The Attention Economy: AI, Search, and the Future of Measurement | Duane Forrester
Welcome back to The Search Session! I’m your host, Gianluca Fiorelli, and in this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with someone who helped shape the early infrastructure of the search world as we know it—Duane Forrester.
Duane isn’t just a name from Bing’s history (he was one of the minds behind Bing Webmaster Tools), he’s a force in the ongoing evolution of how we discover and understand information online. Today, he wears multiple hats—as COO of LynxPulse, founder of UnboundAnswers, a fractional CMO/SME, and yes, even as a certified drone pilot and guitar craftsman.
What followed in our conversation was not a typical SEO talk. We explored how AI is reshaping not just search engines but the very concept of search itself. We dove into the future of metrics, the shift from CTRs to visibility, the reality of zero-click experiences, and why many businesses and SEOs aren’t prepared for the upheaval that’s already underway.
If you’re ready to challenge how you think about SEO, marketing, and what it means to stay visible in a multi-agent world, this episode is for you.
Let’s jump in.
Video Chapters
Duane's Reflections on Early Reactions to OpenAI and Generative AI
Concerns About the SEO Industry’s Readiness for AI-Driven Change
How the Young Generation Finds What They Need, Beyond "Googling"
Redefining Our Profession: From SEO to Information Retrieval Specialists
The Central Role of Monosemanticity and Attention Mechanisms in AI Search
The Coming Evolution of Advertising - Smart Glasses and Eye Tracking
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, and welcome back to The Search Session.
Today, we have someone who, honestly, helped make the story of search. Why?
Meet Our Guest: Duane Forrester
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because he worked at Bing and was one of the key people behind the creation of Bing Webmaster Tools.
This incredible professional has grown so much over the years. He’s not just working in search anymore, though search still remains his main focus.
Now, he’s the Chief Operating Officer at LynxPulse, founder and CEO of UnboundAnswers, offering his consulting services as a fractional CMO/SME. And just to top it all off, he might have one of the coolest side gigs out there—he’s a certified freelance drone pilot! So if you need someone who really knows how to handle a drone, this is your guy.
Duane Forrester: I'm happy to—
Gianluca Fiorelli: How are you doing?
Duane Forrester: I am awesome! Thank you very much for having me on the show today.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I should’ve also added—okay, maybe it’s more of a hobby—but you're also pretty skilled at crafting guitars.
Duane Forrester: Yeah! In fact, I was in my shop this morning doing some work for a client, one of my neighbors. His son bought a guitar from me earlier this year, and now he wants a modification done. So I was out there doing some metal work, trying to figure out how to give him exactly what he’s looking for. I haven’t found the perfect solution yet, but I will!
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes! Maybe I should start charging when people ask me to paint their miniatures.
Duane Forrester: I'll tell you—mine is on display in the house. It’s beautiful, and I think of you every time I walk by it. So yeah, there’s definitely something there!
You know how ChatGPT does those little dolls in the plastic packaging? It’s just an image, but it looks like an action figure of you, me, anyone really. You could totally do that in real life. And there’s less risk, too, since there's no data tied to it.
Although... you could embed an RFID chip with some info—so when someone scans it with their phone, it pulls up a virtual business card. There you go! That could be fun.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That would be cool.
Duane Forrester: Right?
Duane's Reflections on Early Reactions to OpenAI and Generative AI
Gianluca Fiorelli: So—we’ve already started strong with ChatGPT and unconventional ideas. But take me back a bit… what went through your mind almost three years ago, when OpenAI first announced what was coming?
Duane Forrester: Oh… I had a range of thoughts.
The first one, honestly, was—it wasn’t a surprise. It felt expected.
Back when I was at Microsoft, I spent a little time working with the team that was building Cortana. It wasn’t a deep involvement, just a small part, but it gave me early exposure to what machine learning looked like in terms of training systems. At the time, it wasn’t particularly advanced or intelligent, but it opened my eyes to what was coming.
Within a year, we had Cortana on Windows phones. You could have conversations with it—limited, of course—but there was utility there.
So when OpenAI brought ChatGPT to the world, I thought, “Huh, okay… this is interesting.” It felt like the genie was out of the bottle. This wasn’t going to stay confined within the big tech companies anymore.
At that point—three years ago—Perplexity didn’t even exist. And today, Perplexity is very much a part of the conversation in the world of search. Like it or not, it’s here, and it matters.
That was a moment for me. I thought, “Here we go.” Now we’re starting to see real, practical utility. This is going to change things—and it’s going to keep changing things, very quickly.
And then, immediately, I thought: “Oh crap. I’ve got a lot to learn.”
