the most important aspect of that acronym. And I'm really curious your thoughts on
As we sort of move into an LLM world, how do you think about trust in the sense of a ChatGPT response, right? Knowing that some news organizations are blocking content, there's been a lot of, I guess, news around how easy it is to manipulate these platforms in some cases.
How do you think they're going to manage trust in the future? Are they going to fall back to backlinks like the legacy Google algorithm, maybe brand mentions? Have you given any thought to that?
Barry Schwartz (26:47)
So how is Google going to manage E-A-T in the future? I mean, they still talk a lot about E-A-T. They still talk a lot about the quality rate or guidelines and so forth. And they have teams that are Google focusing on making sure that they actually have the most trustworthy and authoritative stuff, especially for the YM topics, like your money, your life topics. So that's going to continue. Google always says they ground and they ground their
Jon Clark (27:06)
Thank
Barry Schwartz (27:08)
AI overviews and LLMs across Google search. So they still want to provide and give the most authoritative responses even in their AI answers. So don't think that's going to necessarily change, although they have to play with those dials constantly. So now we see a lot of Google Discover showing some people are calling a of spam and so forth, or X-posts and so forth. That's not a spammy, but some things are spammy and some things aren't. We see spam always right. It's like a cat and mouse game for Google in terms of showing new content, fresh content from new sources versus showing
you know, authoritative sources and so forth. And some of the dials are dependent on the industry you're in. So more with medical and finance, Google is much more concerned about what they show in terms of what's authoritative and trustworthy versus maybe stuff that's less important, less critical, maybe like sports and so forth. So I think Google's constantly playing with those dials, constantly trying to combat, you know, like spammers and their tactics they're using to trick Google. And I don't think that's ever going to change. So hopefully that...
Answers your question?
Jon Clark (28:04)
Yeah, yeah, think I'll be curious to see how the LLM models sort of try to layer in some layer of trust in their responses in the future. I think that's sort of maybe an open question in terms of how they'll get better at that.
Joe (28:17)
There was that behavior that came to be known last year where people would prompt something in a answer Engine and then use Google to verify that it was correct. I guess that gives us this idea that people don't yet trust the AI to give them the truth, they do have that years of trust built into Google.
Barry Schwartz (28:41)
Right. I mean, think people do trust it and that's an issue. Most average person just like ask ChatGPT something and just trust what it says, which is big issue. Google, when they first started rolling out like Bard and their Gemini stuff, they have like a Google it button, like at the end, so you can validate. But now Google's doing that automatically. Of course it gets things wrong still. And a lot of these tools do get things wrong. But yeah, I do agree that it's going to be harder for
sites like OpenAI and these startups to ground their results based off of search data than it would for like Microsoft Bing or Google, because they have lot of that years of history in terms of trying to figure out what's trusted, what's consensus across the web and so forth. And it's a little bit harder for other new players to actually do that.
Jon Clark (29:24)
You definitely get asked a lot about predictions and maybe trends, especially coming into the new year. There's a great article by Marta and I'm gonna butcher her last name so I'm not gonna try, but I'll link to it in the show notes. You mentioned a little bit about continued declining in click volume in 2026.
which I think is holding true with the latest algorithm update. We're already seeing some more news publishers showing some big losses. I think Glenn Gabe has highlighted some of that. But Corre was also quoted in that article. He had a really interesting take, which is sort of this idea of the end of patternless patterns.
Meaning, sort of going away from the templatized approach of websites, right? You have an e-commerce site, have a homepage, basically product page, maybe categories. And the idea is that...
you know, to combat the automation that AI represents, you sort of have to put a little bit more effort to personalize or maybe make these pages different. Do have any thoughts on that? I mean, conceptually, it kind of makes sense. Like you want to show there's a human element there, but, you know, knowing your background around software and development.
sort of the opposite of how you're efficient in developing and traditional website maintenance. So I thought that was just a really unique take that I hadn't heard before. Do have any thoughts on that or how it might impact what you guys are doing on the RustyBrick side?
Barry Schwartz (30:44)
So like two parts of that question from what I heard. What is, how do you write content that differentiates content from being AI generated? Is that the first part of the question?
