Will Scott on AI content reuse, schema and semantics, and generative engine optimization

With AI-driven search transforming how content is discovered and ranked, we must understand how to optimize content and improve visibility for these search results. Enter: GEO, or generative engine optimization.

I interviewed Will Scott, co-founder of Search Influence and instructor of the SMX Master Class on Generative Engine Optimization, about the rapidly evolving search landscape and what it means for brand visibility. Some of the topics covered:

• The evolution of SEO in the age of AI.
• AI-driven content repurposing automation.
• Technical tactics for GEO.
• 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 everyone, Danny Goodwin, editorial director of Search Engine Land here. I’m joined by Will Scott, who will be speaking at SMX Advanced in Boston June 11 to 13 and we’re super excited about it. Will, welcome. Do you want to introduce yourself to people who may not know who you are?

Will Scott: Sure, thanks, Danny. I am also super excited about the return of SMX to the live format. For many, many years I was a regular at SMX Advanced in Seattle. But I think Boston’s going to be even better. So who am I? Will Scott. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Search Influence. We are a nearly 20-year-old digital marketing firm with a lot of strength in SEO.

Will Scott: One of my claims to fame in the SEO industry is back in 2008 at SMX Local Mobile, I coined the phrase barnacle SEO. The idea being – and I was having this conversation like what’s the difference between barnacle SEO and parasite SEO, and the difference is barnacles don’t really hurt much. So, they’re just there. And the other thing that I’ve been just like crazy about for the last two and a half years or so is AI. And so in fact that’s what I’ll be speaking about at SMX Advanced. And we recently produced a Master Class with SMX on generative engine optimization and we’re going to be doing version two of that in October, which should be really cool. I imagine between now and then a lot of interesting stuff will happen.

Danny Goodwin: Absolutely a lot of new models probably between now and then. Things are definitely moving fast. We’re all right now trying to adapt to all these changes.  So, I was curious from your perspective, maybe taking a big picture view, how do you think we’re adapting to all the AI changes in search. What are we doing right and what are some of us doing wrong?

Will Scott: I was thinking about this morning. It’s the challenge of being in an industry where your personal brand matters so much that you really have to take an extreme position, right? And that’s where we get the whole AI SEO GEO is something totally new right and then the other side which is like hey dude it’s just SEO. So that’s the kind of dichotomy that I see playing out. I’m somewhere in the middle. What I’ve been saying is, yeah, it’s just SEO if you’ve been doing good SEO. But the problem is so much SEO that gets done is still the same old thing.

Will Scott: And I look and I see the top X lists and my favorite is a colleague of ours in one of the industries we work they changed the title tag on the homepage of their website to “number one best SEO firm for [industry]” and I was like “okay come on guys really this is where we’re going?” So at Search Influence we’ve been focused on semantics for a really long time. I think we originally started using schema probably 10 years ago but it was more in the context of things like articles and videos and rich snippets. So it’s different that we came from there to somebody who sort of woke up and discovered schema six months ago.

Will Scott: So if you think schema, in my opinion, you think semantics. And if you think semantics and you think semantic SEO then the leap to AI SEO is not that big a deal. But again, lots of folks pumping out keyword dense content and buying spammy links wherever they can find them maybe in a bit of a transitional phase.

Danny Goodwin: Absolutely. I wasn’t in the industry when it started way back in the 90s, but I imagine I’ve heard the stories from some of the old-timers about, it’s just like somebody mentions a competitor 30 times on their page or a keyword 30 times on their page, you do a 31, you rank number one. I feel like we’re starting to see a lot of that kind of hacky optimization sort of make the rounds on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Transitionary periods are like that. And speaking of transition periods, for so long SEOs so much have been committed to ranking – it’s all been all about ranking and traffic. So, as we move into this new chapter where it’s more about being cited and, being seen and visible as opposed to getting your page ranked. How do SEOs continue to prove value or show value beyond just the ability to rank something?

Will Scott: I think the right answer is business impact for your client organizations. But I think a lot of folks aren’t there yet in terms of their thinking about it. Before SEO I actually put yellow pages online. In the yellow pages they used what they referred to as remote call forwarding numbers, which we now know as call tracking numbers.

