Duane Forrester unpacks the evolving intersection of AI, search, and digital trust, and why the future of optimization isn’t about acronyms — it’s about judgment, strategy, and managing AI as part of your team.
https://page2pod.com - In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, we welcome Duane Forrester, SEO pioneer, former Bing evangelist, and founder of UnboundAnswers.com. Duane dives deep into how AI is reshaping the world of search and what that means for content creators, SEOs, and businesses alike.
From the evolution of Bing Webmaster Tools to the semantic structures that drive modern optimization, Duane shares battle-tested insights on how to stay visible in a world where large language models rewrite the rules.
This episode isn’t just about SEO — it’s about the critical thinking, systems awareness, and storytelling skills needed to lead in a world powered by AI.
🧠 In This Episode (🤖 AI Meets SEO):
• Duane Forrester on launching Bing Webmaster Tools & Schema.org
• Why AI hasn’t killed search, it has fractured it
• Semantic density vs. semantic overlap explained
• The critical role of chunking strategies in modern content
• How to train AI to be part of your SEO team
• The emerging importance of people management in SEO
• Why job titles don’t matter. Doing the work does
• Universal verifiers: what they are and why they matter
• How to future-proof your SEO skills and team structure
• Tools Duane is building and the AI-infused future he sees coming
Duane delivers an unfiltered, deeply informed perspective that bridges the past and future of search. Whether you're a marketer, SEO, or content strategist, this episode will reframe how you think about AI’s role in your work.
📢 Subscribe to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of search and AI.
💬 Comment below: What’s your biggest challenge when integrating AI into your SEO strategy?
🔗 Resources & Mentions
• Duane Forrester on Linkedin
• Unbound Answers
• Schema.org
• Duane Forrester Decodes Substack
• Which SEO Jobs AI Will Reshape & Which Might Disappear
• The Verifier Layer: Why SEO Automation Still Needs Human Judgment
Jon Clark
If AI is the PhD in your pocket, what does that make you? The intern or the manager? Duane Forrester is the founder and CEO of UnboundAnswers.com, where he helps businesses navigate the shifting intersection of AI, search, and digital trust. He launched Bing Webmaster Tools, stood up Schema.org, and today he's trying to solve a much messier problem. How to keep your business discoverable when large language models rewrite the rules of visibility.
This episode is about the new SEO, if we're still even calling it that. Duane argues that AI hasn't killed search, but it has fractured it. From chunking strategies and semantic density to the myth of the universal answer, we dig into how optimization is evolving and why the real leverage might now sit with content creators who understand systems as well as storytelling. We also unpack why people management is emerging as the next essential SEO skill, not just managing a team, but managing AI as
part of that team. Duane is optimistic that Search will be around for another 30 years, but whether you thrive in that future might come down to something much harder to automate, judgment. Duane has been at the forefront of every major shift in this industry, from the early days of MSN Search to the AI-driven future we're now barreling toward. He's a voice worth paying attention to as we enter yet another inflection point. This one's worth a listen from start to finish. Here we go.
Welcome to another exciting edition of the Page2Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and as always joined by my partner in crime at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today, we're very excited to welcome Duane Forrester to the show. Welcome, Duane.
Duane Forrester
Hey guys, thank you for having me on.
Jon Clark
We're excited to have you. Both Joe and I are, we're going back and forth yesterday, just trying to trim down the very long list of questions that we have. I'm sure we won't get to a third of it, but we had.
Duane Forrester
I went through them and thought, if we can do all these, this is going to be amazing. Like, this is going to be a great self-cover.
Jon Clark
Yeah, I know, I know, right?
we had Marshall Simmons on and it was a little bit of a history lesson. And he's been in the industry so long. You've been in the industry, I think, 25 years or so. And you were at Microsoft from 2007 to 2011. I was there from 2008 to 2010. And it was...
one of the many periods in Microsoft's history where they were having some evolution. At that point in time, they were launching Bing and Google was by far the dominant player in the search space. And your role there, the way that I always envisioned it, I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was sort of like Matt Cutts on Google, Duane Forrester on Bing, and you guys were sort of the spokes heads there.
When Microsoft was so heavily focused on software and office, How was working in that environment where you were definitely the underdog, but also trying to get a huge organization that's not really focused on search to move a little bit more that way. Did you have any tough conversations?
Duane Forrester
Yeah, you know, this is interesting. First off, I'm going to correct some of our dates here, OK? I joined Microsoft in, I think it was 2018. It was there almost 10 years. It was like nine years and seven months or something. But a lot of what you're alluding to predated me joining the company. It was very good timing, as it turns out. But MSN Search was really the kind of beginning of it, OK?
Jon Clark
Perfect.
Duane Forrester
And look, it's really helpful too, I think, for folks to understand because everybody kind of looks at Microsoft and they look at Meta and they look at Google and Amazon and look all of the big tech companies. And they think it's a company that is a shell. And inside that shell is everyone. And it's really probably more accurate to describe it as
Microsoft is an incubator filled with a series of startups because every group within the company is treated like
Jon Clark
Hmm
Duane Forrester
a standalone entity and it has to sing for its dinner just like every other group does. So there's no like vast money pit and you want to go do that, go do that, we'll fund that until it becomes a success. No. What ends up happening is
You get things like, ⁓ you know, I'll take you way back to, take you way back to the early days of like AOL, for example. And you had this ecosystem that sprang up and
AOLs was built around keywords and, you know, relative. At the time, that was fine. You were talking
Jon Clark
Thank
Duane Forrester
like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of entities. And so a business could own a keyword. There wasn't that much traffic and weren't that many people. And it was all fine, right? Like today. ⁓ could you imagine? You know, we see some of the CPC costs in Google advertising for, you know, like legal terms, right? And it's like, you know, eight thousand dollars a click, right? It's like, is crazy. But.
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
Back then, you had a small group of people who stepped forward and said, hey, this idea of an aggregator where we bring all the news together and we publish some of our own stuff uniquely, and it's very pop-centric, this is what gave birth to MSN. And during the time MSN was growing, Google was coming out of stealth and incubator and becoming something.
Jon Clark
right.
Duane Forrester
People inside the company took note of this because they knew about this anyhow because they were a part of the initial like, you know, do we fund the conversations and the pitches and all that stuff? And they made the decision that, yeah, you know what? Search could be a thing. We should probably have our own people. And that was the beginning of MSN search. Over time, and I got there just ahead of like the... of MSN search. I was actually hired because I wrote a couple, well, I wrote a book and a recruiter saw it and went, hey, we want you to come work for us. And so like, you know, he calls me up and he leaves a voicemail for me and, or sorry, no, he emails me and he says, I'm a recruiter with Microsoft. You know, give me like, you know, send me your phone number or whatever, right? I'm like, yeah, this is BS. If you're real, give me your number. I'll call you. 30 seconds later, I get a phone number.
Jon Clark
I second.
Duane Forrester
You know, and I look up the area code and I'm like, tells me nothing, right? It's like out of Idaho or something, right? Quick look on the map and I'm like, Idaho, Washington, okay. You who knows, right?
Little do I, now I know better, right? And I call the guy up and he goes, you know, I will never forget his name. His name was Jubal and his last name was Incy, I-N-C-E. And I asked him about it because we work together.
me going through the process for like a good two months. And I asked him about his name and he said, my parents were straight up out of the sixties and they loved jubilance as a name. So my first name is Jubal and it plays off my last name, you know? And I was like, wow, okay, that's super creative,
Jon Clark
All right.