Jon Clark (30:54)
Well, I think his point was literally the page design. So maybe even less about the content, like, you know, maybe you have rather than a single, I'm just going to use e-commerce as the example, rather than having a single product page template, maybe you have like five or 10 and maybe they're different by category. And again, the idea is that you're sort of getting away from this automation and showing that there's sort of a real human element. And I think because the page templates are
different, it sort of forces you to also create more unique content, right? You can't maybe spin up 100 of the same type of product description. Maybe you need like different types of content to fill those page templates. Which again, is a concept I had not heard before and that's why I thought it was so interesting.
Barry Schwartz (31:40)
Yeah, that makes sense. At the same time, when you do that, those page templates that offer a differentiation between what a typical e-commerce page might have in our product, they're still going to have the same product database. So they're basically going to be using data and maybe inputs from humans that they have. It's like, need content on this topic across all these products in this category. Maybe it's going to go ahead and produce again, it's all database driven for the most part, but the way they display that information might be
different and maybe helpful or maybe less helpful or more helpful for the person who's consuming that product or buying that product. So yeah, it does make sense to create landing pages that differentiate your content from the hundred other e-commerce sites that are selling exactly the same thing you are. But I don't think it's more about like trying to say, you know, it's trying to make a full Google that is not AI or it's not software.
Google keeps saying AI is fine, keep using it as long as it's going to make things better for the user. And you see that with like Reddit's translated AI posts and so forth. Google just keeps consuming that. I think as long as like that content that's being produced, even if it looks AI-ish or not, is still helpful for the user, I think it's fine. I think there's a misconception out there that AI is actually something that's horrible for the internet. It could be, and it's easy to create
a lot of really fast content using AI and automate that and just produce junk. But if you're thinking that far and that deep into terms of creating these types of profile pages, different types of pro pages and structures for them, and you're thinking about that, how can I make the best possible page for the user? And you think about how can I also leverage AI to help with that, that's I think a win-win. But if you're just thinking about how can I create pages really quickly to rank well in search engines using AI, then that's why you lose-lose situation.
Jon Clark (33:23)
Yeah, yeah. I think we've seen a few case studies where the traffic has exploded and then just literally got chopped off through that sort of programmatic automation. You mentioned Reddit, but I haven't heard you mention Reddit in sort of your social syndication. Do you spend a lot of time there? Have you tried to figure out that? I don't know, Reddit's a very nuanced channel, have you played around there at all?
Barry Schwartz (33:44)
So I don't spend that much time on Reddit. I know a lot of my articles end up on Reddit, which is cool. I do follow sources on Reddit to get information for content on search Roundtable and viceversa. And I've done some AMAs on Reddit. ⁓ I do randomly comment there, but it's not something that I'm on all day, like on Twitter or something like that.
Jon Clark (34:04)
Is there a thread that you spend more time in? The SEO thread, big SEO?
Barry Schwartz (34:10)
No, no, mean, there are obviously the SEO forums specifically, but I don't spend too much time on specific, you know, subreddits or anything like that. I know some people are really big into their Reddit communities and so forth. don't, I'm not in there that yet at that point. Yeah, not yet at least. mean, there are pretty good forums out there, but we've seen some SEO forums on Reddit communities actually get totally destroyed and taken over. So this is a bit of long history when it comes to Reddit and SEO, but there are some really good communities out there.
Jon Clark (34:34)
Yeah.
Barry Schwartz (34:37)
some that John Mueller at Google actually partaken. So I do try to follow those and see what people are writing about.
Joe (34:42)
Do still think X is the platform with the largest, most active SEO community? Maybe I didn't mean to put the answer in your mouth, but do you think where is the most active and intelligent SEO?
Barry Schwartz (34:54)
It's a shame because it used to be for sure the most active and it was all consolidated. And then when Elon took it over and people were getting disgruntled and so forth, it's definitely not as active as it used to be, specifically in the SEO world. And that's a shame. So now I'm literally across so many social networks trying to like find everything, including old fashioned forums to like you said, Reddit to Blue Sky and you you name it. But X is probably the most popular still in that realm of stuff.
It's just not as popular and as useful as it used to be, to be honest.
Jon Clark (35:24)
Feels like a lot of that is migrated over to LinkedIn. Maybe the longer form options make it more.