Will Scott: And so very early on we were big in the idea of can I attribute all of these leads to the actual source? And way back when in the Google Analytics version 1.0, you could actually get the referral source. So we were doing actually dynamic phone number switching in 2007 with a home-rolled system. So for us, I think that discussion about business impact is not that different. With our clients, we try to get them engaged in the idea of developing smart goals that are not necessarily around SEO metrics. But there’s a lot of folks who are really stuck in metrics that may not be relevant in this AI world.

Will Scott: One of our clients, they’re a tourism organization. They’re the marketing organization in that group, a big KPI for them is actually page impressions. And so they’re hosed, right? I mean, and they rank number one for the phrase, “things to do in [city]” and they’re 2700 pixels down the page underneath all of these new Google features and ads and AI Overviews and People Also Ask. Number one organic, right? And you got to scroll four times to get to it.

Will Scott: So I think it’s tricky because so many people are so accustomed to logging into the dashboard and seeing how many number one rankings they have – and those number one rankings are not going to get you business these days. So, I credit the SMX GEO Master Class with incentivizing me to do a deep dive on a bunch of these AI tracking tools.

Will Scott: And so I think we’re going to get to a place before too long where we’re able to focus on things like citation growth, right? And share of voice in citations within AI, as well as competitive metrics within that that can say we’re winning or not. But I do believe that we’ve got to get comfortable having the conversations about the business.

Danny Goodwin: Great points. So yeah, big time of change. What gets Will Scott excited right now in the world of SEO? Is there anything you’re testing out or any tactics or just anything like what’s kind of exciting to you right now?

Will Scott: So I’m working on a blog post right this second for the Search Influence blog on AI content reuse. It’s a drum I’ve been banging for a while, but what I’m really super pumped about is using automation tools to do it. So, up to this point, we’ve been copying and pasting URLs into different tools and I have this little side project it’s semi-automated SEO. So, I have an RSS feed of marketing blogs in an industry I track.

Will Scott: And so every week, my automation in make.com pulls in all of those blog posts, processes them with ChatGPT, generates an image, and then puts them in a Google Doc for an assistant of mine to go through and screen. He then puts them in WordPress, and I do a final review, and I pick tags and categories and press the button. And the next thing I do is I take that manually into a couple of different tools. NotebookLM where I take that blog and all of the sources and I create a podcast with it and then I take it into Wave. Right?

Will Scott: So, shortly after the launch of that blog post, it’s got an embed of a video and a podcast that’s now live on Spotify, Apple Podcast, etc. And no humans were harmed in the process. So, to me, that’s what I find really interesting is this idea of Ross Simmons has been about content repurposing and content promotion forever. And to me, if we can get from true relevant source document to something that can be repurposed in all of these modalities. So regardless of how you are comfortable approaching information, you’re getting what you need. We’re going to be feeding the humans and we’re going to be feeding the engines, too. And every single one of those lends itself to your topical authority in the knowledge graph.

Will Scott: And so that’s what I’m really excited about. How do we move quickly from, real hopefully human-engaged content into something that serves all of the users and all of the machines and ultimately benefits our clients.

Danny Goodwin: That’s awesome. I love that. Very cool. So on the other end, I’m curious then, is there anything that has you worried right now in the SEO world? Obviously a lot of talk about AI Overviews taking traffic away and zero click and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah. Is there anything sort of keeping you up at night?

Will Scott: To be honest, the one thing that’s keeping me up at night is having that conversation that we started with clients right…and I shared around a potential email to our clients which was like the subject line was something to the effect of “sorry but no it’s not coming back.” So I think it’s going to get some hard editing from my marketing team before it actually goes out but that’s the way I’ve been thinking about it. It’s not the reality of it. It’s the conversations around it that keep me up at night. The reality is the reality right? Try arguing with reality all you like and see how far that gets you.

Will Scott: So to me, it’s having those hard conversations with folks who have spent the last 20 years in this world of ranking. But I’ll tell you, so one more thing that excites me more kind of peripherally is we just got invited to the beta for ads in AIO’s and I’m super pumped about that for a couple of reasons,  One is for some of those clients where they’ve just lost a ton of traffic because the AIO’s and the other Google features, we now get to get them back in front of those searchers in a hopefully manageable, knowable way. But the other thing that I’m really excited about is keywords, right?

