Branding in the Age of AI and Zero-Click SERPs | Rand Fishkin
Welcome back to The Search Session podcast! I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and in this new episode, I’m joined by Rand Fishkin, a familiar name to anyone in the marketing world. We had a fun, wide-ranging chat about where search is headed, how branding fits into the picture, and why zero-click is changing the game.
Some of the big ideas that came up in our conversation:
SEO is thriving – far from declining, the industry keeps growing in jobs, learning, and search interest, proving it’s now a mature and essential part of digital marketing.
Rand envisions marketing as a story – with Google, OpenAI, and marketers as characters, but who are the real heroes?
Zero-click is the big shift, not AI – clicks still matter, but as zero-click searches rose from 40% in 2016 to 60% in 2023, influence now happens directly in SERPs and AI Overviews.
Beyond awareness – brand and memorability are what truly move the needle.
How SEO can support branding – using structured data, Knowledge Graph optimization, and even sentiment-driven clustering to reinforce brand identity.
The attention shift – search is now less than 10% of online behavior, with TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit dominating user focus.
All of this, plus a few extra insights, in this can’t-miss episode. Enjoy watching and listening!
Video Chapters
Transcript
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and today on The Search Session, we have someone I consider a truly good friend. In our industry, we meet a lot of people—we connect, and sometimes even grow quite close—but real friendships? Those are rare. And I can honestly say that this person is more than just a colleague. He’s a really good friend.
Everybody knows him. Let’s see if you can guess who it is. Back in the day, he was known as the man with the yellow shoes. He founded one of the first famous blogs, then a consultancy, and later a SaaS company. He wrote a book. He lives in Seattle. Oh, and maybe the most important clue: his wife is more famous than he is. Of course, I’m talking about Rand Fishkin. Hey Rand, how are you doing?
Rand Fishkin: Ciao, buongiorno, buonasera! I’m good, I’m good. Thank you for having me, Gianluca. This might be my favorite introduction ever. Usually, people list my accomplishments or all the things I’ve done—but someone saying, “This is my friend”? That means a lot.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Well, I think I’m lucky enough to be able to give that kind of introduction—because, actually, we are friends.
Just as an anecdote for our listeners and viewers: we first got to know each other virtually, many, many years ago. Basically, because I was... let’s be honest, I was kind of spamming the comments on Moz, back in the day, SEOmoz.
Rand Fishkin: People think you can’t build a relationship through comments.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I don’t think Moz still does the gamification they introduced back then. But if they’ve stopped it, well, even after not commenting for years, I was still ranked near the top. Except for you, of course. You were the super top. And then we finally met in person, I think it was the second edition of SearchLove in London. It actually happened by chance, because we were both having dinner at a Greek restaurant right across from the conference venue.
Rand Fishkin: Incredible.
Gianluca Fiorelli: You said, “Hey, you’re Gianluca!” So I practically had two dinners—one by myself, and then again when I got invited by the whole team, all the speakers. So, if I know someone, why should I be obliged to stay formal?
Rand Fishkin: I think that’s wonderful. You know what I really appreciate about it? It puts the focus where it matters most—on the most important thing first. And in my opinion, that’s not professional accomplishments or knowledge. It’s relationships. That, to me, is what matters the most. And I don’t know... ever since my experiences post-Moz, it’s been relationships first. Business was great—but it’s secondary.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I think that’s also because—just to generalize a bit—it’s a cultural thing. I’m Italian, I live in Spain, I’m Mediterranean. It’s in our nature to be open and social. Even if you’re an introvert, you still end up being more extroverted than, say, an introverted American.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, it’s cultural. And I think this is something Americans could definitely learn from their Mediterranean cousins, which is good. And also from people in South and Latin America.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, yes.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, very, very social places. But hopefully—hopefully someday the U.S. learns.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Let’s see. Okay, let’s move on. I could easily keep going with this kind of conversation—but maybe we’ll come back to it at the end of the episode.
SEO Through an Outsider’s Lens
Gianluca Fiorelli: Now, let’s continue—out of respect for our viewers' time. I usually ask all my guests this one question. But in your case... well, it’s different. Formally, you’re still introduced as an SEO—and I know we’ve even joked about that. Because you always appear as a top SEO—and you always reply: “I don’t do SEO anymore.”
Rand Fishkin: No.
Gianluca Fiorelli: No, it’s true! So normally, my question is: “How is SEO treating you lately?” But I thought—okay, that one doesn’t really work for Rand.
