People to follow: Newsletter

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.

Aleyda Solís

The educator

Founder, Orainti · Madrid, Spain

Known for: Built the free curriculum the rest of the industry learns AI search from.

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.

Eli Schwartz

The skeptic

Independent SEO Consultant; Author, Product-Led SEO, Independent · San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA

Known for: The principled contrarian arguing GEO is mostly rebranded SEO fundamentals.

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.

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.