What’s happening to SEO in the age of AI and zero-click results?
A lot.
I recently interviewed Mike King, CEO of iPullRank and one of the most respected minds in SEO, about where search is headed and how SEOs need to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. Some of the topics covered:
- Google’s AI Overviews and what SEOs are getting wrong.
- Why SEO tools are years behind how Google actually works today.
- What “relevance engineering” is – and why it may be the future of SEO.
- A preview of his upcoming presentation at SMX Advanced 2025 in Boston.
Reminder: SMX Advanced returns June 11-13 in Boston. Get your tickets now!
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Danny Goodwin: Hey, everybody. Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land here and…
Michael King: I’m Mike King…
Danny Goodwin: I am being joined today by none other than Mike, I feel like everybody in the SEO world probably knows you at this point, but if you want to give yourself a brief introduction of who you are and what you do.
Michael King: CEO and founder of iPullRank, also chief relevance engineer. I’ve been doing SEO for far too long. I also have a background in computer science and we do a lot of enterprise SEO.
Danny Goodwin: And you just had your first SEO Week conference. I was curious how you thought that went and sort of what was the overall theme or takeaways that you think came out of that?
Michael King: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because we kind of positioned it as the next chapter of search and a lot of the things that we talked about were things that ultimately got announced at Google I/O.
Michael King: So, it was kind of indicative of like us just being slightly ahead of the curve with the conference and the feedback, and I’m not being hyperbolic here, but a lot of people said it was the best SEO conference they’ve ever been to. I’m really happy with how all our speakers showed up and excited to do it again next year.
Danny Goodwin: We’re at the year anniversary of the leak from last year. I was just kind of curious if looking back on it any thoughts on how that kind of helped the industry or did it not help as much as you thought it did? What are you thinking about it a year later?
Michael King: I think our industry is really stuck in this kind of cognitive dissonance where when they get new information they just say we already knew that and it’s a way for them to navigate the fear of things changing right so I don’t think enough things have changed right I think that all that information effectively gave us a lot of telemetry of how search works and you would expect that at the very least our software companies would adopt more of that and surface more of that data for us so that we can be more effective in our jobs. But I do believe that there is a certain subset of the community that did absolutely do that. I’m seeing a lot of people that are pulling those metrics and using that to build their own sort of correlation studies. There’s a guy named Manick Bhan from a company called Search Atlas who spoke at SEO Week and he walked through here are all the things that we’re doing. Here are the metrics that we built on the back of that.
Michael King: One of the things that we do a lot of is using that site focus score idea and using embeddings to represent the whole site and then seeing what is the distance for a given page from the overarching site embedding and then if anything is too far away, we just delete that content. And every time we’ve done it, we’ve seen, the whole site perform better. So, it’s shocking to me that we don’t have, content auditing tools that automatically do this sort of stuff.
Michael King: I got an email from the Screaming Frog team the other day and they are starting to incorporate stuff like this. It’s interesting to see that they are always the company that’s the most agile and updating their software in this way and then reluctantly the rest of the SEO space starts to copy what they do over time. But it’s been really slow going on that upper level of the SEO space. But I think that there are more and more people who are like me that are incorporating this sort of stuff into their analyses.
Danny Goodwin: Let’s dive into a little bit of the state of SEO today. Overall, as an industry, what do you think that a lot of us are doing right when it comes to adapting to all these AI changes and what are we doing wrong?
Michael King: I think we’re doing the exact wrong thing as it relates to adapting here because again going back to the software companies, they’re not fundamentally changing. They’re just throwing ChatGPT on top of their service. So, when I left Google I/O, it felt like the idea of logging into one of these tools is just completely futile at this point because it’s such a disconnect between what Google does and what SEO software does. At the very least, we’re 10 years behind, right? And that’s not again being hyperbolic.
Michael King: It’s this idea that Google moved beyond the lexical model of search 10 years ago and all of our tools are still just counting the presence and distribution rates of words and saying “hey, use these words more” or we’re looking at the link graph in a way that is a very small approximation of… what Google is doing but we learned from the leak and also we’ve learned a lot of things from the antitrust trial documents. We’ve learned a lot from the exploit where we can see all the IR metrics and things like that.
Michael King: But at the very least, we’ve learned that, where the pages that link to you sit in the different levels of the index impact how much authority that they pass. But every link index is still using the same metrics that they were using, for the last 15 years. So what we have to use to do our job doesn’t make sense at this point. And then also a lot of where Google is going as far as AI overviews, we don’t have the ability to do what they’re doing. And to some degree it’s not really possible, right?
Michael King: They have this idea that they call query fan-out where effectively they’re doing query expansion based on what the user put in and they’re doing it in a way where they’re just handing it the query off to Gemini 2.5 Pro a customized version of it and it’s then returning a bunch of queries and also different data points from the Knowledge Graph and so on and so forth and then it’s performing all these searches in the background and then it’s pulling chunks from those pages and then feeding to Gemini to then generate what the response is going to be in AI Mode. So we have nothing that does anything like that. And in fact before I jumped on this call with you, I was literally coding a version of what this could look like so I can have something we can point to get a place to start.