So instead, I want to ask: “How do you see SEO today, from the perspective of someone who’s no longer directly in SEO?”
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, interesting. You know, for the first few years after I left Moz—and left SEO, really—for anyone who doesn’t know: my first company, Moz, was in the SEO software space.
And when I left, I had a non-compete agreement. Basically, I had to sign a contract—which, in some parts of the U.S., is illegal, but not where I live—saying I wouldn’t do anything related to SEO. I think that was for two years initially.
Then Moz was sold—the company was acquired—and as part of that deal, I had to sign another non-compete. So it ended up being five years in total. So essentially, if I wanted to do SEO again, I could only really start this year... or maybe last year.
And I just haven’t. I haven’t been practicing, and I haven’t kept up. But from the outside, the perception I get is... well, SEO feels like a very strange place. There’s this narrative that the field is shrinking, or in trouble, or facing challenges.
But when you actually look at the numbers—how many people are employed in SEO, how many are learning it, how many are searching for SEO-related topics on Google—it hasn’t declined. If anything, it’s only grown. I think SEO has become a core part of digital marketing.
In a way, Gianluca, when you and I were starting out, we were constantly fighting for respect. We were trying to get a budget, trying to get companies and corporations to even acknowledge SEO. And now? Everybody has an SEO team. Everyone has SEO practices. Everyone’s investing in it.
It’s become a huge, mature industry—with billion-dollar players like Semrush, Ahrefs, and others. Public companies, too. So yeah—I think SEO is still a very interesting place to be.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally. I think a lot of the classic “SEO is dead” is more a PR thing—because, honestly, it sells quite well. I don’t know how many kinds of these articles are going to appear in AI Overviews.
And I also think—just my perception—that the majority of the SEO community has always kind of seen itself as the “nerd guys”. You know, the ones... not unlike Mulder in The X-Files, working in the down level.
Rand Fishkin: In the basement.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But somehow similar. Meanwhile, the “cool kids” were the social media marketers. And SEOs were the obscure ones. So there’s always been this kind of grief for the past they didn’t have. And maybe even a bit of an unconscious inferiority complex.
So whenever something comes along that shakes their sense of certainty—like now, with AI—they kind of spiral into a sort of depression, it’s more of a psychological reaction than something based in reality. Because honestly? Everyone’s saying AI is going to kill SEO... and I’ve never received so many pitches.
Rand Fishkin: I think you’re absolutely right—that there’s an inferiority complex embedded in the psyche of a lot of SEOs. And my suspicion is that it comes from the fact that, for the first 10 or 15 years that SEO existed, Google was actively suggesting to people that “SEO is unnecessary. SEO is spam. You don’t need an SEO. You just need good content.”
Developers, publishers, and others in the field were naysayers. They didn’t believe in SEO. They didn’t want to prioritize it. The software engineering world hated SEO and saw everyone who practiced it as spammy.
So for much of the field’s early history—and this is recent history, right? We’re talking up until maybe 2012, 2013, 2014—there was very little respect. SEOs were constantly fighting for every scrap. And yeah, sure, it’s been 10 years since then—but I don’t think that kind of psychological impact is going to go away anytime soon.
Compare that to fields like advertising, social media marketing, influencer or creator marketing, and email marketing. These disciplines never had to go through that same fight for budget.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I also think that out of all the marketing channels related to digital—let’s call them “technical marketing”—SEO is probably the most technical of them all. So there’s always been, within the community, this sort of pendulum between “SEO is 99% technical and 1% content,” and then “content is king and technical doesn’t matter.” Something like that, you know?
AI and SEO: From Data to Creativity
Rand Fishkin: I’m relatively excited for the AI era—whether that’s actually people using AI tools, which I think is still relatively small, or Google using AI. I’m excited for that to make a big change in what people are working on and worrying about, and my suspicion is there’s still going to be technical portions of SEO that matter, but there’s going to be a lot more opportunity for creativity and for content, because most of how AI works is not links and keywords.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I agree with you. I think the most interesting part of AI, and this could introduce a new topic into our conversation, is that even though there’s this popping up of new tools for tracking prompts, I don’t know how useful it really is to track prompts. If keywords can be in the trillions, prompts can be in the gazillions—especially since one prompt can receive ten different answers because of personalization.