New ideas, new directions, new technologies. I started asking myself: What’s this going to impact? How? What do I need to understand?
So, I just jumped in. I started using it. I wanted to understand where it was at that point, how I could use it effectively, how it fit into the broader landscape, and what businesses needed to consider.
All of those thoughts were swirling. And now, now I feel like I can almost keep up.
I can see the leading edge, but I still have to sprint just to stay with it. Things are evolving so fast.
Concerns About the SEO Industry’s Readiness for AI-Driven Change
Duane Forrester: But I’ll be honest—my biggest feeling right now is… fear.
There’s a very real layer of fear I carry. Because we have, what, hundreds of thousands of SEOs out there? People who call themselves SEOs? And I’d say 97, 98% of them are not equipped to handle what’s happening right now, or what’s coming next.
And that worries me.
They’ll end up leading businesses into poor decisions. They’ll miss opportunities. And those businesses will suffer for it.
On top of that, we’ve got companies that simply refuse to embrace change. Maybe because the founders or decision-makers are older and stuck in their ways. Or maybe because they’re younger, inexperienced, and don’t know what they don’t know—so they lock into one idea and think that’s enough.
I don’t know how it’ll play out for everyone, but I’m pretty confident we’re heading into a period of serious upheaval.
And while part of me is really excited by that… another part is genuinely concerned.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I feel the same way, honestly.
On one hand, I’m actually happy to return to a state where I’m a student again, because that’s great for me.
And I think we do have an advantage: we’re older students. Sure, it can be harder to get back into the mindset of learning new things. But we’ve grown up with a methodology. We have memories of the past.
So, in a way, our brains are... well, trained muscles. Not always as sharp as we’d like—at least in my case!—but still, they’ve been exercised in the right way over the years.
On the other hand, yes... it’s not exactly fear I feel—it’s more a sense of uncertainty.
Duane Forrester: Yeah, that’s right. That’s fair.
Metrics Duane Would Now Build for Bing Webmaster
Gianluca Fiorelli: One of the biggest questions I keep asking myself is: how the hell do we measure things now?
Because we don’t have any solid tools.
So let’s jump into some SEO science fiction.
Let’s say Microsoft calls you up and says, “Hey Duane, you did great work at Bing. We need you to come back and build something new.”
The mission: help people, especially website owners, understand what’s actually happening to their traffic in the age of ChatGPT, OpenAI, Perplexity, and all these emerging tools.
Are these referrals? Are they organic? Are they something else entirely?
I’m sure you’ve thought about this already, so tell me: what kind of metrics would you start building?
Duane Forrester: This is a fascinating question, Gianluca, because I’ve actually written a couple of Substack articles recently that touch on this very topic.
And I’ve got two more coming out soon that dive even deeper, looking at attention spans and what optimization really looks like in a world of generative AI search solutions.
If I put my old Microsoft hat back on—when I was Senior Product Marketing Manager and helped build and launch Webmaster Tools—we had a pretty clear idea of what metrics people wanted to see.
I knew, because I was an SEO. I knew the kinds of data I wanted and the kinds of data I relied on to make decisions. So I worked to bring that to market through Webmaster Tools.
But here’s something folks don’t always realize: not everything I asked for made it in.
Some of the metrics I wanted to include weren’t allowed to be shared. They were considered proprietary—too sensitive for the search engine to expose. And that’s always going to be the case. There will always be internal metrics we want… that we simply won’t get.
Now, this is just my personal opinion—my own guess—but I suspect that if Google could rewind the clock, they might choose to share less data with webmasters, SEOs, and businesses.
Why? Because once they started sharing, it created an expectation to keep sharing—and to keep expanding on it. That means more time, more resources, deeper conversations… and that’s not always a great trade-off from a business perspective.
And let’s be honest: not all the data they share today is decision-making data. A lot of it is just informational.
The Real Value of First-Party Data
Duane Forrester: I think one thing businesses really need to do, especially now, is rethink their reliance on third-party data sources.
SEOs often assume we need to base decisions on analytics from GA4, Search Console, whatever. And while that’s helpful, it’s still third-party data.
Your own first-party data is often just as valuable—if not more valuable—for making smart decisions.
Think about real-world examples: when a product disappears from store shelves, it’s not because the manufacturer thought, “Hey, Duane likes this—let’s mess with him.” No—it’s because I was the only one buying it. There wasn’t enough demand. It’s simple business.
So that kind of first-party insight—what’s actually happening with your customers, your conversions, your bottom line—that’s what truly matters.
And now, in this new landscape? It’s even harder to see what’s happening in AI-powered search results. It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from ChatGPT or some other system—referrals are murky, indirect, and often invisible.