Michael King: But there’s numerous keyword research tools out there and none of them have jumped on this idea. Even when you read other people’s blog posts, and when I say other people, I mean not mine about how to optimize for AI Overviews, they’re still just saying “yeah, look up what ranks for that query and then, do your optimizations.” And it’s really hand-wavy, do your optimizations, right? The way that AI Overviews works is also using this query fan-out idea. And so where we got things wrong, I think as an industry is that we initially looked at these AI Overview results and we saw something that ranks you like number 52 is being considered for this AI Overview. That’s not necessarily what was happening.
Michael King: What was happening was that document may have ranked number three for one of these expanded queries, but we just can’t see that. And so what we’re doing is just completely out of phase with what Google is doing. And the problem is that you still get some level of results. And so people are happy just to continue to go with the best practices.
Michael King: But frankly, most of our industry does not know what it’s doing right now.
Danny Goodwin: You just mentioned AI Mode and AI Overviews which are not rankings, they are citations and synthesized answers. So that’s been one of my questions I’ve been having too is how do SEOs continue to provide value heading forward in this new landscape beyond rankings which is what a lot of people have sort of based their whole business around – getting you ranked number one on Google. So where’s our value heading forward?
Michael King: Yeah, I think the channel has fundamentally changed and as a result of that, the user behavior has fundamentally changed. And so what I’m realizing is that search has always been a branding channel. We’ve never positioned it that way because it’s always been considered like, performance, we drive traffic, we drive clicks. But with more of these surfaces that are popping up, whether it’s featured snippets or AI Overviews or AI Mode, there’s a lot of instances where the user doesn’t have to click to take an action, if you look up a query that’s [best earbuds for working out], and you see in the AI Overview Apple AirPods, cool. You don’t have to click through for that.
Michael King: You can go to the store and buy the Apple AirPods. But we’ve never taken credit for that because we look at channels like display that have zero click or .0001% click-through rate and we’re like that’s not real. That doesn’t do anything. But the reality is that branding channels do a lot. Running YouTube Ads, running a Super Bowl ad – that creates search volume. So what’s happening here is that you might type in a non-branded query and then you see some branded information and you take action or you see some branded information and that informs the subsequent query that you’re going to run and then take action.
Michael King: So, I think what we need to be doing is a more strategic thing where we’re leaning more into the branding aspect of the channel and then showcasing for clients like, “hey, this is a way that we can help you change the mind share,” not just how do we drive clicks for you? Because the reality is that people are getting their information directly from the SERP.
Michael King: And again, that is a valuable thing. But what we’re ultimately seeing is that when they do click, it is a more qualified user because they’re more educated. So we have to explain to clients that the relationship between clicks, impressions, and conversions has changed a bit. And in a lot of cases we see that conversions may be going up even though traffic is going down. But nevertheless, all of this is a strategic discussion that we need to be having. And the problem is that SEO is historically not good at being strategic.
Danny Goodwin: So, you’ve been around for far too long in the industry, like a lot of us at this point. Is there anything that’s exciting you about SEO and in the future?
Michael King: Yeah, it’s all very exciting because we’re in a space where we’re changing things. So, we’ve got to invent things, we got to research things, we got to find out, what actually works now. So, it’s a lot of fun to play around with these things. And also just the technology is marvelous, I mean, it’s like the new aspects that they’re adding to Google search are mindblowing, the fact that we’re talking about personal context, We’re talking about deep search. We’re talking about all these new things that allow us to get directly to these answers. We’re talking about the multimodality aspect of it where you can bring in videos and very much understand it or the information can only be in Japanese but they’re going to translate it into English and give it to me. All of this is amazing.
Michael King: And so figuring out where we fit in this again for so many people is like a fearful endeavor, but to me it’s exciting because it’s like we have the opportunity to define something new. And again, this is where my problem comes with the SEO community is that so many people are just saying “it’s just SEO.” And where they’re correct is that the fundamentals still need to be here. You still need to have a technically solid website that’s accessible. You’ve got to have the content. You’ve got to make sure your 301 redirects are in place, all that sort of stuff. But the big difference is that what they do with our inputs is dramatically different.
Michael King: And so we don’t have the control that we did before. you put something into Google before, it comes out the same on the other side. Now it is enhanced. It is chopped and screwed and then it’s served up to the user in a way that’s unrecognizable and you don’t know if it’s going to be your site or someone else’s site that shows up there when you have the same information. So I think that is a fundamental difference on how we need to be operating. But we don’t have enough visibility into what we need to be doing to operate that way. And the way we get that isn’t through optimization. It’s through engineering.
Danny Goodwin: And on the other end, as you alluded to, there are some fearful people at this moment of all the changes that are going on, especially following I/O. Is there anything right now in the SEO world that is sort of keeping you up at night? Is there anything that has you concerned?