Rand Fishkin: Did you see Ross Hudgens’ LinkedIn post?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, yes, I did. And I agreed with your comment on it, which is why I eventually wanted to talk about another type of analysis I do. But since we don’t have the data, in some sense, I think the best in our industry are coming back to the marketing roots.
So, audience analysis—what should we really be creating content about? What is the product actually about? If we’re a travel website, then let’s talk about travel. If we’re a Saas company doing brand enablement, let’s not suddenly start talking about cooking. That’s going way too far.
I think this is one good effect of AI: it’s forcing people to be creative, and not to fall back on a definition I’ve always disliked—“data-driven”. I’ve always preferred “data-informed”, because data-driven sounds like being a robot. It’s like saying, “The statistics say that if I go this way, I’ll go faster.” But faster to where? Maybe it’s a cliff. You might be heading quickly toward a place you shouldn’t be going at all.
That actually happened to me once in the Canary Islands because I forgot to change the Google Maps settings. You know Google Maps defaults to showing you the fastest route? Well, in the Canaries, that often means taking roads that go almost straight up instead of following the longer, winding curves. So I ended up on one of those roads and thought, “Oh.” That’s what being “data-driven” looks like. The other approach is being “data-informed”.
It is about having the data, but not letting it blindly dictate your decisions. You have to pick up the data you have, then go back and find the real data you actually need—not just be guided by whatever Google Analytics tells you or by what ten million clustered keywords are showing. Because those are only telling you what people are already seeing you for, but not what they aren’t seeing you for, and so on.
I think this is one of the least talked-about advantages of the AI era in search. Of course, there are also many things that can go wrong—as we’re already starting to see. Spam is coming back in ways that feel like 2005, because it’s essentially the same situation. We’re living in a moment similar to 20 years ago, when SEO was still relatively young, and because the landscape is so transparent and our knowledge still limited, people are experimenting wildly—sometimes doing the most black-hat things possible.
So yes—coming back to you. For our audience: you are also the CEO at… what is the name? SnackBar Studio. It’s a small, independent company where you’re producing and are currently in the beta-testing phase of a video game. So let’s use the metaphor of a video game—and let’s say our characters are Google, OpenAI, and, in the middle, us—the marketers.
If you had to create a story with Google, OpenAI, and the marketers as characters—what would they be? Would Google be the classic big boss? Would OpenAI be the hero? I don’t know… I don’t think OpenAI would be the hero. The hero should be the people in the middle. How do you envision it?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, if I had to craft an analogy, I think the hero would be the users—that’s who everyone is creating everything for. Marketers are just one piece of the puzzle, and the other platforms are the challenges along the way. Marketers are almost like a tool. The real heroes, in my view, are the people who create things—the inventors, the makers of products, services, and content. In my view, that’s the hero. Marketers are simply there to help get those products into the places where the audience can see them.
And Google, OpenAI, and to a smaller degree Reddit, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Bing, Yahoo… all of those are the gatekeepers. They’re like the little mini-bosses you have to defeat so you can reach your audience.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, that’s cool. Maybe someone should take the classic hero’s journey and turn it into a video game with this kind of setup. That would be cool.
Rand Fishkin: I wonder how well it would sell—you’d probably run into a lot of copyright issues.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, probably. But, as I was saying before, especially since SEOs are very geeky, the community would probably buy it. It would be very niche.
Rand Fishkin: It is a big, big industry.
From Audience Research to Zero-Click Strategy
Gianluca Fiorelli: Mm. I have a question for you. You say you’re not an SEO anymore, but honestly—don’t you think SparkToro, for instance, is a wonderful tool also for SEO?
Rand Fishkin: Well, I think SparkToro is a wonderful tool for marketers—and for some SEOs, at least the ones who focus on content distribution, and on influencing people in places outside of search engines and AI tools. Yes, I think SparkToro is excellent for that. But at the core of SEO is understanding what people are searching for or prompting AI tools for, what’s being returned, and how to get visible or rank higher in those results. SparkToro doesn’t directly help with that.
SparkToro is about audience research, fundamentally. It’s about saying, “Hey, this group of people—what YouTube channels do they subscribe to? What subreddits are they following? What websites do they visit? Are they using Google to search more, or ChatGPT to search more, or Perplexity? Those questions, I think, come before you do SEO, rather than in the middle or after. That’s not to say some people don’t use us for their content distribution and PR, and those tactics might be part of what they do for SEO—but we’re not intentionally building for that.