These environments are designed to keep users there. They give you a direct answer. And maybe there’s a link—but most users probably aren’t clicking it.
Some may not even realize the links are there. Or maybe they see them and think, “I trust the answer, and if I really need to, I can click through to verify it.”
I don’t know if that’s good or bad—but it’s the reality right now.
And the key metric—Gianluca, the real key—is simple: it’s your money. Your conversions. Whatever that looks like for you.
That’s what matters most.
Focus on that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Conversion is surely the queen metric.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But it's inevitable that clients and stakeholders will always need to understand how to allocate budget.
Duane Forrester: Absolutely, yes.
Rethinking Metrics in an AI Search Era
Gianluca Fiorelli: In fact, it’s an idea I’ve been ruminating on—literally ruminating in my brain. Maybe conversion, and maybe even rankings—like the classic average position from Google Search Console—aren’t really valid anymore.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because, for instance, with AI, every link is position one.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So maybe the real metric should be something like average visibility—average visibility across topics. A way to measure a website’s visibility within relevant topics, based on a statistically significant number of potential queries.
And from there—and I’m not an analytical person, but still—we could find a formula to correlate visibility with conversion. Or visibility, brand, because we’ll continue to receive traffic from branded searches, for example.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, it’s about connecting metrics coming from many different channels, not just relying on metrics from a single channel. It’s possible to connect to the metrics of, let’s say, TikTok metrics, or TikTok analytics, or Meta analytics, and find a way to combine them to measure visibility.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Maybe that visibility isn’t sending you traffic, which we’re already seeing. You might get just a tiny percentage of traffic from ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Gemini, or AIO. It’s becoming more apparent to everyone now, especially with the drop in CTRs.
Duane Forrester: Hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I also have a theory in there.
Duane Forrester: Listen, when we talk about the results we're all seeing as an industry, from AIO and these kinds of solutions, every complaint is really just one side of a coin. Because one side of the coin says "the click-through rates are low", "the zero-click searches are expanding", or "I’m not getting traffic.” That side of the coin is balanced against the other side of the coin, which is Google saying, "search share is dropping or flattening, and we need to increase revenue." This is how that happens.
So, that attention—it comes from somewhere. Today, we think the entire economy we're engaged in is centered around dollars, cost per click, and revenue in terms of money. But in reality, it’s about attention. That’s the real economy, and that’s the other side of the coin.
So when we see low click-through rates but Google has a high capture rate, what they’re actually winning is attention, and that matters more than outright dollars. I see both sides of this, and it's part of why I have a layer of fear about it.
You mentioned shifting budgets and what we should change, and there are two really important things here.
First, I just released an article on Monday where I included a graph I created. It compares a fictional SEO budget today with what it should look like if you're focusing on AI-driven search. And let me tell you—a lot of the traditional things that you have in your budget as an SEO simply don’t exist, and there are completely new things that you need to put your money and resources into in today's new world and moving forward.
And there’s good reason for that. Traditional search still handles trillions of queries globally. But if you look at generative AI-powered search, that space is already in the hundreds of billions of queries—and it’s growing at a much faster, steeper curve than traditional search, which is starting to flatten.
We see that change happening, and it's really important that people understand it.
How the Young Generation Finds What They Need, Beyond "Googling"
Duane Forrester: The second thing—and you mentioned this—is the fracturing of where people are and how they are coming to get answers. Whether that’s on Snap, TikTok, Reddit, or wherever, that fragmentation is having a measurable impact.
Maybe not on outright search query volume, but definitely on people’s behavior. People are retraining that skill of information retrieval that we’ve all been taught over the past 30 years. It’s a new skill set given to humankind, digital information retrieval.
That skillset is now getting refined, and we’re not coming at this saying: “Oh, Google is a verb, it’s my spot, I’m just going to Google that.” No, no, no. Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and even a big portion of Millennials have already moved on from that model. What we’re seeing now is a much broader, multi-sourced approach to finding information.
And they don’t care if the answer comes in a short-form video on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. It’s about convenience and context: “This is where I am. I’m comfortable. The app was open, I asked my question, and I got my answer.” And that’s our world now.
We can no longer depend on what we thought of as a traditional search as the core driver three years from now. Over the next couple of years, we’re going to see that trend continue, flattening out for a lot of companies. And I think maybe sooner than that for most companies.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, in fact, just as it can sound like an anecdote, the younger people today don’t even know what it means, “I Google it“.
Duane Forrester: Yes. I’ve got a story to share. It’s not mine—it’s actually from Michael Bonfils.
