People to follow: Long-form

Mike King

The engineer

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

Known for: The engineer who turned AI Mode's internals into a working SEO playbook.

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.

Jason Barnard

The founder

Founder & CEO, Kalicube · Loches, France

Known for: Wrote the entity-and-knowledge-graph playbook that AEO is still running on.

Dan Petrovic

The engineer

Managing Director, DEJAN AI · Brisbane, Australia

Known for: Trains his own models to reverse-engineer how AI search picks its sources.

Andrea Volpini

The builder

Co-founder & CEO, WordLift · Rome, Italy

Known for: Made schema and knowledge graphs the substrate of GEO before it had a name.

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.

Britney Muller

The educator

Founder, Britney Muller LLC / Orange Labs, Independent (ex-Hugging Face, ex-Moz) · Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, USA

Known for: The ex-Hugging Face SEO who teaches marketers actual AI literacy, not prompt tricks.

Crystal Carter

The educator

Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix · Exeter, UK

Known for: Makes reasoning models and bot-log analysis genuinely understandable for marketing teams.

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.

Ross Simmonds

The builder

Founder & CEO, Foundation Marketing / Distribution.ai · Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Known for: Made content distribution the strategy AI search actually rewards.

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.

Bernard Huang

The builder

Co-founder & CEO, Clearscope · Austin, TX, USA

Known for: Publicly experiments on his own brand to show what actually gets cited in AI answers.

Cyrus Shepard

The empiricist

Founder, Zyppy SEO · Oregon, USA

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

Known for: Wrote the academic paper that gave GEO its name and its first benchmarks.