As I mentioned before, Gianluca, I had to be very careful to make sure SparkToro is not positioned as an SEO tool, because otherwise I’d be in breach of my contract.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, obviously. But anyway, even if SparkToro isn’t a tool meant for SEO—because it’s not—it’s a tool for marketing in general. It’s a tool for discovery, for audience analysis, especially. And audience analysis is important not only for social media and email marketing, but also for all marketers, and even for the CMO above them.
And for an SEO, it’s important when you have to design an SEO strategy. Now, for instance, we know we need to understand the audience first, in order to better inform our research—what we search for, what we create. So the best way, in my case, when I use SparkToro for this kind of work, is to say: “Okay, this is the type of audience my client is trying to target.”
Rand Fishkin: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, let’s take Reddit as an example. SparkToro makes my work easier—instead of using another tool and scraping all the potential subreddits, which may or may not be related to my target audiences, I can start directly from the ones SparkToro recommends.
Because SEO is not just about positioning text anymore—it’s multimodal. Everything is multimodal. ChatGPT is multimodal, AI mode is becoming multimodal, the SERPs are multimodal, and so on. So, if my client doesn’t have a YouTube channel or the resources to create one, I can look for YouTubers I can contact and build co-marketing relationships with—either on their channel or by bringing them onto my site. This is the kind of work I think SEO can do with SparkToro.
I think it’s an excellent tool in this sense—for audience analysis—which is a distinction Amanda Natividad always stresses: the difference between audience analysis and market analysis. They are not the same.
So, now let’s move to another big topic of yours. I remember it well—honestly, I’m proud of it—because you wrote about it on your blog, but I think the first time you spoke about it was at Inbounder 2018 in Madrid. It’s the concept of zero-click search.
And I think AI is pushing this situation to the extreme. To be honest, I don’t want to play devil’s advocate for Google—everybody blames Google because of CTR issues—but no one is looking at the CTR for ChatGPT, Anthropic, and other LLMs. It’s also extremely low.
You and Amanda often talk about zero-click search, and then you developed the related concept of zero-click marketing.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So my question is: now that the search results pages are becoming more of a space for awareness, do you think they can also be a place for doing strong zero-click marketing?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. Our contention is essentially that zero-click marketing is something you can—and should—do everywhere. That’s in search, in social, in email, in your content, in your video marketing… and obviously in all offline marketing too—billboards, radio, television, traditional advertising—all of that is zero-click.
It’s only in the digital era, Gianluca, that we’ve seen this rise of obsession with “How do I drive clicks from platforms back to my site, and then figure out what to do with people once they get there?” I would argue that, generally, traffic—unless you’re a publisher who monetizes through advertising—is a vanity metric.
What you really care about are sales and conversions. Maximizing traffic will not necessarily maximize sales or conversions. What you really want—especially now that every platform, whether social, search, or content-based, is reducing the clicks that are available, prioritizing keeping people on their site rather than sending them out—if you’re a marketer, is to invest in zero-click marketing.
In search, there are still clicks to be had. I saw Cyrus Shepard’s piece making the point that clicks still matter—you can still drive more traffic. You can. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But you’re fighting an uphill battle. You know that Google is shrinking the share of clicks that are available. And you know that ten years from now, there will be far fewer clicks available than there are today.
So you have to be thinking: “How do I influence people directly in the search results, without any click at all? How do I influence them in AI Overviews, or in instant answers, or in whatever results Google puts on that page—regardless of whether they’re going to drive a click?”
I think this is the biggest shift SEOs are undergoing right now. AI is secondary to zero-click.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I totally agree, and I think that’s exactly why the whole zero-click, zero-search SERP phenomenon started. This is something I was already thinking about even before ChatGPT was a thing, for example.
Rand Fishkin: You were paying attention, right? I think I wrote my first report on zero-click search back in 2016 or maybe 2017. And since then, it’s just fallen. I want to say that back then, about 40% of searches ended without a click. Now it’s 60%. So in less than ten years, we’ve lost about a fifth of all search clicks.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And that’s exactly why I always say that, in my personal evolution as an SEO—especially in my more strategic role—when looking at all these features Google has been pushing, I’ve been stressing this idea: let’s stop thinking only about the classic search session where someone searches, clicks immediately but is navigating. So, when navigating, the idea is not to guess blindly, but rather to anticipate the most statistically probable path a person is likely to take. That’s why I was using Google as a tool—because with the same query, Google keeps redefining results and pushing people toward new queries and new search outcomes. It's effectively telling us where we should aim to be visible, and for what.