He once went to his daughter’s school for a parent day, and he went in and the teacher said, “What do you do?“. Michael explained: “I run an international SEO company. I help businesses get ranked highly on Google, so when you search for something on Google, my clients are there at the top. That helps their business be successful.”
And one of his daughter’s friends, sitting in the front row, raised her hand. Michael looked at the teacher and said, “Okay, let’s do a Q&A.” The girl asked, “What’s Google? I hear my parents talking about it all the time, but I don’t know what it is”. I encourage people to reach out to Michael and ask him to explain his reaction at that moment. His reaction was equal parts of shock and fear. In that moment, he said that he realized that the future is going to be vastly different from what we’ve been expecting.
Because we literally have the lifespan of that child until they get their first job and start becoming a consumer. Or even when they start becoming a consumer, which is happening younger and younger—as kids don’t necessarily need a job to get money, they get gifts for birthdays, and so on—they already have opinions on where to spend money and where they are going to find the things they want to buy.
Unfortunately, I think for all of us, and to be fair, this is a sample of one single individual child, so it is not an analogy for an entire generation. But two generations ago, you’d never hear a story like this. But today, we hear the story more and more.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, indeed. Well, you surely know the “messy middle” model that Google came up with a few years ago. It was clearly just customized to its own experience.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, that triggered something happening outside, and then people obviously went into “search mode”, where they move through exploration, then consideration up until going to finally make a decision. It was an interesting model. But today, the messy middle has completely exploded.
Duane Forrester: Oh, yes!
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because the trigger can be anything.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It could be anything from a TV ad, or on YouTube, or a video from an influencer on TikTok, anything, and then the whole loop between discovery and consideration just jumps from one place to another.
Duane Forrester: Oh, yes!
Gianluca Fiorelli: And it can even happen offline. The exit might not happen on a website—it could be in a physical Zara store instead of Zara’s site.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So this is something we’ve started to talk about more here in Italy: the messy middle is no longer just Google, it’s expanding.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Just a few years ago, right around when ChatGPT came out, we also started rethinking the role of SEO. And it became clear that the figure of the SEO shouldn’t just be about classic search anymore.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s not classic search versus AI search—it’s about search as a concept.
Duane Forrester: Yes. Broader. Higher level.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Exactly. It’s about mastering the art of understanding how people search—how they look for ways to fulfill their desires, dreams, needs, whatever. And it’s about guiding clients, the company, to connect with those people across all the potential steps of a search journey that might evolve into a full customer journey.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s actually why my website is called I Love SEO—but below the name, you’ll see the tagline: Search Experience Optimization, not Search Engine Optimization.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s kind of fun, because that concept—Search Experience Optimization—is quite old. It goes back quite a bit.
Duane Forrester: Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I remember when Matt Cutts mentioned it years ago.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And I remember a talk you gave at a conference we both attended—I think it was in Dallas. It was pre-COVID, during what felt like a boom period for SEO.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And you were already advising us back then: we needed to change the definition of our work. That just calling it SEO wasn’t enough to convince stakeholders of the full value we bring.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That reminds me of something Mike King recently started pushing—a sort of campaign saying we must redefine ourselves. That we shouldn’t even call it SEO anymore. He suggested calling it “relevance engineering”.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Personally, I find that term a bit convoluted... but I do understand the idea behind it.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: How would you define the work, the role, of an SEO in this changing moment? What do you define it as? It can’t be just “SEO”.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It can’t be someone who does the work of everybody else, because that would be crazy, it would be illogical.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Redefining Our Profession: From SEO to Information Retrieval Specialists
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, where do you see the evolution of the SEO professional heading?
Duane Forrester: This is a really interesting idea and question. I don’t have a final answer, but several thoughts have been occurring to me over the last couple of years, especially the last three-ish years, with generative AI becoming part of what we’re doing.
Look, you can argue with me that ChatGPT is not search, at least not in a traditional sense. And you’d be right—it’s not. However, maybe the traditional sense is not how we should be defining things anymore. Perhaps the concept of search, at its core, is really about finding something you're interested in.
I've started going back to the term information retrieval, and the reason is that, in my mind, it sits a layer above search as we currently define it. So, when I use information retrieval, I’m thinking about it in broader terms. All of us, every day, are involved in information retrieval as human beings. It’s what we do. We have senses that constantly gather information for our brains, helping us survive, helping us find comfort, helping us succeed, or pursue intellectual goals. Whatever it is we’re trying to find or search for, our senses help us do that.
And I think that in the future, we may not be called SEOs. Maybe we’ll be something like information retrieval specialists—though I admit, there are way too many letters and words and syllables in there. We may get more aligned with, if AI is developing agents, then we ourselves may be the human agent of some kind that is a part of this.