Barry Schwartz (35:28)
Yeah.
Yeah, but then you have the LinkedIn bros and so forth and it's like, much money did I make this past week? So it's also, like, there's pros and cons. So LinkedIn, there's definitely great stuff on there for sure. So it's just weeding all the stuff out as a pain in the neck now. It used to be much easier.
Jon Clark (35:34)
Yeah.
Yeah. I want to get your take on query fan out. I think it's a rise in interest over the past few months, especially to be understanding a little bit more about how LLM sort of, or I guess even Google from that matter, creates synthetic queries to sort of cobble together a longer form response in AI mode, etcetera.
What are you, I guess, what's the most interesting thing that you've been reporting against around query fan out or maybe some of the more unique things, ways to manipulate it or target it through keyword research or anything like that? I'm curious what your take is on that.
Barry Schwartz (36:24)
Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions around query fan out when it first launched. Like what search console could show versus what, and Google search console is not showing you query fan out data. Like just gonna see a long query in there and that might be just a long query. It's not necessarily Google showing you query fan outs. So it's hard to know. I mean, it's not like people also ask when you see it right in front of you. It's hard to know.
how Google's actually fanning out that query, because they're not showing you this is the types of stuff that I'm doing to break out this query. At least I don't think they are. So are there tricks to do that? Yeah, read the actual response, look at the sources, see what those sources rank for, and then you could probably someone back where it is engineer all that stuff. But is it worth it? I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure if it's worth all that effort. How you better name from for keyword research? People probably does most of that.
Reading the actual AI answer with the sources probably gives you enough content ideas anyway for your keyword research that you might not have to actually go ahead and do a query fan out backwards manipulation to figure out what those queries were because you're just reading the content anyway. And you probably just say, Oh! this is great content. I can know I now I have some more content or ideas and content that I can write based on reading the response. So I don't know. I'm not a big keyword guy. never really wrote content based on these are the keywords that I should be writing content on. I really write based on what I think the community is interested in.
and not by looking at like keyword databases or Google trends or anything like that.
Jon Clark (37:42)
Got it, got it. I know we're getting close to our rapid fire section, but I did want to ask a question. So we had Rand Fishkin on for our 100th episode, and we had a quick conversation around how sometimes it's challenging to get new voices into the industry, right? You see a lot of the same speakers at conferences, all the same folks on podcasts.
And you've had a lot of experience at conferences, running conferences, taking part in conferences. Do have any tips for someone who is maybe looking to get their first presentation spot? How would they go about submitting an idea, maybe who to reach out to? Is there a good entry level conference for them to target first, to get their feet wet? Any tips there?
Barry Schwartz (38:26)
Yeah, I mean, so for me, when I'm trying to find a new speaker, if I can find content that that person wrote, and then maybe a video of them speaking in general, like it would be great to see that if you want to be a speaker at an event, it would be great for you to one, have a bunch of articles or a few articles on the topic you want to speak about so you can see and read to see if it's a topic that you really know about and two, also to have some YouTube videos of you just speaking in general doesn't have to be about anything so we can see how good of a speaker you are.
and so forth, because that really matters. In terms of conferences, we're always looking for new speakers at XMX. We also have a post on Search Engine Land when the speaker enrollments are out there. So you can actually go ahead and submit your applications. I think Brighton has segments for getting new speakers on board. I know Google Search Central events, they try to get a bunch of speakers that maybe haven't spoken before also at their events.
So I think that most of the conferences, a lot of the conferences do make an effort to do that. You don't always see it because sometimes just not the people don't want to speak and especially newer people don't want to speak. So I do my best to like always source my source, my citations by crediting where I get my content from, which then builds up, hopefully builds up the community to share more and more. It's a shame that a lot of people in the industry don't really credit their sources. But I think by us,
who are doing these podcasts and so forth and videos and writing content, if we could bring up the community and source where we're getting our information from and credit them and link to them and call them out on LinkedIn or on whatever they might be, that will encourage more newcomers to actually share more. And then hopefully end up speaking at events or joining podcasts like this or writing a piece of content that might help somebody else. yeah, I think it's more, there's two fold. One is how could us who have been in the industry for a longer period of time help and encourage
newcomers to actually go ahead and speak and contribute to the community. I think that's by, when they do publish something, to add them to your newsletter or, you know, call them, know, link them, to them in a post or whatever it might be. And then credit them as much as you can. And two is for the person who's looking to speak, you have to write. You have to write about the topic so people know what you're talking about. You have to share some videos on YouTube or whatever of you speaking so people know that you can actually speak at a conference.