And I think that all these things that are so widely discussed right now—like query fan-out, prompt analytics—they’re really just building on that same foundation. This kind of strategy isn’t revolutionary to me. Before, we were already working with features like “People Also Search For,” “People Also Ask,” query refinement of the topics, and so on.
Now we’re simply adding query fan-out into the mix. But the core idea remains: it’s all about massive information clustering—especially around entity-based search—and how to structure a website really well to target these potential search journeys more effectively.
Personalized Search and Its Impact on SEO & Branding
Gianluca Fiorelli: But now, personalization is really starting to become very strong. In Europe, of course, personalization can clash with privacy policies, so its rollout is more cautious. But in the rest of the world, personalization is becoming a very big phenomenon.
That’s why analyzing prompts has become such a titanic job. So I want to ask you: how do you foresee the possibility of working effectively in a context where personalization is deeply embedded in both search and social media? Because I believe that just doing zero-click marketing for awareness—for visibility—is no longer enough. You have to go further. Yes, you have to aim for memorability, right?
Rand Fishkin: Brand. Technical marketers are going to hate this—and I include SEOs, myself included—I don’t think we’ve ever been particularly good at it. But brand marketing is where it’s at. How do you build a brand that’s memorable, emotionally resonant, that triggers something in people? A brand that sits and sticks in someone’s mind and becomes associated with the problem you solve—and with your unique solution.
Brand marketing is rarely achievable through the kinds of marketing that a lot of digital marketers are used to. “How do I move up in the Google search results?” or “Get more people to click on my blog?” or “Get an email with a higher open rate?”
Brand is different. Brand is creating memorable campaigns. It’s standing out in people’s minds. It is—it's way more than logo and colors and branding. It is emotional triggers. It is playing to someone’s echoic memory and understanding of a space, perception of a field.
That's—that’s gonna be the world. I mean, look, that's been the world that's won for the last 150 years. You can point to almost no brands, such a vanishingly tiny number of brands, that have built something truly huge and successful in their space purely on click-based digital marketing—whether that's PPC or SEO or other kinds of digital ads. It's vanishingly small. Brand is the solution.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. Totally right. I totally agree. As someone who didn’t start out in SEO…
Rand Fishkin: Right, you were in television.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I was working in television—it was all about positioning our brand as a different kind of channel from the others. And if you think about it, even the most successful internet-based companies—just think of Expedia, or especially Trivago in the travel industry—they really became successful when they started running TV ads.
Let’s be clear about this, and this is something I think SEOs tend to confuse—SEO can actually support branding.
Rand Fishkin: Oh, absolutely. Support, for sure.
Gianluca Fiorelli: There are two parts to this.
One is the technical side—structural data, organization, helping machines understand that a brand is a brand. For example, a friend of mine, here in Spain, told me about a case involving a Spanish fashion brand from the guys behind Zara—but it’s not Zara.
The problem is with their Knowledge Graph presence. In Spain, they’re recognized as a brand, as an entity. But in Google US, they’re not. There, the brand name is interpreted as a person’s name—because it is a name and surname—and Google doesn’t quite understand it. And this is happening because they didn’t invest enough in structured data and Knowledge Graph optimization.
Then there’s another part—something I started doing thanks to my background in semiotics, which I was lucky to study at university. And this goes against what many Googlers have said publicly—for example, “No, we are not using sentiment analysis.” But I think doing sentiment analysis for SEO is great. Because in SEO, people typically cluster keywords for a topic. So there's a natural need for clustering.
What I do is start by looking at the query—especially with query fan-out, which is really interesting to work with. I say, okay, let’s cluster this query based on the sentiment it implies. You can often detect urgency or some kind of emotion embedded in the way the query is phrased.
Then I do a third type of clustering, which involves analyzing the SERP features Google shows for that query. For example, does it trigger a video pack? An image pack? A "People Also Ask" box? That kind of thing. So essentially, I cluster the query by topic, by customer journey, and by format and emotion.
This way, I can design a single information architecture, but inform it with the right type of content. I’m filling that architecture based on the nature of what people are really looking for.
I’ve been experimenting with this approach with a couple of clients, and it’s starting to work well—because it resonates. I know clicks may not be as plentiful as they were in the past, but what I’m seeing now is that branded searches are increasing. People are connecting more with the content, and then they search using the brand name along with the keyword.
