#SEOWeek was a heady mix of insights, laughs, and existential dread, which is pretty much my sweet spot. Somewhere between entity indexing and the open bar, I realized this wasn’t just a conference. It was a full-blown epistemological intervention for our industry.
See, it’s no longer about ranking pages. It’s about being known, understood, and cited by the machines who now whisper answers into the ears of users. And it turns out, those machines don’t like whispering about you unless you’re actually saying something worth knowing.
Shocking, I know.
We Are More Than Day 4, But Let’s Start There
Rand Fishkin strode on stage on the last day of the conference, and immediately triggered my inner existentialist (and outer Brit): We are more than SEO.
At first, I thought it was another motivational poster moment. You know, the kind with an eagle flying over a lake called “Engagement.” But he wasn’t wrong. SEO is no longer a channel. It’s not even really search engine optimization. It’s a bridge. A gateway. A translator between:
- Human expertise
- Machine comprehension
- Business goals
It’s why LLMs are feeding on structured data, subject matter experts, and sites that can demonstrate they’re not written by a content farm powered by caffeine and desperation.
As Rand said (kinda): We are the knowledge layer of the internet.
And like any good layer cake, some of us are deliciously visible, and some are buried beneath fondant fluff.
Knowledge is the New Authority
(and Authority is the New PR)
Lexi Mills hit hard with the idea that trust is the new currency, and PR—done properly—is the fastest way to cash in.
We’re not just optimizing for Google anymore. We’re optimizing for ChatGPT. For Perplexity. For Gemini. For the AI overlords trained on scraped data and ‘citation-worthy sources.’
So what do you do? You:
- Tighten your topical relevance (focus your knowledge)
- Showcase authentic expertise (human, verifiable, present)
- Push your narrative outside your site (PR, podcasts, partnerships)
Because in a world of LLMs, your content is not just judged by what’s on your page, but by what other machines say about it.
This is where knowledge influence kicks in. Your blog post on “fermented SEO strategies” might be brilliant. But if no LLM has ever slurped it up or had it reinforced by multiple trusted sources, it’s basically cheese left in the fridge.
Entities, Experts & Epistemology
“These are a Few of My Favorite Things!”
There were moments at SEO Week where I genuinely considered getting “Entity Salience” tattooed on my forearm. (Thankfully, I was distracted by a tiger roaring behind Greg Gifford.)
Ricardo Baeza-Yates dropped some fascinating slides on syntactic analysis and reduction, dissecting how verbs and roles help machines understand sentences. It’s not *new* but it’s not said enough. LLMs (and Google) don’t need keywords for their results and answers; they need clarity. Structure. Context. Machines aren’t impressed by clever turns of phrase. They’re impressed by well-formed meaning.
Dawn Anderson reminded us not to abandon our knowledge graphs just yet. Why? Because LLMs may hallucinate, but they still need maps to navigate. Entities are the landmarks.
And in a world of AI confusion, epistemological anchors (i.e., actual facts about known things) are what get you remembered.
LLMs: The Oracle with Amnesia
Let’s be blunt.
GenAI is powerful. It’s impressive. But it’s also basically guessing.
Wil Reynolds, Jeff Coyle (in absentia – sorry to miss that talk. I did review the deck), and others laid into this beautifully: LLMs don’t know the truth. They know probability. They know what sounds right, not what is right.
So the question is not “How do I rank?”
It’s:
- How do I become a trusted input to the LLMs?
- How do I reduce the knowledge distance between my content and the truth machines want to deliver?
Your job now isn’t just to write good content. It’s to:
- Get cited by machines
- Close gaps in your knowledge graph
- Fill in what the AI thinks it knows, but doesn’t
LLMs will never say, “I read it on your blog”. But they will reflect what you and others like you repeatedly demonstrate.
Dejan and the Semantic Cheese Factory
“How to Build a Better Cheese”
Let me rave a moment. Dan Petrovic’s (Dejan) presentation was nothing short of a mind-melter. Beyond Rank Tracking felt less like a talk and more like being personally ushered into the Large Language Model Matrix!
While most of us are still polishing our SERP pixel counts, Dan’s out there building his own large language model to analyze how brands are associated through language, not just ranked. Yes, he built his own LLM.
That’s like fermenting your own brie—not just to eat it, but to redefine how the entire cheese industry measures flavor.
His approach maps how Google and other models conceptually connect brands, uncovering hidden associations, relevance patterns, and gaps that traditional rank tracking tools couldn’t sniff out if they were dunked in truffle oil.