All that stuff matters and all that stuff is looked at when selecting a speaker.
Jon Clark (40:40)
All perfect tips. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you're going to be talking about something, you want to be able to show that you have some experience doing it or implementing it for sure. All right. I we only have a couple of minutes left. Let's jump to a couple of rapid fires before we wrap things up. You've mentioned a bunch of times that one of your favorite things to report on are algorithm updates. Is there any, you know, going back in history, is there any update that you
you got wrong in your first report or sort of a most memorable fail if you will.
Barry Schwartz (41:09)
that I got wrong.
That's a question.
I mean, there are points that I get wrong here and then I have to fix. So I will, it's not that often. Maybe, I mean, I write a lot. So maybe once every couple of months. And then I'll update the story right away and then send out clarifications. Nothing's significantly wrong. I mean, most recently I quoted John Mueller as saying something when John Mueller was actually quoting somebody. So I updated that story. I don't know if I got something super wrong.
Jon Clark (41:18)
Right.
Who notifies you when that happens? Is it something
where like John Mueller is like, hey, I didn't say that? Or is it like Google spokesman? Or like, how does that come to fruition?
Barry Schwartz (41:41)
Yes, I guess it's interesting. it could be like I wrote a story that Google said this and a Googler said this, quote them at a conference saying that and either one or two things happens. Well, three things. is it's correct. Two is the person who said it didn't really know what they were talking about. And Google has to say like, well, that person misunderstood stuff and they shouldn't have said that. And so you have to be like, well, Google got back to me and they really didn't mean that. And that's not.
That's not true. And those stories happen a lot, actually. Not a lot, enough, enough. I think something happened at the Blue Array Conference where a Googler said something about, I forgot what it was, AI overuse in ads, and it wasn't actually true. So then it had to be like, all right, Google said this, but it wasn't true. And then there was another part of that where he was quoted as saying something, but he didn't really say it. So I wasn't at the event, but somebody quoted him as saying that. It's like, well, he didn't really say that. I'm like, OK, so I'll have update the story.
A lot of that stuff happens when you hear a Googler speak at an event. That could be dangerous because you might not hear the whole thing and so forth. A context ticket is taken out of portions. So you always try to include the context that you get it from. I got it from a conference. Here is the people who are tweeting about what he said. So you include as much information as you possibly can. And then sometimes Google gets back to you and be like, well, no, this is just wrong. And then you update the story and you just tell people. I don't think I ever caused this.
I did close damage once. I wrote a story about how, this is probably like 15 years ago, how a girlfriend was getting back at her boyfriend by spamming Google images with a of memes about the boyfriend. And the boyfriend was devastated and I'm like, and it was like, it was in Reddit and so forth. I sort of thought, oh, this is really cool. This is these two teenagers going at it over on Google. guess the SEO community is gonna love this. like people are using it, how teenagers are going, like at some date, I don't know, some like.
girlfriend boyfriend fright and taking it out on Google image search. I'm like, this is great. I'm to cover this. And it's because I'm in the public already. It's on Reddit. People see it. Then I covered it. And I'm like, only our search community will see it because nobody else is really going to care about it. And then it got picked up by everyone, like TMZ everywhere, all over the place. And I'm like, I'm surprised. It's like some gossip stuff. like, this is just, then the parents called me and it's just so devastated that the son's upset. I'm like, I really just thought it be something in my small little community that would be
cool for us to read about, not that we're trying to make any individual look bad. It was just like how these two kids are using Google Image Search to go after each other. So it was probably the only URL I actually robot.txt out on my website. Not that it mattered because it was all over the web, but it was something I never imagined it would do that. In hindsight, I regret it. I probably would have, in hindsight, wouldn't have known this, but I still would have covered it not knowing what I've known.
It's just a unique individual situation where non-SEOs are using SEO to get back at each other. And it wasn't even that bad, to honest, but guess teenagers, know, teenagers.