And I also see, somehow, a correlation in visibility on ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on—by doing this. So it's not just theory. It's really about what you were saying: this brand has these values—now let’s see if those values can resonate in the content. If the content—and the sentiment of the customer or potential customer—can coincide, then you’ve got something meaningful.
So instead of creating the classic guide, the typical “10 places everyone goes” kind of post, let’s try to find different ways to present the same content. It’s a very, very old concept from Seth Godin—what was it?..I don’t remember the name.
Rand Fishkin: The purple cow.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah! The purple cow. Exactly. It’s pure classic marketing.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
How Rand and Casey Henry use AI
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, so how do you use AI at SparkToro? We all know Rand Fishkin, of course, and we know Amanda. But there’s a third person—a really good friend of mine—who works more behind the scenes. So, how are you and Casey Henry using AI in your day-to-day work, and also for the work at SparkToro?
Rand Fishkin: Daily work? Not too much, to be honest.
Well—I should clarify. Casey does use it for code review and for writing certain kinds of code where it’s faster or more efficient. He also uses it for debugging. But for me personally, I rarely use AI in my daily work, which is mostly things like answering emails, joining podcasts like this, social media, content creation, video filming, product development and ideation, talking to customers… that kind of stuff. I don’t find AI particularly additive for me. But if it is for you, that’s great.
Inside SparkToro, though, we have found some clever use cases. We primarily use ChatGPT, and we use their API. We make calls against the API when, depending on the kind of search that someone does, we will try to expand the dataset that we have using—essentially, words that frequently come after other words, which LLMs are great at doing, right? So we might say, for example: "Hey, you searched for—let's say—executives at food and beverage companies in the UK." We might go to ChatGPT and say: "Hey, what are other titles and roles that we should be looking for that are essentially the same as, you know, executive manager or executive director of a food and beverage brand?"
We'll go get those other ones, and then we can add that into the query expansion so that when we look through our database of, you know, hundreds of millions of LinkedIn profiles, we can also include those profiles, which substantially mean the same thing. So we're doing stuff like that with it. We find it useful.
We have this new section coming soon called Take Action, which is essentially us taking a bunch of prompts that we've seen our customers use with their audience research data.
So a lot of people—yourself included, I think, Gianluca, right?—you'll export the CSV from SparkToro, upload that to ChatGPT or Claude, and then you'll ask questions like: "Hey, give me a bunch of whatever—content ideas that this audience would be likely to resonate with," or "Give me some visuals on social media that I could use," "Give me some ideas for videos that I might film," "Of these podcasts that SparkToro said—which ones accept pitches for guests?" You know, it's that kind of thing that people are doing already with our data.
And we thought, “Hey, we should just take those prompts, bake them into SparkToro.” And so you can go from a research report, click Take Action, choose which task you want to accomplish based on the audience research data, connect the two right there, and get the output inside SparkToro.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah. That’s really cool because it’s a good way to maintain a single project in one place. Because one of the problems is that there are so many tools sometimes, or you’re really hopping into many tools. So yes, when you have just a piece—a bit of what you're doing—and then you’re obliged to do the classic merge into one gigantic CSV in Google Workspace… and you know that Gemini is spying on you, because it’s activated in Google Workspace.
Are you experimenting with all the things that Google is trying to make people experiment with?
Rand Fishkin: Like—like the AI mode stuff and all that kind?
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: No, I haven't played around with it much. Back in my SEO days, you know, I would've been, "Oh, I gotta spend a lot of time in here." Now? No, I don't, I don't have to bother. I do spend a lot of time—I mean, I spend a lot of time with other forms of audience research. So I look at a lot of surveys and interviews, market research stuff, how other people are producing reports, and talk to people about their processes and that kind of thing. And I spend a lot of time in video games. I play 15 minutes of like a lot of games, right? And not a lot more. But my research in SEO is basically non-existent these days.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because of what we have said before about using the search results as a zero-click marketing space, if I were you, I would test at least the web guide.
Rand Fishkin: Okay. Yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That is fine. It's interesting because it’s—one, it would be a good solution also for publishers because the links are there, so people can click.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I saw some screenshots.
Gianluca Fiorelli: It’s also interesting because it's organized in a way that, if you’re asking for something—for instance, for travel ideas—I tested it with Washington, because I’m going to spend my vacation in Washington, D.C. So I tested it. I said, “What are the things that I can do during eight days with family, two teenagers,” and so on. And it's organizing it.