Duane Forrester
super cool.
And so anyhow, he was my on-ramp into Microsoft. And at that time, it was still very much MSN search. But in the background, unbeknownst to me, they wanted to do more with it because they were looking at the revenue that Google was getting from the actual ads. And they were saying, hey, we want us a piece of that. Because they were, at the time, geez, I don't even remember what the percentage was, but they were like a legitimate percentage of
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
like search traffic was going through MSN
search, you know, probably because there really weren't a lot of other options. So like by default, somebody has to be second, third, fourth, and so on. And I got in there and I started speaking. I'd already been speaking at conferences, but when I started showing up and I was the SEO guy for MSN,
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
inevitable, right? Like, are you not going to ask that person about search? He's an SEO guy. He talks search.
Jon Clark
Knows all the secret sauce.
Duane Forrester
He, as far as you know, shares an office wall with the engineers in the search program, like this kind of thing, right? Yeah. And now we're back to discrete startups. Okay. And we're into literal zip code deviations of where my offices were and their offices were.
And the likelihood of me ever being in a meeting with them was very small, except it wasn't zero because we did have very, very small access to key people. And we were able to actually ask questions. Imagine a group of SEOs and a lead search engineer sitting down, having the conversation about what it takes to rank better. And
Jon Clark
huh.
Duane Forrester
That was amazing to me. You were never so crazy
as you would say, here's my web page, tell me what I need to fix, right? Nobody does that. However, if you understand the mechanics of how search functions and the reason it does what it does, you can start applying that to the work you have in front of you and you can see the differences of where you thought you were going.
and where they think consumers are going. And so I end up out at these conferences, I end up talking, and not through a planned action, I ended up being the voice of MSN Search for like six minutes, and then it rebranded to Bing, and then I was the unofficial voice of Bing.
And of course, everything internally is like there are PR teams, there are marketing teams, there are program management teams, engineering layers and all of this. And we're trying to figure out like, do I or do I not represent the brand when I'm out? And this is me asking this question because people are assuming and they're asking me and like, it's always like, well, you know, this isn't official and blah, blah, blah. And it was like, I had this like,
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
instantaneous like, ⁓ now I understand everything Matt says. Now I get why everything starts
like it's the exact same pattern every time. And it's because every single statement you make, you have to set the expectation clearly. Because the one time you don't, is the one time you will be quoted out of context, and it's a problem. And you like you do the last thing you want is anyone in PR going, huh?
and having to pay attention to something like, like you should just be smoother than that. And Matt and I talked about this several times and it goes with the territory, it goes with the territory when you are, you know, the face of any organization. But I think there was maybe a bit more weight because these were the two largest engines.
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
And there was, you know, at times a bit of a frenemy thing. mean, anybody wants to look it up, right? Like, know, Danny Sullivan got Matt and I to agree to do a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure spoof at a conference once. And we wore the clothes and we were in character and all the questions were framed that way. like, you know, so like we had good times and kind of had some fun with it. You know, great time.
Matt and I walked on stage at South by Southwest one year and the fire marshal came in and stopped the session and physically escorted people out of the room because we're way over capacity. And then we had to wait because they had to set up televisions outside so that everybody would be able to watch the session. Like it was
Jon Clark
Wow.
Duane Forrester
off the hook, full green screen, parting the crowd, escorting us through, you know. And I looked at my boss who was one of the heads of PR and I said, any last minute advice he gives?
Yeah. Okay, before I get into the advice, right? How family-friendly are we on our recording today?
Jon Clark
We have the explicit button checked, so go ahead.
Duane Forrester
Okay,
so he looks at me as I walk by and he says to me, he goes, I say, get any last words? He goes, yeah, don't suck. And I'm like, okay, thanks, man. No, seriously, anything? And he just levels square eye to eye. He goes, don't fuck up. And then he just like sits down on the floor to just like watch the show, right? And I'm like, awesome, you know, Matt laughs at it. He's like, I get the same thing, right? He goes like, it's
Jon Clark
You
Yeah, that's great advice.
Duane Forrester
all on you, right? And I'm just like, whatever. So we went, had a great session. It was awesome. Um, had a little bit of fun, poke some fun at some people asking questions and the audience loved it. But, but like it was, it became an official thing because it was an unofficial thing. And we went back and forth and I was basically like, Jesus, is anybody else going to do this? Because I'm out there.
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
And I can answer these questions. And when I sit down with one of your engineers and I say, hey, you know what we need? We need a tool that shows us how many links we have pointed at our domain. Well, ideally, how many per URL. You know, it was a big deal at the time. Everybody wanted to know. And the engineer looks at me and says, do you think links
matter to ranking? And I legit, I just stopped the meeting and I'm like, OK, Sasi, hold on a second. I can't tell.
If you are pulling my leg, like if you're trying to disassemble here where you are literally trying to throw me off the track, or if you legitimately do not understand the role that links play in determining authority for a URL within a search engine. And he's like, I'm not an SEO. He goes, I don't know. And I'm just like, I think I'm home. OK, I know what to do now. And.
Jon Clark
Since
Duane Forrester
Off we went. And it was great, right? Because that was the team at the time that was maintaining the original Bing Webmaster Tools. And so from that, conversation started. They decided they needed a new version of Webmaster Tools. I went in, interviewed for the job, crushed that, got the job, crushed the tools, minorly crushed Google one day.
but that's okay. You know, it was a, it was a flip, right? It was, it was
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
just like a momentary thing, you know, everybody wanted a link disavow tool and they cornered Matt on stage and asked him for it. And it was the day I announced the new webmaster tools for Bing. So we were riding high already. We had massive coverage through the media. And, um, I went and met my head engineer at a bar downtown in Seattle, cause we had just done the announcement. We were all done. And, and I went down to meet him and I said, Hey, I just came from.
math session and like everybody's after him for a link disavow tool. Like it's like, like almost like they're storming the stage, right? Cause he talked about it before he had said that they're talking about it internally and everybody was like, these guys just came up with a whole new tool set that's bigger, badder, clearer, more information, blah, blah, blah. And you can't even do this one thing. Like it was, it was rude is what it was. And I said this, engineer looks at me and he goes,
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
yeah we could probably build that this week and he just like just like totally low key just no drama drops this and i'm like i'm sorry what and then he speed dials his lead engineer gets Alex on the phone they talk about it and Alex is like yeah he goes yeah I think we can you know come up with an MVP over the next week or so i'm like great we split up he goes home I go out to the after party we're you know talking with everybody at the event and
Jon Clark
That's crazy.
Duane Forrester
I come in the next day and I'm sitting in office.
And it's like maybe 7:30, eight o'clock in the morning. And I get a message from Alex and he's like, Hey, can you come down to engineering? So I go down a few floors into the bullpen where these guys are. And Alex is like, I just want to show you something. And I'm like, okay. And he logs into webmaster tools. Of course, the version of tools that we have access to with our login was like, it was always a beta version. So it was always whatever the public had plus anything we were playing with. So we just logged in and he goes into the navigation. Then all of a sudden there's link disavow in there and he clicks on it. There's a whole tool. It's done.
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
He stayed overnight and coded through the night and just built it. And his idea of an MVP was literally like two inches away from production. It took me a week to try to figure out like, do I actually need to change anything before we push this and go in crazy with the PR team because it's like, hey, we
Jon Clark
Jeez, wow.