So, if your AI agent is designed to handle all the grunt work—all the lower-level, tedious tasks like actually finding the information, collating it, understanding what matters to me on a personal level—and then giving that back to me, it essentially lessens the cognitive workload of information retrieval.
If that’s what the AI agent’s job is, then my job is to help that agent include me as the best answer to a question. And so, we may be agent optimization, we may be agent support. I don’t know what we will end up with as titles in the future.
But I do know this: if you’re an SEO and you define yourself strictly as an SEO, and you hold onto that title… Look, we’re all friends here on the show, and when we’re talking to each other, we can describe ourselves as SEOs. We get that. We understand what that means.
But when you’re talking to your boss, to stakeholders, to the people who allocate resources and budgets, when you’re having those conversations, you may not want to call yourself an SEO. Because now, you’re signaling that you’re from a distant time in the past. And you really don’t want that. You want to show them there’s a way forward, and that it involves embracing these systems.
I’m actually writing an article right now, and in it, I say something rather cheeky. I talk about crawling and what’s happening with AI agents and the AI systems today. And just as a side note, I ask the question: “How’s that plan to block AI robots helping you now?”
Because I was never a supporter of that decision. A lot of people in our industry said, “Yep, we’ve got to block them. Can’t have that. Don’t want them stealing our content, don’t want them taking our ideas.”
But I never really believed in that. I never thought my content was so precious that a human should see it, but a crawler shouldn’t. But why Google over anyone else? You’ve literally backed yourself into a corner where you won’t get traffic from one source, and if traffic goes away from the other source, you lose.
I’ve never seen that as a winning strategy. And now, with all the data showing consumer use of these tools—and the tools themselves ramping up—I just can’t see that as anything other than a short-sighted decision.
As for what we’re going to be called next... I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of acronyms. Honestly, I’m already tired of the industry constantly trying to invent a new name for what we do—everyone trying to be the inventor of the new acronym. I don’t care what we’re called. I care about results. And to get results, you have to know what work to do. You have to know how to optimize.
And if you’re going to talk to me about technical SEO as we’ve all known it over the last 30 years, I’m falling asleep. That’s not the approach anymore. You need to wholesale change things. That means, at a company level, you may need different employees with different skill sets than what you have right now. At an agency level, you’ll offer different services. And you’ll need to hire different skill sets in order to provide those services to your clients. Your reporting will change, too. You’ll have to define new metrics, make sure your clients understand the value of those metrics, and then refine them over time. This is where we are now.
I think of the very beginning of SEO—it was a complete mess. It was a dumpster fire happening inside a goat rodeo. We were all running around with different ideas, no alignment, and it took years for us to centralize around core themes and best practices we could all agree worked. Eventually, we developed a basic outline of what SEO was.
And look—if you’re new to this space or you’ve never come across this—track down Brett Tabke, way, way back. It's got to be a hundred years ago now, but he released 26 Steps to 15K a month or a day. Look up that concept. It was a checklist—probably the first of its kind—that SEOs used for daily work. Tasks you’d do each day for a month that, when accumulated, would lead to better rankings and more traffic.
We are at the beginning of that all over again right now.
The Central Role of Monosemanticity and Attention Mechanisms in AI Search
Duane Forrester: Because I can assure you: AI doesn’t read the way you and I do. It doesn’t assign value in the same way. That catchy hook—the ego hook, the emotional hook, the anger hook—all the tactics we’ve been chasing for 30 years in marketing? They don’t matter to AI. It sees them as fluff. Useless words. They don’t give it what it needs. AI needs data. And if you’re not lining up with that, that’s a fundamental failure.
Gianluca Fiorelli: In fact, one of the concepts I talk about, I don’t know if you read my long, long guide about how to use semantics.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: There are two concepts in there. One was actually suggested to me by Dejan SEO, and the other was already part of my guide. But one is monosemanticity—the necessity of being clear, without any possible ambiguity or disambiguation problems when you're writing.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: The second one came from Dan Petrovic, who told me it's actually more important than all this talk we hear about cosine similarity.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because actually, LLMs don’t really use cosine similarity.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: They use attention mechanisms. And boom—that changed everything for me. So I started studying: what the hell is an attention mechanism? And essentially, it’s nothing more than the ability to capture the attention of a reader about a topic.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: See the different parts of a long text, for instance.
Duane Forrester: Yep.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And that’s essentially just being a good writer, if you’re writing content—or a good video maker, if you're creating video.
This is actually a way I’ve found to explain things in plain words, so my clients can understand. Because if I had to talk to them using formal terminology.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Like... Italians would just go, “What the hell are you saying?”