Michael King: My only concern is the lack of information from Google about the search behavior changes. I think, and I said this to some engineers and Danny Sullivan and so on. What would have been super valuable would have been them to add something to how Google works section of the site that talks about “hey AI overviews is shifting user behavior. you should expect that there will be less clicks.” Because, without that, what we’ve had to do as a community is tell our clients that prove it. And after, 25 years of being measured on traffic, which we can argue was right or wrong, we’re now telling them that they should expect less traffic.
Michael King: So we don’t have, credibility to establish that. We needed Google’s support on that. And I think that’s especially disheartening because, our relationship with Google was symbiotic, Google’s search quality would not be anywhere near as good if it wasn’t for us. They wanted sites to go secure, so we pushed that. They wanted core web vitals so they can make the web faster and save money in crawling and so on. We gave them that. They can’t give us something as small as “things are changing. Here’s a document that you can give to your clients so they can have their expectations managed.” That’s preposterous. And I don’t think that the relationship that we have with Google is healthy, if you look at Google I/O is a good example, right?
Michael King: They are supporting the development community and it’s not an altruistic thing. It’s obviously so that people use their products and pay for Google Cloud and so on, but there’s also this aspect that they give a lot to the open-source community because they’re going to get a lot back from the open-source community. And so they have this huge event that costs, probably $10-$20 million, where they’re really like taking care of these people. And then for us, they put us in these side rooms and they give us some soda and some chips and they say, “Cool, here’s what it is. Take it or leave it.”
Michael King: That’s not a good way to manage a relationship with the people that you need. So that’s my big thing. It’s really just like we deserved more support in this moment.
Danny Goodwin: So, just to kind of sum up, based on what you’re seeing right now, do you think SEO is heading toward a period of growth, decline, or reinvention?
Michael King: It needs to be reinvention. And I think what’s going to happen is it’s going to split to some degree. And I think I’m driving the split, right? Because what I’m saying is that we need to reinvent ourselves. And that reinvention I’m calling is relevance engineering. because the SEO frame is so limiting SEO has an awful reputation. There was a study about a year ago where they proved through a longitudinal study that SEO has made Google worse. There’s no standards in SEO and you talk to 10 SEOs and ask them what they do, you’re going to get 10 different answers of how to do an audit, how to do anything, right?
Michael King: And so I think we need to frankly grow up and come to terms with this environment that we’re in and we need to be building open-source software to support this because the SEO software industrial complex is not giving us what we need to do the job as it is today or how it’s going to be in a couple months from now. So, I think that there are going to be people who cling to what SEO has been for the last 25 years and continue to lean on best practices and continue to only make changes when they read a blog post or when Google tells them to do something different. But I think that, this new thing needs to define what it is for itself.
Michael King: SEO has largely been defined by Google and it’s been such a disservice because they tell us not to do certain things so we don’t but the real opportunities often lie in the things they tell us not to do. As an example … our own community has continued to say that page titles should only be 70 characters. That’s not true. It’s 100% not true. They weigh everything that is in that page title and in some cases they will use parts of it to rewrite the page title based on the user’s query. But despite that being an actual fact that you can experiment and see and in fact Google spokespeople have said where did that even come from? We never said 60-70 characters.
Michael King: So, we have all these things that don’t make sense but have this perpetual inertia because so many people said they were true. And that stuff has no place in this environment that is so volatile and just needs new information to capitalize on where we’re going. So, you’re going to have this mindset that continues to persist because it just will. But then you’re going to have this other set of people that are going to be like, “No, let’s test everything. Let’s try and build things that replicate what Google is doing.
Michael King: Let’s pay attention to what’s happening in all the research that Google is sharing and let’s actually make this a thing that is more scientific.
Danny Goodwin: And I heard you mention the term relevance engineering. I know that’s going to be part of your talk at SMX Advance, which is coming up June 11 to 13 in Boston. We are back live in person, which is awesome. I think you’ve spoken at a few Advanceds in your day in person.
Michael King: Absolutely.
Danny Goodwin: So, it’s great to have you back for that. And if you just want to give people who are thinking about going, why should they come to your session?
Michael King: Because I’m the greatest SEO speaker there is. Just no. I’m going to walk through the tenets of everything that I’m talking about. I’m going to make the case very clearly. Here’s where we’re at, what’s going on, here’s the changes that we’re not ready for, and here’s what we need to do to get ready and stay viable in this space. So, we’re going to be thinking strategically about it, but I’m also going to give you tactics and tools and, things to really learn so that you can level up to maintain and grow and thrive through this next era of search.
Danny Goodwin: It’s going to be one of the sessions I’ll be moderating. So, I’m looking very forward to that. So, Mike, thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with us and sharing your insights. It’s always awesome to hear from you. and I sincerely hope a lot of people start really listening to you and following the direction because I think you’re spot on.