Duane Forrester
We literally could drop a hammer here. Like, do we want to do this? there, you know, do we have any conversations going on in the background that could be preempted if we like suddenly lower the boom on this? Like, because the core search teams, they're often talking with each other because they're solving large scale problems that are not proprietary. They are literally societal problems. And so.
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
Everyone needs to solve them in order for everything to step forward. And so they have those conversations.
And everybody just kept coming back thumbs up. And so like a week later, we announced the Disavow tool and it was like, And you know, I'm just like, okay. And then think maybe four months later, Google announced their Disavow tool and everyone was like, yeah, that's about time. There we go.
Jon Clark
Yeah, yeah, Ben there done that with Bing already.
Duane Forrester
Yeah,
so there's always that back and forth. And of course, by that time, you know, I was officially Mr. Bing. That was the thing, right? And it was not without its challenges, I will say. I had an actual job as a PM that I had to do. I had a lot of writing. You know, I was committed to, you know, I think it was like 52 or 55 blog posts a year.
Jon Clark
Yeah. ⁓ god.
Duane Forrester
And if I didn't meet that goal or exceed it, it affected my compensation at the end of the year. like, wasn't something you were going to skip, you know, like you had to do it.
you know, I, meetings I had to be in products, I had to, you know, give feedback on like all of that stuff. My job wasn't technically to be on the road on stage with audiences, even though that was, you know, I was traveling 35, 37 weeks out of the year and.
Jon Clark
Yeah, I can imagine you were everywhere.
Duane Forrester
That's a lot. a lot.
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Joe DeVita
Duane, can we stay in the Microsoft Wayback Machine for
one more question? Because we know you were involved with Cortana.
Duane Forrester
Go for it. We'll see if my brain
is still functional for the time.
Jon Clark
Ha ha ha.
Joe DeVita
I think a lot of our audience may have forgot about Cortana. It was around for over a decade, 20 years. It was around for 15 years.
Duane Forrester
Yeah.
So Cortana as a name has been around for eons, literally the better part of 20 years, okay? Microsoft, and I think a lot of companies do this, ⁓ they create what is essentially a fake business so that you have something to reference in material. Because you can't just say like, you know, ⁓
You want to use Word in your situation. You want to buy this product. Here's the way a company uses it. Let us give you a walkthrough. It's really hard to go through the process of getting permissions and getting companies to sign off on that. When you could just invent a company and name it Cortana, and now you have a fake company that you can use in every example. And you
Jon Clark
Mm.
Duane Forrester
have the fake employees, and you have all of the illustrative situations like
All of that is yours. And Cortana also became in... I'm trying to remember... Cortana was in Halo? I think Cortana was Master Chief's AI assistant, if I'm remembering correctly. I'm not a gamer. I only know these things because I worked on Cortana at one point. I met Master Chief and helped the Halo franchise with SEO.
So like I come through knowing all this, not because I'm a gamer, right? But because like, like I actually met the human beings and Master Chief, the ⁓ username, that person was actually the head of development for Halo. So he was an actual employee at Microsoft. And in order to get into like Xbox, for example, I did a lot of work with,
those teams. In order to get in there, you actually had to have a gamer handle and you had to have credibility.
So you actually had to have GamerCred in order to be hired on top of all the skills you were needing. So they took that very seriously because they believed that, and I think rightly so, how can you build for this world of people if you do not come from that world yourself? Intrinsically, you won't understand it. And so it's a model that has served them well. But Cortana, as I was involved with it,
very early on was the voice assistant. so very early machine learning. And let me tell you, the unsexiest work you can imagine, right? I sat in a windowless office with a television, like literally a big screen monitor on the wall, and it would flash words at me. And I would speak into a microphone. And that was like eight hours a day for four days. Let me tell you.
Jon Clark
And.
⁓ my god.
Duane Forrester
You never appreciated a 15 minute break so much in your life as when you're doing that kind of work, okay? And if you think that's a one-off, I actually did similar work while we were training models when I was at Yext. Different version of it, it was much more click point and select and align answer with question, that kind of stuff. But it's the same level of unsexy
training that those systems require.
⁓ So shouldn't shock anyone that these systems all want to be kind of self-moderating in their training. They want to have the machine train the machine basically because you do it, you know, like I was brought in because I am from Canada and I was the Canadian English voice that trained Cortana on voice inflection for Canadian English and I'd still mispronounce things. I still have my own personal inflections and what-have-you so
You know, it becomes something that is very, sounds cool, but it's really, it's a low bar.
Jon Clark
you were instrumental in launching Bing Webmaster Tools. You were also instrumental in launching schema.org. less maybe curious about the launch of it and more curious about in our industry, right? There's a lot of debate. Is schema used in LLMs? Is it not? Maybe it is, we don't know. I'd love to get your opinion just based on your knowledge of schema. Do LLMs...
use schema.
Duane Forrester
and you'd be crazy to be thinking they're not using all of the structured data languages and all of the signals they can get because the number one thing that an LLM has to have is confidence that the answer is correct. Now that doesn't seem to stop them sometimes as we all know, they just put stuff out there that's not actually accurate, but it's not because they're not trying.
And I highly encourage folks to go wrap your head around the concept of a universal verifier. I talked about it in my sub stack last week. It is a layer that is coming. There are versions of it now in certain places, but it's basically a machine fact checking a machine. ⁓ You can, wait for the laughter to stop, but when you do, what you're going to realize is that these systems are actually running verifying checks in the background. So before
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
the LLM that is answering your question hands you that answer, it has to go through this validation layer basically. And part of that validation layer's job is to collect information and collect understanding of what it believes is accurate and factual.
Jon Clark
you
Duane Forrester
So structured data is just one more signal that would be used to fill that library that the verifier pulls from. So I'm sure if we just asked, know, Chat GPT, it would tell us, yeah, I use structured data, right?
Jon Clark
Thank
Joe DeVita
I enjoyed that article you
put out. think I read it on Search Engine Journal. And you describe, the way you described it made so much sense. was so clear, like you could almost highlight words. The verification layer could highlight a word, maybe yellow, if it's not 100 % accurate, or just change the color of the highlighting if there's questionable authority behind the truth there.
Who puts this together? Who brings that to market though? It's not ⁓ consortium.
Duane Forrester
So look, there's,
I've been down this rabbit hole, right Joe? ⁓ And the reality here is, you know, these systems are using, look, whether they're using the schema library per se, or they're pulling information from the markup, they're still getting direction, right? That's the reality. And I think that in order, like something like a universal verifier, that,
Jon Clark
Yes.
Duane Forrester
could come from a third party, like we could build one, but what you're doing essentially is building a model of something. And so, you know, you would input your information, it would act like a universal verifier might act. If we understand how the system would react, then we would look at that output and say, ⁓ okay, here's where we need to add more information, expand on information and so on. But we'll never be able to see inside.
Chat GPT, Claude, right? This is like the proprietary stuff, right? And we're used to that as SEOs because Google has been doing that all its life. And I had to split that hair when I was with Bing. So the reality is you will not see inside that layer unless the company says, hey, we're going to build tools and we're going to expose this information for you in order for you to help us build better. And
I can't say if that's in their best interest, right? Like I'd love to see that happen, but this is all math, that every single thing is converted to math. And so every bit of this is about, it risky? Is it not risky? Inside the system asking itself that, the answer, is this
Jon Clark
So.