What I find cool is that it’s substantially creating a pillar, with subtopics—let’s say chapters—with questions and a series of links. Questions and a series of links, and also text from AI. But they are integrated well. So I hope that many people will try it—and that you will too—and say, “Hey, great! Google, AI Overview—trash in the bin. Go for this.” It’s a good solution for everybody. And I think it’s a good solution because nobody else has it.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point too. I am surprised at the number of people who say they’ve switched away from using Google toward AI tools entirely. That surprises me a lot, because I can’t find a way to substitute ChatGPT for my Google use, or Bing use, or DuckDuckGo use. Like, much of what I do in those places is navigational. So much of it is exploratory, into other things. You know, if I ask ChatGPT, “Hey, I’m looking for a men’s tuxedo shoe,” I get a list of things—and then I find out, you know, the hallucination problem, where Dolce & Gabbana doesn’t actually make a brogue tuxedo.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Maybe it's going to give you a direction to a place where there is nothing—but I don’t know. Totally different thing.
Rand Fishkin: You know, clicking on the Google Image results or the Google Shopping results—it’s just way, way better, right? Like, “Oh, I’m looking for flights to Tokyo.” Google Flights is very helpful. ChatGPT is still not great. Like, it’s not—it doesn’t do the job. But regardless of that, I think the era of zero-click marketing, no matter what direction Google chooses, is here—because of how people consume content.
With clickstream data, Gianluca, we looked at essentially what people do with their day on the internet. Search is less than 10% of all the visits that people make on the internet that go to any form of search. I don’t care if we’re talking about AI tools, or traditional search, or whatever.
What people spend a lot of time doing is browsing Reddit, watching YouTube videos, and watching TikTok. Four, four and a half, five hours a day in the U.S. watching TikTok, right?
Gianluca Fiorelli: I think it’s the same here in Europe.
Rand Fishkin: It’s not—you know, that’s not influenceable through creating content on your website.
Gianluca Fiorelli: I remember a study that you also described. Let’s be honest, when we use ChatGPT, how do we use it? I mean, we use it for creating images, asking questions that Google would eventually answer with an answer box. So something where—even in classic search—it wouldn’t bring a click anyway.
Rand Fishkin: I think that most of the tasks—when we did our analysis of ChatGPT prompts, which was classifying maybe around a million prompts, right?—last year, it was 70% plus generative tasks.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Rand Fishkin: Things you would never do—and could not do—with a search engine. So, you know, it’d be things like, “Hey, will you help me write this email?” “Hey, will you brainstorm some ideas for this?” “Hey, I’m having trouble with my relationship with my daughter—will you give me some ideas of conversations to have with her?”
I think almost 40%—maybe a little more than 40%—of all AI prompts were something to do with programming. That’s not—you know—that’s not a search.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. Because it’s conversational, it’s easier for a person to start a conversation, even if it’s a bot. But it has the trick—it has a voice.
So it would be cool to see how many of these conversations are actually made with voice chat. Because, especially if you imagine a classic Her situation—like in the movie—where if you’re a guy, you choose a cool robot voice that sounds like an actress, maybe like Scarlett Johansson.
And this was happening in the very beginning of the voice chat with ChatGPT. Yes, you start conversing and then you forget—you forget you’re not actually conversing with a person. So you can start asking things. And this is something that other friends of mine, who were analyzing this kind of behavior, were also seeing.
But yes, it’s actually what you were saying—which is coming back to search. It’s really about how our search behaviors change.
I always talk about the messy middle. Because the messy middle is when you have a trigger, and that trigger can be you walking down the street and seeing something in a shop, or you’re in the shop doing showrooming with Google Lens. Or maybe you’re in ChatGPT, in this case, doing a search, but then going to YouTube because it says, “in this YouTube channel…” And you go to YouTube, you search within YouTube, and then the YouTuber is recommending something. So you click through that, then go with a referral click to a website, and then maybe go to Google to see reviews about this tool. That’s why the search journey is really becoming so complex.
And this was already clear when we started seeing queries getting longer and longer over the years—because people started to learn how to search. Before it was “Hotel Seattle.” Now it’s: “I want a hotel in Seattle, four-star, with breakfast included.” All that kind of detail.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay, almost one hour.
Rand Fishkin: I know. I was gonna say, I have to run in a couple of minutes here.
Rand Fishkin Beyond Marketing
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, let’s stop talking about marketing. Let’s start talking about you.