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So yeah, I totally think that’s important. In fact, I read your Substack article—the one about the difference between SEO and AI search, and how you also need to allocate budgets differently because of how things are evolving.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s interesting. It’s not a total transformation, but it is a big shift. What I’m noticing is that a lot of the crappy thing of SEO... It’s just not useful anymore. And for me, that’s actually an advantage.
The Two Audiences Approach: Human and AI
Duane Forrester: So, okay—I want you to think about something, because everything you’re saying—I agree with it, I understand it, and I support that perspective. I’d just like you to add something to your thinking here.
You're going to be the best writer. You’re going to be the best video content maker. All of that makes absolute sense. But—what if your audience is not just human? What if your audience is now an AI agent?
This is a fundamental change, because how you write for a human—and what a human values—is very different from what an AI agent values.
So, as we—and I’ll still call us SEOs, because we haven’t really come up with a different name yet—continue to guide companies forward, we have to guide them toward this two-audience concept.
One is the human. Yes, that’s great—we know how humans consume content and how they like to consume it. But we also have to produce content that is liked and consumable by the AI agent.
And there’s a very important reason for that. It’s not pandering. It’s the same methodology that drives us to apply EEAT logic to everything we build—whether it’s written content, actual branding, and positioning of a company, and all of that.
The fact of the matter is: these AI agents act as filters. That filtering is similar to search, but also very different.
Search is all about: “Here are a bunch of answers. Go take a look, and you tell me which of these is the best for you.” That concept—and we’re talking about 10 blue links here, right? Which is old, but still very much in play, makes the human asking the question do a lot of work. I have to— and I don’t read, I scan down—identify something in this list that you’ve given me. I will take action and click on it. I will then have to go consume whatever that content is on that webpage.
You’re seeing a lot of the reasons why Google and Bing rank things the way they do in this process, right? Trustworthiness of a domain, ease of consumption of the content when it lands on the page, content above the fold.
All of these changes that have happened in search, that SEOs have had to deal with,
have literally come as a result of improving everything on the website. Now, if you’re talking about an AI agent, I am asking it to find me a source for something.
This morning, I mentioned I was doing work on a part for a guitar, for one of the custom guitars I sold recently, and I needed to figure out how to remove chrome from a piece of metal. And I know I could just grab my grinder and grind it off, but that’s, you know, a pretty inelegant approach. Which, incidentally, is the exact approach I took, because the other approaches that are more elegant are also toxic, with chemicals.
So, what I needed in that moment was just a list of a few options for how I could do the work. I already knew I had the type of acid on hand, and I had the hardware to get the job done. I just wanted a quick overview of what the best solution might be. I didn’t need anything more than that.
So that AI system—and I’m using ChatGPT for this—that AI system literally is my filter against everything on the internet. I don’t need everything on the internet. I need it distilled down into a small, easily consumable answer so I can get on with the job I have.
And I think that’s a really important inflection point today. Because that’s exactly what AI Overviews are designed to do. It’s what Copilot answers are designed to do. It’s what ChatGPT is doing. It’s what Perplexity does.
But it’s not about making the human go do the work anymore. And just to be clear, humans are inherently lazy. And I say that not because, you know, you’re lazy, I’m lazy, or that we need to be more active or anything like that.
I’m talking about laziness in terms of biology. Our brain is the most voracious organ we have in our body when it comes to consuming calories. And it's hardwired into our DNA to limit the use of it, because the more we use it, the more calories we burn— and that, in primitive terms, would mean we’d need to do more hunting and gathering, which exposes us to more danger. This is a genetic-level cycle that humans still operate through.
So, we are programmed to be lazy. When you give me an answer through an AI system—an answer that’s plausible, proven trustworthy, and that I know is good— I’m not going to go do the work of clicking through links or researching more. That’s laziness at a human scale. I’ll just take the one answer and move on.
Anticipating Upcoming Changes to Google’s Interface
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah. And that’s why—Cindy Krum and I were discussing this too and were thinking the same—what we’re seeing in Google right now is really just an interim interface. An inter-kingdom interface between the old model and what Google already showed us in the trailer at the last Google I/O.
Duane Forrester: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: What they showed in that Google I/O 2024 trailer it’s not fully here yet. But it’s starting to show up. Because just yesterday—well, a few days ago from when we’re recording this—Google showed how, in AI Overviews, you can now interact with a recipe card.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You can toggle between different types of cooking styles or different calorie levels. So, that was the kind of example Google showed last year. That’s why I think the AI mode—that's currently in testing—will be pushed into classic search.
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because it’s exactly what you were saying—it’s about the agent.