Will Scott: I’m really hopeful that one of the outcomes of us being able to put ads in AIO’s is we get to learn what keywords triggered those ads. So, we’ll be able to see even through everybody’s talking after the recent Google patent about the fanning of queries, we’ll get to see how deep do you have to go in those queries as they fan out to get the click. The click being the next step hopefully prior to a real conversion.

Danny Goodwin: Sounds like a good future article for Search Engine Lamd, too. I can’t wait to see what the results are for those AI overview ads. Can you say what vertical it is in?

Will Scott: Yeah, it’s two that we’ve gotten asked into the beta. One is that tourism client I was talking about and then the other is actually senior living.

Danny Goodwin: Very cool.

Will Scott: And I just looked at my calendar and I want to say that the beta was going live on May 27th and I haven’t heard anything from the team on that to understand whether we’ve got actually ads live in there. But I’m really intrigued to know how it goes.

Danny Goodwin: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’m so curious to see how that performs and even, it’s been somewhat murky, too, if you’ll actually get that data. So, I’m super curious to find out. I’m sure you are as well. 

Will Scott: Right. Yeah because we know that we’re not seeing meaningful data in Google Search Console, but as so often happens, my sense historically is that Google is way more willing to give you the real data if you’re paying for it. And arguably, I mean, the real question is could they say, “hey, thanks for those millions of dollars. Up yours on the data.” Maybe, right?” And would advertisers push back. Sure. But then there would be that whole thing of “Yeah, whatever. We’re Google, right?” I mean, so I don’t know. We’ll see.

Danny Goodwin: All so sort of zooming out a little bit and based on everything you’re seeing right now, do you feel like SEO is heading toward a period of growth? Is it declining or do you see a reinvention happening right now?

Will Scott: I see reinvention. Short answer, I think that good SEOs going to continue to do good SEO and it’s going to be effective in all the places that we’ve been effective. I’m finding the rhetorical shift interesting, right? That now we’re talking about vectors and embeddings and all this stuff that’s very sort of AI centric. I remind people of this that the knowledge graph blog post on the Google developer or Google webmasters blog went live in 2012. So Google’s been thinking about this stuff for the last 13 years. The rest of us are just catching up. And so I’m really interested. I saw a post from Dan at Agital earlier today that they’ve launched a tool that I’d seen him demo in a webinar, which is basically looking at the topical relevance of your whole website based on vectors and embeddings, right?

Will Scott: He talked in this webinar about how when you start to look at your website from that perspective, you see semantic leakage, if you will, right? Because you want to get to this place and Gianluca [Fiorelli] talks about this in a really smart way. This idea of monossemanticity, is you want to be totally unambiguous in the topic or theme that you’re talking about. And so that’s where I find this idea of if I can look at a whole website and I can say, so we’re talking about online ads, we’re talking about baking brownies, right? Okay, one of these doesn’t fit.

Will Scott: And if I can look at it through data and say maybe I should get rid of that, then I get to be more focused in the kind of semantic tailoring of my content and my website and all that kind of stuff. So I think that’s super cool.

Danny Goodwin: That is super cool. Yeah, I’m very excited to see I’m hoping a lot of tools will be coming out with more of that. Because I talked to Mike King and he’s very much on the idea that a lot of the tool companies are about 10 years behind Google. So, it’s definitely ripe space for some tools to come out right now.

Danny Goodwin: So, I’m looking forward to your session at, SMX Advanced, where your session is 5 key insights for mastering Generative Engine Optimization, which you may have heard of referred to as AI SEO or answer engine optimization, or it’s sort of undefined. We’ve sort of bought into the GEO moniker, but it’s all the same thing.

Danny Goodwin: So, for someone watching who may be interested in going to the show or already and is super looking forward to your session, what are you going to be talking about and what can we look forward to learning there?.