Duane Forrester
a risk? How little risk is this? How much risk is this? How close to accurate is it? Is it factual?
And a lot of that happens on the fly, but a lot of it also happens from like knowledge it's built. So if I give you an answer and I tell you this answer and you agree with me and then all of your watchers agree with me and then everyone else in the industry agrees with me, I am more likely to continue to repeat that answer over and over again because the consensus is that that's a good answer.
the systems work in a similar fashion. And so, you know, take the hint from here, test the answer, the answer is good, it's valid, okay, use it again and again and again and 14 million more times. And when the answer starts to break down or the query changes, then you need to change that vector.
Jon Clark
Hitting on the schema, just one other question
I've seen the common like claim that during the training data, right? Like all the schema stripped out and therefore it's not used, but it sounds like, and it would make sense that during the training process, while it might be stripped out, they're screening the model. Yeah.
Duane Forrester
They're aware. Yeah,
they're aware, right? Like one thing that I caution people against is trying to dumb down how complex all this is. And the idea that, it strips it That language would lead a listener to believe that it's gone.
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
It's not useful. You throw it away because for us as humans using that lexicon, that is typically what we mean when we say we strip that out. We remove what we don't want. It's like trimming the fat off the snake. Like it's, you're not going to eat the fat. So you trim it off, right? But the reality is those systems are so complex that they are aware.
Jon Clark
discarded.
Duane Forrester
of that structured data. They were aware of where it applied. Now is it stripped out? heck yeah, it's stripped out because the LLM doesn't need bracket open, colon, quote, work for, quote, close bracket. That doesn't have a meaning inside the answer that it is trying to construct. It knows that's a piece of code, not words to use in an answer. And so yeah, that's stripped out.
but the intent behind it before it's stripped out is also captured by the system.
Jon Clark
Yep, yep. That's the way I've always thought about it, but I didn't quite know how to put it so eloquently. So thank you for fielding that question.
Duane Forrester
Yeah, you know, it's fun. When
I, when I started answering the question, I oversimplified this and I just went straight to, yeah, they use it. but there is a ton of nuance in there behind. Yeah, they use it. Right. And like you go ask the systems, right. And they will tell you like, we don't use structured data the way you use structured data. It's just a signpost. And I believe that because when you understand more about how these things parse data and what they're looking for, like I.
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
I just wrote this morning about the difference between semantic overlap and semantic density and how you have to have semantic overlap to be included and you actually have to have semantic density to pass the sniff test with a human. So your job is finding that infinitely moving balance point between them on a per chunk basis. And
And we're still having conversations where people are saying, don't understand what you look, what do you mean chunk and chunking and what does this refer to? And I'm like, you you really should go ask a search engine to help define these things, right? Or go take a Coursera course or something, because there is a lot that's new in this that does apply to the work we do.
And again, if we spend our day trying to dumb it down and oversimplify it, you will miss a lot of nuance. You will miss a ton of detail. And I remember, you guys all remember this a month or two ago, was like, everybody looked was query fan out. Query fan out was like, it just exploded, right? Like, ⁓ my God, this is the thing and blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, OK. I mean, I'm on the side of like,
Jon Clark
down.
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
but we've kind of been doing this for like a decade plus, right? Like if you've been serious about doing SEO, you've been serious about intent and about all of this branching that you do with your keyword analysis and like ask, what are the tools called? There's a couple of tools that are out there that do this really well. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I think that it's incredibly important for people to not take that step of
Joe DeVita
Phrase is a good one. You've talked about.
Duane Forrester
⁓ how can I create an analogy so that it's simpler for me to wrap my head around it? Take the step and go learn the detail about it because what you're going to learn is the devil is in the details. And these systems work at such a detailed level that, you know, I have had conversations even last week, the week before with people who are using, you know, semantic density and semantic overlap interchangeably.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
because they're fixated on the word semantic and they don't understand the application of the other word, they have not looked it up. They have not dug in. And let me tell you, it's hard on the brain, but this is where we're at right now.
Jon Clark
Well, I want to ask you about the acronym debate too, because I feel like you have a very, I mean, of all the people spouting all this stuff out, I feel like you have the internal awareness and just the experience to be able to think about this logically. So is it AEO? Is it still SEO? Is it GEO? how do you think about, like when you're advising your clients, like
you talk about it?
Duane Forrester
⁓ I actually don't care what acronym is used. I'll use whatever is least friction. But I do have a very clear opinion of this. I frankly don't care what we call it. What I care about is people are focused on the work and the depth of the work.
Jon Clark
Yeah
Duane Forrester
I think that it is a massive distraction that people are getting wrapped up in this. The companies are getting wrapped up in this. The clients are getting wrapped up in this. And everybody thinks they're having serious conversations when they debate this or focus on why it should be called something. When the serious stuff is where are you at balancing your density with your overlap? Where are you at with converting all your content to chunked content?
that this is the stuff that matters. And if you want to stay debating SEO versus GEO versus AIO versus whatever, okay. But really we're talking about the same stuff here. Oh, and incidentally, I did some research into GEO and GEO is one of the most used acronyms. It is used in 183 different industries.
to represent 183 different meanings. So now imagine you show up and pitch a client who's in one of those fields and you're talking to them about GEO and they're sitting across the table wondering why you're using their acronym and they're impressed that you know so much about their industry. Imagine how difficult that conversation will be to unravel when they realize
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
You're using a made up acronym that has nothing to do with their industry, and they placed false trust in your knowledge because they didn't understand your use of what they believe is their phrase. So, you know, like I've written about new job titles that could possibly come about as a result of all of this work.
Jon Clark
All
Duane Forrester
Yeah, look, the fact of the matter is, all of this work can be done by an SEO, and it's going to be tasked by an SEO to do this work. Should we call it SEO? If you want to get into that debate, we have to start asking ourselves if ChatGPT actually earns the moniker of search engine. Not by a traditional definition, but...
Joe DeVita
But
consumers say I search with Chat GPT
Duane Forrester
Exactly, because it's an action. The
verb has its own meaning now. So look, SEO by any other name doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that you understand the work and you understand the new tools and you understand the data that the tools are giving you and that you can make meaningful decisions on behalf of a business. That's what matters. And right now, that debate about GEO and AIO and SEO and what should we call it?
Joe DeVita
Right.
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
That is delaying action in companies while people debate this. Or worse, they're sitting on the sidelines saying, well, the industry can't make up their mind. So until they figure it out, we're going to sit here and wait. OK. That's fine. Because I don't know if anyone's noticed this. But there's generally, and I am generalizing here because I understand the difference, there is generally one answer from these new systems. So.
You want to wait and your competitor is the one answer? You want to wait and your competitor is the one that builds the trust and is continually brought forward as the answer that gets tested over and over and trusted over and over and cements themselves as the answer to the question? Okay, keep debating about GEO because someone is going to step ahead of you and that's going to have a material impact.
Jon Clark
All right.
Joe DeVita
It is superficial.
Jon Clark
Yeah. I definitely want to encourage everyone to go read your sub stack because it's phenomenal. ⁓ And you mentioned your study or your, I don't know, your point of view on what the job market will look like and get a great post. I can't remember if it was an excerpt of that on search engine journal or not, but it was around like the skills that are being trained today or the incorrect ones.
Duane Forrester
Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Jon Clark
You reference things like chunking and vectors, right? Like all these things that are heavy into the machine learning side of things, which all sound really technical. ⁓ Well, but they're technical, but the concepts are simple once you understand them. Yeah. But you also...