Duane Forrester: Yes. Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s predictive and connected to all our search history, which Google has, stored in trillions of bytes of data.
Duane Forrester: Exactly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And that’s why I think Google’s biggest fear right now is that the United States may force them to sell off Chrome.
Duane Forrester: I’ll tell you—one week from today is Google I/O. That’s when we’re really going to get a look at all of this.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Right—and just for reference, we’re recording this on May 14.
Duane Forrester: Oh, okay. Okay. That’s fine. So, about a week from now, Google I/O will be happening. And I think we’re going to get a very different view of what’s happening in search with Google. I do believe we’re going to see a lot more integration of AI and answers. A lot of what’s been happening behind the scenes—there are really two parallel tracks.
On one side, it’s about figuring out the technology—making sure it’s usable, trustworthy, repeatable, scalable—all the hard work that needs to happen to ensure information retrieval stays as reliable as it’s always been for consumers. Google has set a high standard, and they know they have to live up to it. So they’re going to work really hard to make sure that’s maintained.
On the other side, there’s the need to protect revenue. The need to monetize this new path. And what does that look like? It’s not simple for Google. It’s not easy. We don’t live in the days where there’s just an ad block and people come in and buy ads and that’s all it is. Google now has to go out and explain to advertisers why something new is important—and why it’s better.
And that’s not an easy conversation. It takes months and months of meetings with the largest ad management companies, tools, systems, agencies, and ad buyers—all of them.
So, from a timeline perspective, what we’re seeing makes sense. But I really believe we’re going to see something different. When I/O happens in 2025, I think we’ll definitely see a major change. And I think Google knows they have to make that change. Because again, you’ve got ChatGPT, you’ve got Perplexity.
Perplexity isn’t on the same growth curve as ChatGPT, but between February and March, I think ChatGPT doubled, from 400 to 800 million weekly active users. I mean, just what?!. That kind of growth is unprecedented. When you look at the graphs, nothing in our history has grown that fast. And that’s a real threat to Google. Not because ChatGPT is search, it’s not. But because ChatGPT is changing the behavior of how people search. If people think they’re getting the answer and they’re happy with the answer, that’s a big deal.
So, this idea that you can go into a search result and actually change the recipe ingredients in that AI-powered search result, yeah, that’s great. But again, humans are lazy. Don’t burn calories. Won’t do the work. Simpler is better. And I think that in this next I/O, we’re going to see some very big changes.
The Coming Evolution of Advertising - Smart Glasses and Eye Tracking
Gianluca Fiorelli: I totally agree. And going back a bit, talking about advertisement, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Google just announced, a few days ago, AI Max, this superpowered AI advertising capability. Because I think, if Google can help advertisers understand that by feeding ads contextually and very precise, super-targeted experience for the user, when they’re using and searching for something.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And not just because you’ve bid for a keyword. It’s more effective and maybe it’s going to bring you more conversions, because you’re actually consistent and relevant for that exact moment in the search journey.
Of course, we’ll still need, legally, to label ads as commercial or sponsored.
Duane Forrester: Right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: But the way it plays out can be designed in such a way that the ads feel almost invisible.
Duane Forrester: Yes. So, I’m going to blow your mind with an idea right now, Gianluca—because I see this as a very real future, just months, maybe a year away. This pulls together a lot of what we already have today.
We’ve got the Meta Ray-Bans—those smart glasses. We’ve got other smart glasses on the market. And we’ve got Google’s... oh, what’s it called—those big AI goggles? Whatever they’re calling them now. I can totally foresee a world, in the very near future, where these devices—not the current Meta Ray-Bans, because they’re not built that way—but the next generation could be. They could include eye tracking, which is already available in some smart glasses today. That eye tracking could pinpoint exactly what we’re looking at.
And these AI systems will be smart enough to trigger ads based on the instant we are looking at something. So, if we’re walking down the street and we’re window shopping, looking for a new pair of shoes, you look into a store window—
Gianluca Fiorelli: That’s minority report—remember the scene where he is entering the shop when he is running, and all the advertisements are calling out to him.
Duane Forrester: Exactly, exactly.
The difference being, this would be contained to our device, not the world around us.
However, there’s nothing stopping it from extending into the world around us, because that device could just as easily, through RFID or any other means, broadcast who we are, and then show us those other pieces externally. I think all the pieces are already there.
And this is the kind of change that people doing SEO now—working to keep businesses relevant in front of consumers—need to be thinking in that direction. Not because maybe someday that crackpot Duane was right and now we’ve got ads in our glasses and it’s Ready Player One or something like that. It’s not about that.