It was brilliant. Insightful. Awe-inspiring. Occasionally hard to keep up with (I think my brain rebooted mid-slide).
But for anyone who wants to really understand how machines perceive brands—this was next frontier.
Cheese, Distance & the Knowledge Graphs You Forgot You Had
Let’s stretch our dairy metaphors, I wrote in this cheesy post here.
I’ve been playing with the idea of Knowledge Distance – a more strategic, less academic cousin to Semantic Distance. It’s about where you sit in the brain of a machine relative to the topic at hand.
Let’s break it down:
- Knowledge Alignment: You and the machine see the topic similarly. Think brie on a warm baguette. Lovely.
- Knowledge Divergence: You’re talking about Gorgonzola, but the machine thinks cheddar. Not good.
- Knowledge Gaps: You’re missing crucial info that others have covered. That hole in the middle of your Swiss content? It’s why you’re not cited.
- Knowledge Influence: You posted a Camembert manifesto, and now everyone else is quoting you. LLMs, pick that up.
- Knowledge Sources: You need to be in the digital equivalent of Whole Foods, not the gas station dairy fridge.
In other words, it’s not just what you say, it’s how closely it resembles the collective understanding and how often it’s reinforced.
This is a lactose-free caveat. Sometimes, being the antithesis of the collective can help, too. As LLMs seek all views on a topic, maybe being contrarian is a position they want to highlight, even if they disagree. We are not the Borg.
Now? Building Strategies for a World of UnLinked Answers
Sundar Pichai said it himself: “The traffic we send outside has only grown.”
Which is true… if you squint. Yes, clicks exist. But the goalposts have moved.
We now live in:
- The era of AI Overviews
- Summarized SERPs
- Zero-click realities
So if your strategy relies solely on “getting the blue link,” you’re already behind.
The new strategy?
- Optimize for presence, not just position.
- Become the canonical voice for your niche
- Ensure your content feeds machine visibility as much as human visibility
Own your slice of the knowledge graph. Embed your expertise into the internet’s bloodstream. Be unmissable even when unlinked.
Excelsior, Entity Warriors
Onwards, Upwards, and Everywhere In-Between!
As I sipped my lukewarm tea in the back row, tweeting furiously and occasionally yelling “Oh yeah!” at the after Algo Afterparty morning session, I realized something:
This industry is brilliant. It’s weird. It’s filled with people who know far too much about canonical tags and still wear ironic hats. (Thanks for the bucket hat, Search Atlas!)
And that’s exactly why SEO Week matters.
Because in the age of AI and answer engines, we need conferences that don’t just rehash ranking tactics. We need ones that challenge our understanding of knowledge itself.
To everyone I met: cheers. To everyone I missed: you still owe me a drink. 🙂
Now go forth. Be cited. Be structured. Be the cheese the machines crave.
#SEOWeek #KnowledgeDistance #ImNotDancingYoureDancing
Thank You
Too many people to thank. But I’ll try anyway. Thanks Aleyda & SEOFOMO for the ticket, Dixon, InLinks, and Waikay for getting me there, Mike King & iPullrank Team (including Garrett of course!), Krishna Madhavan (wonderful thoughtful kickoff), Elias Dabbas (one word. smart.), Jori Ford (always brilliant to see you), Annie Cushing (fantastic to see you back on stage), Manick Bhan (I’m not the legend. You’re the legend!), James Cadwallader (Englishman in NY), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (fascinating), Bianca Anderson (hope to see you talk more!), Ross Hudgens (cool), Wil Reynolds (you build cool shit), Talia Wolf (nailed it), Dawn Anderson (marathon not a sprint), Farrah Bostic (bold beautiful slides and info), Dale Bertrand (good to see you again), Phil Nottingham (great entrance), Crystal Carter (always making me think), Will Critchlow (dapper and ABT), Greg Gifford (cool 3D – raining the bar for the rest of us)), Ruth Burr Ready (bigger *can* be better!), Ross Simmonds (want that jumper!), Cindy Krum (it’s the journeys not the destination), Tom Critchlow (its not easy being green, or a C-Level SEO), Dan Petrovic (welcome to the matrix), Lexi Mills (trust. trust. trsut), Rand Fishkin (we are more), Lily Ray (you *are* the epitome of cool & smart), Jeff Coyle (missed your talk, dang), Robert “RSnake” Hansen (heard this was brilliant), JR Oakes, Devin Bramhall (cheese?), Carrie Rose (luv’ly to meet you), Brie Anderson (be the cheese)!