Rand Fishkin: Okay.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Tell us more about this video game.
Rand Fishkin: Sure. It’s called The Snack Bar at the End of the World. That’s the provisional working title. We haven’t formally announced the game. We haven’t put up a trailer yet, any of those things. So the game is probably still at least 18 months to two years away. We’ll most likely make an announcement about nine to 12 months before it launches. And that’s for marketing reasons, actually. If you study how games perform, they tend to lose their audience excitement if they haven’t come out for more than a year after they’ve been announced. And we don’t want to lose any marketing excitement. So we want to carefully time that.
The game is set in 1960s Italy, sort of a magical alternate-reality version. You play a chef in a small hilltop town on the border between Umbria and Lazio—and you’re running a restaurant with your brother. Your aunt, who owned the restaurant, has been thrown in prison, and you’re trying to make enough money to break her out of prison.
And in order to do this, you need to go out into the dangerous, magical wilds around the town. And you fight boars, and chickens, and artichokes. Yes—even the artichokes will come attack you. And, you know, you need the artichokes to make Carciofi alla giudia, or you need the pancetta or guanciale from the boar to make your spaghetti Carbonara. And so you find these recipes and traditional dishes, you use the ingredients that you get in the wilds.
You make them, you earn lira—the old Italian currency—and then the lira you can use to upgrade your restaurant, upgrade your weapons and armor, fight more dangerous monsters, and eventually, hopefully, break your aunt out of prison.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Cool. When you said “lira”, my old memories were coming back. And speaking of memories… Usually, the question is, what would you say to your younger self? Now the question is: what would you never say to your younger self?
Rand Fishkin: Oh my God. I think about this sometimes when people say, you know, “What would you change from the past? What would you do differently?” There’s this weird part of me, Gianluca, that reflects on the fact that I have an extremely lucky life—almost exactly the life that I would want. The life my 12-year-old self would want.
I get to work on a video game. I have other jobs—SparkToro and AlertMouse—which hopefully make money and do well, and they’re enjoyable. I get to work with people I like. I have a wonderful marriage to Geraldine DeRuiter. I have so many wonderful friendships all over the world. I get to travel and eat amazing things. I just feel incredibly blessed and lucky. And so part of me says—I don’t know that I would change too much.
I went through painful things, and I made terrible mistakes. Really awful mistakes at Moz, for sure. But also—gosh—what would I… I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to curse myself into a world where, for example, let’s say I hadn’t made some of those bad mistakes at Moz. Let’s say Moz had become, you know, SEMrush. Instead of SEMrush going public, it was Moz that went public, and I was the CEO. And we had this extraordinary thing, and I became, I don’t know, worth hundreds of millions or a billion dollars or something.
Have you met people? Do you know how many people are worth those numbers? I know almost none of them who are happy people. Or happy, contented, fulfilled—in good marriages, in good situations with their families, with close friendships. They have to become insular and protective, and they’re always worried about their security and their privacy.
And I don’t worry about any of that stuff. You know, I live in a regular house, like anyone. I drive a regular car. I can go out in public—it’s great. I think I’m not a complete asshole. And 99.9% of those people who are worth those numbers—are just terrible. I don’t know if that’s correlation or causation.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Usually, there is a consideration that people of that kind—but sometimes also super-successful surgeons or super-successful politicians—they are just a little bit psychopath. Not in the sense that, you know, psychopaths are someone who has a very low—if not no—sense of empathy.
Rand Fishkin: Right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And for instance, being a little bit psychopathic for a surgeon is perfect. It’s needed. Because if they were too empathic in an urgent operation, imagine—they wouldn’t be able to do it.
Rand Fishkin: I see, yeah.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So also, for instance, sometimes in law enforcement—policemen, detectives—they sometimes have this kind of characteristic. But yes, I mean, I prefer to be more empathic than psychopathic, so I totally agree with what you say.
That said—we’ve reached the end. I know you have to go. Thank you, Rand, it was a real pleasure to have you here. And let’s say—probably, I know you’re a busy, super-requested man—but one day in the future, let’s do another episode with you. We can look back at what we’ve said and do an update.
Rand Fishkin: I love it. Sounds great. Gianluca, thank you so much for having me. Take care of yourself, my friend.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you—and thank you to everybody here. Just let me do the creator stuff now, just one second. Remember to give a like to the video, subscribe to the channel, so you’ll be notified about the upcoming episodes of The Search Session. Thank you, and bye-bye.
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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