It’s that these are the types of logical leaps companies are already making, to prepare themselves in case the market becomes viable. And if they think there’s enough of a market there, they’ll work to make it viable. So your job, as an SEO, is to make sure that the business remains relevant in a way that gets them included.
That assumes, of course, that the concept of organic stays with us. Because if organic goes away and everything becomes paid, subscription—no advertising, you want it free—you get the advertising, if that’s where everything moves, then organic will just become this nice little bracket of time, that was 30 years, and we’ll all look back and say, “Man, that was fun.” But I think organic will be around for another 30, maybe even 300.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. And thinking forward is actually one of the purposes of The Search Session, right?
Duane Forrester: Mm-hmm.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I personally, as you know, always tell the guests, we're not going to talk tips and tricks.
Duane Forrester: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: For this moment, I really want to create a conversation that gives hints of potential futures so that we can start thinking ahead and prepare ourselves. Honestly, I’d love to continue for another one, two, even three hours with you, because it’s really a pleasure to talk with you…
Duane Forrester: It’s always great, Gianluca.
Rapid-Fire Personal Questions with Duane
Gianluca Fiorelli: …but let’s go toward the end. And to close with a warm goodbye, I want to ask you a few questions.
Duane Forrester: Certainly.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Very short questions, personal, but if you don’t want to answer, you are totally free not to.
Duane Forrester: No worries.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s just a way for us to get to know Duane a little better. We know you’re a certified drone pilot, and you have this hobby of crafting guitars. When you were a kid, what was your favorite hobby? What did you love to do?
Duane Forrester: So, the things that I like to do most, obviously, creating guitars. I enjoy that. That’s a very creative pursuit.
I do read a lot. I probably read somewhere around two to three hours a day, on average. And that’s everything—that’s business reading, that’s personal, that’s fiction, all that kind of thing.
For those who do know about this kind of thing, I was an original fan of the Murderbot series, and Apple has released a TV show based on the books. So, that gives you some insight into where my head is in fiction.
I operate a YouTube channel called @Dirt Sandwich, and that’s where I catalog all of the camping trips I do around Southern California, Nevada, and any of the areas around here. So, if you ever want to see what it’s like going camping with me, that’s where all the videos live—@Dirt Sandwich.
I generally have more than enough hobbies to keep me busy. I used to have three motorcycles and whatnot in my life. I’ve since moved away from those, but I’m still a big fan of automobiles, things that are mechanical—stuff like that.
Travel is obviously something that I love. And my favorite thing to do when I travel is: after I get checked into my hotel, I go to the local grocery store. I look around the local grocery store and buy a couple of things, because I want to know what it feels like for locals in that neighborhood. I want to know what they’re exposed to. I want to see what it is—understand the differences and the similarities. It’s always a thrill for me to go do that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I also know, because I saw them, you like to do photo, especially astronomical photos.
Duane Forrester: Oh, yes. Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: What was your most magical night?
Duane Forrester: Okay. The most magical night was probably also the most hateful night.
I was camping, we were at almost 11,000 feet where our camp was set up. So, 11,000 feet. I do this math backwards—it’s somewhere around 4,500, a little less than 5,000 meters. So, very high altitude.
It was extremely cold, below freezing. I couldn’t sleep. So I woke up at 2:00 AM and sat outside with eight batteries for my camera. I killed every one of them, taking long exposure shots of the sky. I got two photos out of it that I liked. And I’ll always look back on that and say it was one of the most relaxing times I’ve ever had.
I was the only person up at camp, in the middle of the night, watching satellites. It was just such a beautiful night to be out there. The air was very crisp, and the only sounds were the nighttime forest around me. And I absolutely loved that. The only change I’d make next time is—I want to get a Starlink setup, so I can upload immediately from the field.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Last question. What can make a very quiet Duane enrage all of a sudden?
Duane Forrester: Okay. So if you really want to push my buttons, start talking to me about search that’s out of date. Start giving me old information, and prove to me that you're not looking forward, not learning. That drives me crazy.
I don’t understand it—we have access to all of humanity’s knowledge, and when someone willfully stops themselves from learning, I just, I can’t deal with that. I don’t understand it. That’s one.
Or, if you’re in my home and it’s quiet, and my dogs start barking because a bird landed in the front yard. Either one of those things will get me upset. My dogs bark for absolutely no reason. One starts, then the other one barks because the first one barked. And they just keep going. There’s just not enough patience to deal with that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, Duane. It has been a pleasure to spend this hour with you. Let’s plan to have a new second appointment, maybe later this year.
Duane Forrester: Absolutely. Thank you, sir.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Ciao! And you, friends—do me a favor: ring the bell, give a like, and subscribe so you can be updated when new episodes come out. Take care—and ciao ciao!
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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