Will Scott: let me throw one more acronym at you that I really found amusing and it came from Greg Sterling and it was search experience optimization which we got AEO, GEO, and we’ve got SXO. So I think it’s all about the intonation right it’s what I said in my comment back to Greg was okay if we’re going to use that we need to make it sex, ohh?

Will Scott: But I don’t know if that one’s going to stick. So, I looked at as I was working on this and I’m still doing my final tuning on the five insights that I came up with were more around on page. And what was interesting as I started getting deeper is that you can see that some of the things that we’ve been doing in the context of E-E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritiveness, all rolling up to trustworthiness. That some of those things, if you think about them sort of tactically and technically, can be expressed on the page in a way that helps make your content more understandable to the answer engines. And actually we’re recording this on May 27th, 2025.

Will Scott: And I think just this morning we republished Duane Forester’s article on the new search stack on Search Engine Land. And he goes into some really interesting detail on things that we’ve done that we knew had value but we didn’t necessarily understand their connection tables of contents, right? Why is a table of contents interesting? Because it helps the crawlers move very quickly by topic to the important portion of that article, right? And what we know now, and honestly, Cindy Krum brought this up 10 years ago. What we know now is that it’s not about PageRank, it’s about passage rank.

Will Scott: Cindy referred to them as fraggles, the little they were there was a point where we were calling them shingles. But the whole idea being it’s not about when you look at vector embeddings, when you go deep in the AI, it’s not about the page, it’s about the passages. And so it’s about the likeness, the similarity of one passage to another.  And so if I can get the engine to understand here’s the passage, this is what you’re looking for, then it can have a better understanding of that in the context of those vectors and their ranking.

Will Scott: And so the other thing that was really interesting to think about is in page citations. So if I’m referencing a piece of data, then I should really be citing the source. How have we historically cited a source? We’ve maybe linked to it. But if we want to really fulfill on the E-E-A-T in the context of AI we should cite it like we’re writing a paper. So, I have something else that I’m putting together where I had a bunch of actual citations and so I had footnote markers and I linked them from the footnote marker to the actual citation, as an anchor link so that it would be really clear that that’s the citation.

Will Scott: The challenge that, and much of this is almost anthropomorphizing the machine, the challenge is trust. In a world where we can generate a thousand pages of content an hour if we chose to how do the engines know what’s trustworthy. So by doing things like this – by citing an actual source  with a link to it and a reference to the original publication – we’re saying this is a trustworthy piece of content. So those were of the things that I’m going to talk about in Boston, it’s the idea of question first. And then labeling things, clear labels.

Will Scott: Sometimes they’re on the page in the form of an H2 or an H3. Sometimes they’re under the page in the form of schema knows about sameas. Speed matters because one of the tools that we’ve been using for the AI view called Scrunch. it shows you the page in markdown and it’s interesting because you get to see, okay, the first 200 lines are my navigation. That might not be the best experience when the engine’s trying to get to the passages so that it can start to actually do all of the embeddings and whatnot. And then jump links, what we were just talking about. And finally making it really clear what the source is so that you can be the trusted answer in the database full of embeddings I was going to say brain of the machine but really it’s in the embeddings database.

Will Scott: And the other thing Danny that I thought about was I looked at so I was working on this and I was like okay great let me make sure that this is not overlapping with other sessions and the great news it’s not. And so my intention so for anybody who hasn’t yet committed to come, my intention is I’m going to be in that track all day long. I’m going to be watching all of the stuff that’s going on and if we get to the end of the day and I’m like here’s a real opportunity, we may just throw this whole thing out the window, and we can link to it somewhere else and hopefully fill in some gaps on the other stuff.

Danny Goodwin: I can’t wait to see it. Will Scott, thank you so much for joining us. You’ll be speaking at SMX Advanced in Boston live in June 13. And I’ll be moderating you. looking forward to that. Always bring so much information to people who go to the shows and we really appreciate you. Thanks for taking the time to join us today.

Will Scott: Yeah, thank you, Danny. It’s my pleasure again. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be back live and in person with y’all. I’m looking forward to drinking from the fire hose all day long. And I hope everybody else is, too.

Danny Goodwin: All right. Thanks, and thank you all for watching. Bye, everybody.