Duane Forrester
Yeah, but they're not. That's the crazy thing. I mean, they are, they are technical, but they're understandable. Right. Right. Right.
Jon Clark
And I think this is true as well. Like when you look at the job displacements that are at higher risk, there's also sort of, it sort of leans into the content side. So as an outsider, right, if you're reading like chunking vectors and then you're seeing maybe content as the area that in the near term could be impacted most, do you foresee a situation where industry moves like more on the technical side and we sort of lose the expertise on the content side or is that.
Duane Forrester
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so look, I think about this a lot, right? Because I write about this. I'm very fortunate that my wife is a seasoned award-winning HR practitioner. So I get a very different view into hiring for tech jobs, hiring in publishing industry, hiring in general. I'm very fortunate to have that to kind of bounce these things off of, right? So like, when I'm writing about this stuff, I'm not just like,
picking concepts out of the air and tossing them around. I have my own built-in expert to kind of bounce these ideas off of. And here's the reality. The reality is, I think it's an oversimplification if we all sit down and say, oh, content's going to be affected. They're going to lose their jobs. AI is going to take over. I don't know about you guys, but go ahead and try to write something long form using even ChatGPT 5 or Claude, right?
Jon Clark
Awesome.
Duane Forrester
It's not the experience that you hope it will be.
And yet, if you sit down with somebody who's a content writer and you give them, are the five bullets that I need to get across, here's the main core, here's the arc, you know, gonna start with fear, gonna end on empowerment. Like, if you do those things, which a good content development program will have maps for all of this, and your writers, they will be muscle memory. They will just like ask you a question or, you you'll fill in a form and they'll fill it in and go, okay, this is what the SEO needs and off you go and you write this stuff.
that's still a much closer to the bullseye result, even if it is like five times slower. ⁓ But then you save on editing and you save on fact checking and you save on all that side of things. But the fact of the matter is every one of those people are the ideal person to be the person guiding their company on chunk analysis of their content. I can't think of a better person because if I give you
Jon Clark
Mm.
Duane Forrester
2 % more knowledge, the concept of chunking, what it is, what it looks like, a bunch of examples. Then I introduce the whole idea of semantic overlap and semantic density. And I tell you how chunking is impacted by these things and how it impacts these things. And then the final, this is what it means to the answer. If I give you that 2%, you are the ideal person to sit down and say,
Here's all the content we have. Here's how we should arrange it. Here's what we should do with it. And so many times it's as simple as a line break or a bullet. It is not a mystery. So it's a mystery to a lot of people because they're not paying attention to it and they're getting caught up in, oh, chunking. That's kind of a weird word to apply in a technical setting. Vector, oh my God, that's technical. What do I do with that, right? Vector means direction. That's it.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
Just means direction. do not fear these things. Get in there and look at them. Because if you're on the content side, Microsoft did a great survey about this, right? And the data shows people that are in roles where it's a repetitive or a creative section are the most likely
to be impacted by AI. Writers are in that category. Journalists, writers, authors, whatever the name is, whatever work you're doing, if you're writing, you're in that category.
But it is a very small step for you to be in the category of highly valued because you're the first alignment layer with these LLMs. It's the content person and not a huge skill to learn.
Jon Clark
All right.
recent post, the overlap versus density hit my inbox like, I don't know, 20 minutes before this conversation. I skimmed it quickly, but of what I read and what you've talked about, it seems like the content role is almost the only role that can marry those two differences well, where you're sort of talking to the LLM and talking to the user.
Duane Forrester
Yeah, exactly.
Jon Clark
and sort of meeting those two in the middle. Is that a fair assessment or?
Duane Forrester
I don't know. mean, like honestly, I think what we're getting into now is how is your company structured? How, like how are your jobs aligned? Right. Because I could just as easily come back at you, John, and say, that's the role of a technical SEO. know, because in some companies, the technical SEO is actually responsible for content generation or the technical SEO lead is also responsible for the content development team.
So like it's to me, it's not as obvious as it's got to be the content person. If I were walking through the halls of a company and you said, we need to find somebody to run chunk analysis. Okay. Take me to your writers. Like that would be my first thought, right? Because we're talking about content. Nobody knows it better. Nobody knows the process better than them. I'm going to give them that one little bit extra to do on top and
Jon Clark
Hmm.
Thanks.
Duane Forrester
Once they get the hang of it, they're aligned. Depending on how your company is laid out, it could be an analyst, it could be a manager, you know, I don't know. One of you two might start doing this just for fun as a side hustle.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Joe DeVita
I've read a lot.
of your writing recently and I've seen you in a lot of interviews and I'm going to try to pull two quotes from different points in time, like four months apart, but I put these together and it's very hopeful. So I just want to see if I can either comment on it and maybe bring these two quotes together. Recently, you said search optimization will be around for at least another 30 years. I like, there's been a lot of fear in our industry that jobs are
anyway. But like that left me really hopeful. And then maybe four months ago, you had a conversation about the search professionals who are going to excel in the new reality. We face ourselves optimizing for AI search. And you said people management skills are going to be the differentiator between a good and a average search pro. And I wonder, I know there are different interviews and different times, but can you put those together for us?
Duane Forrester
Yeah, so okay, here's my thread, right? Like I get this, people ask me like, you know, how did you get to where you're at in your career? And I graduated with a hospitality administration degree and they're like, and you're doing this now? And to me, it's a straight line, right? So like follow my logic, okay? So I believe that the, and maybe I'm taking liberties people won't agree with. I don't know, we'll find out, right? If people wanna comment on this, that'd be great.
But I believe that the core fundamental work that an SEO does is to improve a product. And in theory, that product is worth being showcased to others. I'm sure we all believe ours is the best. We should all be number one and so on. Or fact, we wouldn't have an industry if that wasn't the case. But the work to do that
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
never runs out. There's always another technological hurdle.
There's always some difference. There are always a change. Just look at the stuff on my sub stack. Look at the conversations we're having. And it's not just me. It's my king. It's everybody else in the industry as well, right? Like people are leaning into this. Okay. Eric Engie just released a new book talking about SEO and AI. Like Brett Tabke is all over this. And yes, I know I'm saying names that are like
Coated in dust right because we've all been around for a while But we saw the initial change we've seen the intervening changes and we're here for this big change so ultimately I believe that the act of needing improvement will always be there for content. Okay, like the way I write something The way I write it now is vastly different than the way I wrote it 25 years ago
25 years ago, I was sure of myself that anything I was putting down was the sum total of all knowledge that needed to be known on this topic. And I was confident in that. Now, every single thing I write, I approach it from, don't I know? Because there's gotta be something out there I don't know on this topic, which means I am more pedantic, I'm slower at creating things. The machines don't do that. The machines are literally me 25 years ago.
here's the corpus of knowledge I possess. Here's the answer. Here you go. You should be happy I did that in 1.3 seconds. Aren't we all happy here today? This is awesome. By the way, you're a genius. Like that's what you get back from these systems. And much as I want to believe, you know, that I'm a genius,
Duane Forrester
only my mom gets to say that with any level of certainty and I will trust it. Otherwise I'm like a little skeptical and I'm thinking, well, if you're that...
use the word obsequious, I guess. Maybe I need to be a little more careful. And that is the domain of the SEO, of digging into the details, of uncovering all of those little pieces that need to be optimized to bring something that is good to better, better to best, and so on. And I don't think that goes away. I have not seen, you guys were there for the launch of Chat GPT-5. I don't know about you guys, but I think the graph went like that.