Jon Clark (44:18)
I mean, that's pretty impressive to think of.
That's pretty impressive for a teenager to think of like Google bombing, like image photo search. I mean, that's next level.
Joe (44:27)
That's also happened to a very long time ago. Is there anything else more recent that you, a story you covered that you wish you didn't have to or which you didn't in retrospect?
Barry Schwartz (44:37)
I absolutely hate covering stories about people who pass away in the industry. And I just posted one just recently. It's just, that's the worst. So I hate writing those stories. So yeah.
Jon Clark (44:46)
Yeah, those are tough. All right, what is an essential tool that you couldn't live without? I don't know, could be piece of software. Hopefully it's not your phone.
Barry Schwartz (44:54)
essential tool that I can live
without.
Wow,
That's essential. Like, how do I live without it? What are you talking about? I don't understand. I don't understand the question, to be honest. How do I live without something that don't, that I need to kill?
Jon Clark (44:59)
Maybe
I'll rephrase it. How about a productivity tool that you couldn't live without? Like something that makes your life easier.
Barry Schwartz (45:09)
couldn't live with that or I
could live with that.
Jon Clark (45:10)
could not like it's like it's very essential to to your life
Barry Schwartz (45:13)
Okay, good enough. Okay. Got it. Okay. So
this is a bunch, obviously Google calendar, email, et cetera. Like this is the obvious stuff, but people that might not know I'm a big Feedly user. So RSS Feedly user. I used to be the number one consumer on Google reader. So Google's had their RSS Feeder reader, which they got rid of. I was such a big consumer that I was there. They actually told me I'm their number one consumer of RSS feeds across all their user base. And they sent me some swag for that. Not knowing that I was in the SEO world.
Jon Clark (45:25)
It's open.
Barry Schwartz (45:38)
But I'm a big user of Feedly. I track tons of stuff and subscribe to I hate newsletters. I hate getting emails. So I subscribe to everything on Feedly if possible.
Jon Clark (45:45)
I'm big Feedly user also actually, not nearly as big as you I'm sure, but that's my weekend in front of the TV scrolling. I go through all my feeds on Feedly and try to stay abreast of everything that's going on What's your EV of choice today?
Barry Schwartz (45:59)
Yeah.
good question. I have the Audi S6 EV, e-tron. So that's what I'm currently the, it's cold outside. So the mileage is horrible right now. And I feel like I'm just like, only thing I do is drive to the charging station and nowhere else. ⁓ But ⁓ once it warms up, when it was a warmer, it was really nice. Before that I had the Genesis G80. That was pretty good. I was.
Jon Clark (46:06)
Okay.
Joe (46:14)
me.
Jon Clark (46:15)
Hahaha
Barry Schwartz (46:22)
That was my first EV. I was considering getting the Lucid Air, but the company seemed to be going down the drain. I didn't want to get a Tesla just because it didn't have Apple CarPlay and a big Apple fanboy. So it was funny because I was doing research about which EV I should buy and I used Gemini and ChatGPT. And I'm like digging in. It doesn't seem right. Like I'm comparing the range and the speed of the charging and all a bunch of these parameters. And it just wasn't like a lot of the responses were like pulling old data or incorrect data. So.
It was a good research project for something that I didn't know about the topic on to use AI and say, wait, you know, I can't just go with what the answer is telling me to go with because it's wrong.
Jon Clark (46:57)
Did you ever find a buyer for lucidinsiders.com?
Barry Schwartz (47:00)
There were a couple of people who wanted it and I just couldn't give it them because they probably would have just turned it into a promotion site for Lucid.
Jon Clark (47:06)
Telecom.
All right, Barry, this has been amazing. I know we're right at time. So please let our listeners know where they can find you online.
Barry Schwartz (47:14)
⁓ Yeah, so Search Engine Roundtable, RustyBrick ⁓ on social, RustyBrick everywhere. yeah, check out the YouTube channel and so forth. Thank you so much for having me. honored to be the 101st show and definitely starting off the fifth season. Thank you so much.
Jon Clark (47:26)
Yeah, this has been great. Always good to catch up, Barry. And if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, and review. We'll see you on episode 102. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.