People to follow: Measurement

Lily Ray

The empiricist

VP, SEO Strategy & Research, Amsive · New York, NY, USA

Known for: Forensic citation analysis plus a willingness to publicly grade Google's homework.

Rand Fishkin

The skeptic

Co-founder & CEO, SparkToro · Seattle, WA, USA

Known for: The clickstream data the rest of the industry quotes when arguing AI search is over-hyped.

Kevin Indig

The empiricist

Independent Growth Advisor; Author, Growth Memo, Independent (ex-Shopify, G2, Atlassian) · San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA

Known for: The independent researcher whose datasets the rest of the industry quotes back.

Known for: Sits on the largest cross-engine AI-citation dataset and publishes openly from it.

Andrew Yan

The founder

Co-founder & CEO, AthenaHQ · San Francisco, CA, USA

Known for: Ex-Google Search insider quantifying which pages AI engines actually cite.

Garrett Sussman

The empiricist

Director of Marketing, iPullRank · New York, NY, USA

Known for: Runs the controlled experiments that show how AI personalisation actually changes results.

Known for: Reads Google's Quality Rater Guidelines so you don't have to, now decoding the agentic web.

Tom Critchlow

The skeptic

EVP Audience Growth, Raptive; Founder, The SEO MBA, Raptive / The SEO MBA · Brooklyn, NY, USA

Known for: Publisher-side data on the death of the link economy and the rise of the recommendation web.

Cyrus Shepard

The empiricist

Founder, Zyppy SEO · Oregon, USA

Known for: Built the evidence-weighted AI citation ranking-factors framework everyone else cites.

Ethan Smith

The empiricist

Founder & CEO, Graphite · New York, NY, USA

Known for: The 18-year SEO veteran who proved ChatGPT traffic converts 6x better than Google and mapped the AEO playbook.