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
and then it leveled off and it was in Crapsville and now it's back up again. Like it's doing really well over the last few days. But that falling down, you know, we all watch the same announcement, right? It's better at writing, it's better at math, it does these things better. It's like having a PhD in your pocket. And I'm like, I don't want that PhD in my pocket, because they're clearly an idiot. So maybe they are a PhD in one thing, but they...
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
do not understand anything else. And the reality is that these systems always need human guidance, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, maybe.
Some of the idea
around AGI, some of the big leaders are thinking anywhere two years to five, eight years. Some of the big names in AGI are saying 10 to 30 years. I don't know. I'm not really looking for AGI. If you gave me an AGI, probably the first thing I would tell it to do is make me a bunch of money so I don't have to work.
And then it's all moot at that point, but I'm pretty sure we would all do the same thing. And therefore, the world would be a very different place with that technology. But we don't have it. And I don't think we're going to have it for a while. And it's not coming based on what we're building and using now. And so ultimately, we need the human in the loop. It's a common phrase now. think most people have heard it. It is very real.
Jon Clark
Thanks.
Duane Forrester
That doesn't go away, which kind of brings me to the people management skills, okay? ChatGTP 5 let's just say it's a genius. Let's just say it's a PhD. It also happens to be a seven-year-old who is predisposed to pleasing you every time and has zero life experience, but has access to the entire corpus of humanity's history and knowledge. And that's a great...
opportunity in some ways, but in other ways it's a disaster. Like, because it will just tell you something and be totally right in your face like this is all there is to it and you're like no, I know that's not the right answer and it won't know the difference and then when you correct it, it kind of gaslights. yeah, I don't know where that came from but here we go, you're on the right track.
And so you do need the people management skills to be able to understand the type of asset you are managing in an AI based system. I like to think of them as a helpful intern, plugged in, has access to a lot of things, can research stuff faster than me, can find things faster than me, like.
It's really, really good for those things. But again, as a people manager, I have to know how to deploy my people. Okay, Joe, you're awesome at A. So Joe, you're gonna go do A for me. John, you've got B covered, that's awesome. ChatGPT you've got research. C, go get that. But you know what? Joe's in charge of how we write things. He is the voice of this operation. So everything you do in C has to be given to A. And then Joe looks at that and says, okay, well,
I'm a crappy typer, so John, you're really good at typing fast. Can you finalize this article and then we can go ahead and publish it. So you have to have that kind of people management skillset. And that doesn't mean you have to have managed people. People who are really good at this, like parents, for example, will naturally fall into this and have an aptitude for it.
because they will have seen that seven-year-old trying to please them in real life and being like, I appreciate what you're trying to do here. It's a little off the mark and that's okay. It's still useful. It's still usable. You can give them the guidance. And so to me, these things are very interconnected, right? As a person managing an output for a business goal, you definitely need to see how these things connect. No doubt in my mind. Then again,
You know, maybe I have a smooth brain and things aren't quite straight in there. I don't know.
Jon Clark
You had a great interview with the San Luca on
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly on the search session. And you mentioned Brett Tabke. And you referenced him in that interview as well, creating, I think it was 26 steps to like 15k or something. So if you actually went back and found that link, was back in 2002, if you can believe it. if you were thinking about creating a list like that today,
Duane Forrester
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, a minutes ago.
Yeah.
Jon Clark
you know, in, in, I don't know, let's call it three or five things. Like what would those things be in your mind?
Duane Forrester
You know, it's funny, when we were prepping for this, I saw that question and I thought, ⁓ this is going to be the one that is difficult because it's a moment in time thing, right? And it's really, really important for people to understand and acknowledge what we're doing today, the optimization that we are all saying we are doing. And there are people that are out there saying, look,
You know, we're talking about stuff that doesn't have meaning. We're saying things that don't really have any depth to them. Nobody's been able to prove anything. So why, how can you advise on this? The fact of the matter is what we're talking about is machine learning basics. We're talking about information that is readily.
available that we can go out and look at and say, ⁓ that's how it treats this piece of information. Now, my job as the SEO is to translate that into the world of what we do against the world of the output of that system.
Jon Clark
Hmm.
Duane Forrester
so as we're kind of looking through all of this, I
I look back on that and I think, okay, we only got to where we're at and we're only tackling the problems we're tackling because all of that existed beforehand. And in fact, this generative, you know, AI, SEO or GEO or AIO or whatever you want to call it, I'm not gonna, I don't want to offend anyone, everybody's welcome. This work that we're doing is only needed and possible because all the other work has existed beforehand.
Now, this is where things get a little complex, all right? Because if you have not cracked the nut on structured data, you're going to have a problem moving forward. If you cannot get a good content management program, I mean, you're people determining what to write, how to write it, having it properly structured and laid out, it's readable, it's legible, it's comprehensible. If you haven't ascended to that level yet, you are going to struggle.
as you need to move forward. And so, you know, we are legitimately on this kind of edge and
I'm hoping that people will understand that the work that we need to do moving forward is complex, it's technical, but you don't get to walk away from the other stuff. Now, back to my moment in time, the 26 steps to 15K a day, that was a moment in time.
Jon Clark
and
Duane Forrester
the 26 discrete things, the work items that you could do that would improve your organic ranking in this new thing called Google. Okay, you know, like let's understand that that existed then. And if
you were to write that today, it would look very different. But the step from today's version of that,
to this new optimization that we do in these systems, we're really just layering on some stuff. You still have to write the good content. You have to focus on the topics. You have to have fast load speeds on your pages. You have to have good structured data deployment. You have to have all of that stuff, all of the best in class that we had from what I think of as traditional SEO at this point.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
Then you've got to get into chunk analysis and then everything that goes along with the concept of chunking, including query fan out and the semantic overlap, semantic density and that balance point. So those are things that are on my list now. I definitely want to understand about vector similarity, which I'm going to use some of my query fan out to help me understand what potential vectors are. Hand in the air,
I know we will never see what the vectors look like from inside
the system. Chat GPT will never tell us, this is my vector that I follow to get to the answer for this. We won't see those things. So the closest we can come is an approximation. But if you do a query fan out and you see all the things that are related to a topic, you're starting to get a pretty good understanding of some of the vectors that exist to get to an answer. And so now you've got to go down the semantic overlap and then
Jon Clark
Hmm.
Duane Forrester
the actual density.
portion of that conversation because once you get in the door you have to prove that to humans you are worth consuming. Overlap gets you in the door, density proves that you're actually worth consuming or proves that you're fluffy and you shouldn't be consumed because it's too much, you know? Depends honestly on the moods and whims of the human reading the answer at that point.
So like that's my list. My list is not particularly deep, right? Like we could, we could, you know, ricochet off into all kinds of other areas where we're going to talk about all these arcane and technical things, but, but these are literally arcane and technical things. You know, I think that the most important thing somebody can do is first off, be aware of all of that. But second, focus on the things that you can work on right now.
Jon Clark
All right.
Duane Forrester
And if there are not tools available to go and look up this information or the systems themselves will not share the information with you, you shouldn't be spending your time trying to figure out what a tool would look like and trying to convince your DevOps team to build you that tool and try to find money to build you a sandbox environment so you can go do your own vector analysis to see what it looks like. Like, no.
Jon Clark
So,
Duane Forrester
Just focus on the work that you can actually influence. Wait for independent companies to build these tools and get them out there. They're...
sorry. Go ahead, Joe.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Joe DeVita
The quadrant that you published on your sub stack was an incredible resource for John and I to try to understand, we have the right tool set to deploy this new service for our client? And we didn't. So it was really helpful for us to find out where those gaps, no, it was great. I think was like a lumascape, you know, it was like a lumascape of the point in time we're in. Is that something you're going to...
Duane Forrester
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Joe DeVita
build on.
Duane Forrester
Yeah, in fact, it's either going to become a quarterly or probably once every six months, it's going to be updated. you know, like, I know that some of the smaller guys, you know, they're going to struggle, right? Because money. Money is the core of everything, okay? I was a part of two startups recently and both of them just stopped for me because money.
and money is what enables you to pay people to stay focused so that they can actually go write the code for the new feature, and then you can actually have money to market that thing, to get people on board, because let's face it, all these new tools, you are literally inventing a category and trying to teach people who have already spent their money this year on tools why the next time they spend money, it needs to be with you. And that's really hard because...
Duane Forrester
Historically, we've had tools that were, I wouldn't quite
call them all in one, but we know the big names, the big tool set providers. And if you were a member of those tools and using them, it covered a lot of ground.
So, tools, like, you know, it's a very...
We're seeing a lot of change in lot of areas, okay? Like these tools are very focused on the areas that historically SEOs leaned into and they needed them, they did the work, they built the features that people would pay for that they could take data out of, make decisions around and improve ranking or whatever it is they were trying to improve. And those tools don't work in the new environment. You can't just point that tool over here and say, go collect, it doesn't, it's not.
It's fundamentally different thing. And while those companies are investing and growing and trying to work on things, you see a lot of vibe coded new tools, people showing up saying, hang on a second, I can do chunk analysis for you. So I'm going to build a tool. This is what it's going to do. I'm not going to lie. I have two companies outlined on my own for tool sets that I can build. And I have half of the code for an MVP on one of them completed. I'm not programmer.
But I have enough that if I had a programmer, I could give it to them and they would know what I'm trying to accomplish. And then we run into money again, because what I don't have is $180,000 to hand to a programmer to say, this is the project you work on. You need to go build it. at that more than once it's occurred to me that we're right back at the beginning of SEO, where it's a bit of a wild west.
And it's a little disconcerting because if you've only been in this industry for five, maybe even 10 years, you have no concept of what it was like when we had no tools and we had no data and we had no information and we were guessing and we were sharing information on discussion forums about, you know, 14 keywords here did this and then, no, no, no, he got hit with the band hammer. Don't do that.
It's a very different world. It's much more mature world that we're in now than it was then. But in some ways we're being forced back into this kind of Wild West situation where, know, like the guy I saw yet again today, somebody posted up on social the quote from Google saying, you know, we're sending higher quality traffic. We're sending more traffic and the clicks are still there. And, you know, the person is showing that the literal like
clicks going down, impressions going up, like 100 % opposite to what they're being told. And that's actually from Google search console. That visualization came from their reporting in Google search console. And the person who runs Google search console is saying 180 degrees opposite that out loud. And it's making some confusion for people. look, I've been inside the big engine. get it. It's really hard to get one answer that applies.
everywhere. And that is at the scale that Google's operating, I am certain their statement makes complete sense. And I am also certain that with the people I know in my network, tens of thousands of people, I could find thousands of people who would refute that statement with their data. But on a global scale of trillions of URLs in play,
Jon Clark
Thank
Duane Forrester
I'm pretty sure that what they're seeing is different than maybe what we're seeing on an individual level. So, you know, like that's it.
Jon Clark
That's interesting,
actually. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. I think when things are negative, people also amplify that more. maybe they're, I don't know, it would be hard to believe, but I guess it's possible they're seeing the opposite, right? I mean, I don't know.
Duane Forrester
absolutely. Absolutely.
Do you think, so let me phrase it this way, do you think that it's reasonable to believe that a senior leader at Google who has to get a statement approved by PR and legal and in order to get that statement made in the first place had to work with an entire data analytics team, dozens of people over probably a couple of months of information gathering?
What are the odds that person made a factually inaccurate statement of that magnitude?
No, their data tells them that's the statement.
Joe DeVita
But it's a riddle to the world because it's been.
Duane Forrester
I can fully understand that, absolutely. And us in our industry, we have to acknowledge that we are and keep ourselves in somewhat of a bubble. If you actually go out and talk to the tens of thousands of business owners out there just doing this on their own, trying to learn enough to move themselves forward and help their own business out, those people don't have a horse in this race. They don't care one way or the other. And for them, it's all about revenue.
Duane Forrester
What to me was the really telling part in that statement was the quality of the click. Because I've been talking about quality of clicks since my time at Bing. And it's only been recently that Google has started talking about quality of clicks. So there's old data out there that would tell you that the quality of the click coming from Bing was higher than it was from Google. And that's historically, at least in my belief, because I had access to that data and we talked about it out loud.
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
It's not a big deal because the volume just trumps all of that, right? But hey, if Google's in a situation now where they can legitimately start talking about the quality of the click and that has a meaningful impact on people, meaning, look, you didn't get $10, $1 sales, you got $120 sale and you lost 15 out of 20 on your traffic count. You don't care. You don't care. The money is going up. The rest of the metrics, 90 days later, that graph is just going to go.
Jon Clark
Yeah.
Duane Forrester
and you've got a fresh new line. You're only looking at one line. There's no drop anymore. It's history. But your revenue keeps ticking up and that's what matters. it's a tough one, really. That one was a tough one.
Jon Clark
When I worked on the search team, on the page search side at Microsoft, that was always the hook that we hung our hat on, is like traffic much, much lower, but quality significantly higher. Typically conversion rates are higher, et cetera. That's ⁓ really interesting.
Duane Forrester
And there was was a lot of data behind it, right? Like the demographic data behind it, right? Higher educated buyer, more affluent, larger purchase sizes, like all of that just flowed. And I have no idea if that's still the case today. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But what's fascinating to me is while I debate this in the back, dusty cobwebs of my mind, I wonder if somebody like ChatGPT or Perplexity is gonna come along and just be like, we're just gonna take everybody, so all of whatever you're thinking about is irrelevant now because they're all with us. And that's it. you know?
Jon Clark
Hey. Good. Well, listen, I know we've kept you for a long time. So this has been amazing. We had a whole section on AI's impact on agencies in the future more selfishly than maybe for our audience. So hopefully we can have you back and dig into that a little bit.
Duane Forrester
happy to. We can speed round it. We can go deep. Whatever you guys want to do.
Jon Clark
Yeah, let's jump into a couple of rapid fires ⁓ if you have the time. Awesome. All right. So you and Joe have a little bit of a camaraderie here, but what are three guitar chords you find yourself ripping more than any others?
Duane Forrester
Okay? Okay.
Yes.
Okay, so this is a bit of a shock. I don't play, I only build. Yes, I suck at playing. At one point I knew six chords and had terrible like strumming technique which was just abysmal, right? Never really got that down. And so was never really able to pull anything together. And then over a couple of years, I simply just didn't pick up a guitar to play or do anything.
Jon Clark
really? That's amazing!
Duane Forrester
I'll be honest, I got fascinated with cigar box guitars and it kind of sidetracked me for a little bit. And these are three string guitars and the chords are different. And so it kind of got away, but it's this really jangly thing. And then I got into my usual, which is like, well, if Rolls Royce built one of these, what would it look like? And, you know, off I went and that's it. ⁓ But, I'm very much more into the math of building and the art of finishing. That's, that's where my head is at. So,
Jon Clark
I love that.
Duane Forrester
So yeah, sorry.
Jon Clark
Well, how about this? This one I know you do. What is your favorite meat to smoke if you're pressed for time?
Duane Forrester
Ooh, if I'm pressed for time, I'll tell you what's been my nemesis is a tri-tip. Because I have failed more times than I have succeeded to smoke a tri-tip and it still comes out nice and moist. For maybe five minutes after you take it out and you slice it up, it's fine. And then you realize that in fact, it was actually way overdone and it's all the juices have left the building and now it's just dry.
Jon Clark
Hmm.
Duane Forrester
It works really well for things like chilies and, you know, like sloppy joes and things like that after that, because you're going to add a bunch of moisture back in and it'll mask it. But but that's my go to. I have been struggling to find turkey breast here in Southern California. I'm told by all the butchers, it's a seasonal thing. They only get it in the fall. But I desperately want to smoke turkey
breast. And I've been dabbling with some chicken breasts. It's just.
It's a bunch of work. It's not a bunch of work to fire up a smoker and get it up and running. It's like literally a couple of minutes and you're off and running, but the cleanup can be, you know, an hour or more. And is that worth it for like two chicken breasts? know, I don't know, you know, but I will say this, my favorite to put on the smoker and.
Jon Clark
Okay.
Duane Forrester
we'll be doing this after we wrap up is a pork butt. I've got a Boston butt sitting in the fridge. I'm going to cut it into large steaks and smoke it this afternoon and have pork steaks for dinner for probably the next week.
Jon Clark
Now I'm really hungry. So
if you could sit down today with Matt Cuts, is there a question you would ask him or a topic you'd want to discuss with him?
Duane Forrester
You know, yes, and it's got nothing to do with the world of search. At one point, Matt was involved with the U.S. I don't even know the name of it. It was Mapping. was a U.S. government office that was in charge of mapping.
And ⁓ I'm fascinated with that kind of stuff. So I would want to know more about how they do what they do, why they're doing it, the areas they're focused on, how they make decisions on what information to update when, that kind of thing. But yeah, I have not talked to Matt since he left Google. It's been a minute.
Jon Clark
Been a while, All right, last one. If there was a book or maybe a podcast that you'd recommend for our listeners, maybe to...
Either I'll leave it open ended. You have a book or a podcast you'd recommend for our listeners that you're really enjoying today.
Duane Forrester
Okay, hmm. I'm going to give you a fiction, and the fiction is a series. I'm on like book 25 now, I think. I don't know. It's called The Backyard Starship. ⁓ It's really well written. It is an Earth-based fiction.
It has to do with history and future. The characters are all very well developed. If anybody has come across Murderbot and that series, I was an early reader of Murderbot. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the show yet. I'm watching it, but I'm having a hard time getting over because in the book, I thought the character leaned female. And in the show, I can't help but think of the character as male.
Jon Clark
Anyway.
Duane Forrester
even though it's technically androgynous, just, that's where my head goes. So I'm like, I'm just having this weird disconnect of like, you you took the character from this to this and yeah, I'm hoping after a few more episodes, I'll just, that'll just go away and I won't care anymore.
But yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I read for entertainment. I don't watch a lot of television. And so I do read a lot of fiction and a lot of business books.
So, yeah.
Jon Clark
All right, last one. We've started sort of a prediction question to sort of close things out. If you go to google.com in the next 12 or maybe 24 months, what do you expect that experience to be?
Duane Forrester
Okay. whole. Okay, this is is a good one and fun. I expect kind of what everybody is expecting. I expect AIO to be more of a percentage. I also expect Google to launch paid ads inside AIO on an auction based system, but it's not going to be what the old PPC system was. You can't bolt that in and say, we're just going to fire an ad here. In fact, I hate to reference this again, but I substack this one. I outlined what that native auction-based system would look like inside an LLM answering system.
Shockingly to me, I didn't see it coming. The day before I published, I did a little more research, just as you do. I've been working on it for a week before I hit publish, take one more lap around the internet, see if there's anything else that you should add. And I came across a reference to a program that Google was working on that sounds an awful lot.
like exactly what I was suggesting. I was like, it took me about two hours of like reading it and there was only two articles referencing it across anywhere that I could find. And I'm like, okay, so clearly they want this on the down low, it's academic stuff, like, you know, and I, but I was just fascinated with the fact that like, wow, these are like kind of parallel thoughts, you know? Now I don't know that they're using any of the ideas that I'm talking about or anything like that.
Jon Clark
Hmm. Well.
Duane Forrester
However, I do know that they have a very vested interest in solving that problem. How do they migrate revenue out of traditional SERPs with paid ads on a click basis and into something like an AIO answer where there's very much a fit for purpose answer to question match and you can't really show ads that are anything but a perfect alignment?
And then you start throwing in some stuff like, hey, you know what? They have AI managed bidding
it was talking about something else that's AI. Related to advertising. And my personal favorite tie-in, if we want to talk about predicting, and we'll see how close this comes, Google has Veo 3 now, which is really good at creating videos. And so
Jon Clark
Mm-hmm.
Duane Forrester
you can imagine a system where you, the advertiser, say, here's my brand, here's my brand book, here's everything you're allowed to say about me, here are all the products and services I offer, here are all the things you have to stay away from. So you essentially draw the size of the envelope. And then you say, here's my MX, go.
Jon Clark
Wow.
Duane Forrester
And Google in real time sees a cohort of people developing and saying, we're interested in this topic. On the fly, it uses Veo to create an AI developed video ad that it then embeds as part of the answer. And the ad is talking about your product or service in real time. And if the click happens, your credit card is hit and off you go. all of the
pieces for this exist.
Whether you could make that work in real time, dude, I don't know. But the PM in me says, anything can be built. Just get me the right developer. So I'm thinking to myself, never bet against Google. They've got really smart people on payroll there. So I have a feeling if anyone's going to crack that nut, it's going to be them. They're motivated. They're talented. And I think that 12 months from now, we're going to be seeing something like that.
Jon Clark
Right.
Duane Forrester
living in that space and it's going to be good for advertisers, it's going to be different for SEOs for sure. But that's what we're all talking about here. That's what we're talking about, the new way to optimize. So, you know.
Jon Clark
Or sure. Exactly.
All right. mean, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time. Before we really go, let everybody know where they can find you. Are you to be speaking anywhere?
Duane Forrester
Absolutely.
Yeah, I'm actually going to be So probably somewhere nobody's gonna be LA Tech Week here in October in Los Angeles So folks are around I'll be speaking there But I'm also gonna do my annual trip down to Dallas for state of search and I'm one of the closing keynotes again this year I think this is like
You're 12 or 13 now doing that? Like, it's just like a, it's a thing, right? Like I should rent an apartment in Dallas, I think. And look, if anybody wants to track me down, my website is UnboundAnswers.com. Go there, hit me up, or just hit me on LinkedIn and you know, we'll get a call going or whatever.
Jon Clark
Alright.
Sounds good. We'll make sure to link to a lot of these references in the show notes as well. ⁓ And thanks again for joining us on the Page2Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate, and review. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.