Brand mentions, backlinks, and AI search with Gordon Meagher

[ on-hold music] Alex here. Today's conversation is with Gordon Marr, the VP of SEO at Userp. It's the final in our series with the folks at Userp. Today, we talk about link building kind of as our main jumping off point, and where that sits today in 2026, and how that's changed with AI search.

Then we kind of jump into some conversation around how people actually search for tools. This was a particularly fun conversation to kind of walk through. Gordon and I both talk about, like, how we look for tools, how his daughter looks for tools, and kind of the process of, like, going on ChatGPT first and then going on Google, and this multi-touch thing, and what's actually going on there. So, had a lot of fun with this discussion.

Hope you enjoy. Gordon, great to have you on Content Briefly. So I wanna get started talking a little bit about link building. This is actually one of the topic areas I have heard the least about probably in the year of everybody talking about AI search and AEO.

And obviously, Userp comes from a background of being a link building agency. You do a whole lot of things, and we've talked to your other founders about a lot of the different services that you offer. But I'm just kind of curious how your link building advice has changed to clients over time and kind of like would love to just have you drop some context of how were you advising clients around link building four years ago, and how has that changed as everybody's become a lot more focused on AI search in the past year or two?

Yeah. So I think that in, in some ways it hasn't changed, and in other ways it has. And I think that really depends on clients. Like, link building, you know, pre-LLMs, was mainly around searching your content in page one of Google for pages, and keywords, and topics that are core to your business.

And in that way, like, I think link building has stayed the same. I think that, you know, for Userp most definitely, you know, I think over the years if we kind of park both things. So we'll talk about, like, Google search engines first. Like, link building has changed over the years.

I've been in the industry for 14 years. I think that how we build or acquire links is a better way to say it than build links. How we acquire links. We know since, you know, Google has baked in Penguin and other algorithms are now more turned into a core update.

You know, we know for, like, the... for before you could get links on all these sites, and now we just don't. They're not making a difference. So I think that link building is super important still for...

Google still uses links as one of their major signals within, you know, for rankings. So in that way, it hasn't changed. Like, page one was always page one, and links- Mm-hmm... getting links with a pile of other stuff that you have to do with content on page SEO, one side SEO, et cetera, to make sure that you could actually get into those places on page one.

And I think what has changed with clients coming today is that we've got clients coming to us that are more focused on LLM visibility. How do we get LLM visibility? And I think link building has changed around that because you don't need to be on page one, you know. Right.

But links still drive discoverability. By that I mean is, like, basically LLMs don't crawl the web. They don't do that. It's just not a function that they do.

And they've got different layers of when an LLM is gonna... You know, when you prompt that, just the final response to that prompt goes through many layers. One of them is a discoverability layer, and then obviously a trust layer. And in that regard, you just need to be in that discovery part.

And we don't know that, you know, that LLM is kind of cut off after page three, page four. We don't know that, but we do know that... And again, it's not just Google. There's other indexes that they look at.

But we do know that your content needs to be in a position where LLMs when they do, you put in a prompt, they're gonna kind of do their web search. And again, this is, it's multifaceted here, so, you know, there's obviously training data that is used as a reinforcement. But when we're just talking about links, it's making sure that your content and pages are within that discoverability range. So whereas before you would go, "Well, you need to be on page one because no one is ever doing SEO to have you on page two."

Like, no one goes, "Hey, you know what I mean? You can rank on the top of page two, and that'll be pretty," 'cause no one looks at page two. But LLMs do, and I think in that regard it's very different. Because we can have, you know, no visibility with pages that are in, like, position, on page seven, and we do see that getting those into page three or two does drive that first layer of discoverability.

So I think that's the kind of what we talk about with clients today. And actually just, like, kind of dumb question from me. I always love to use Superpath as an example here. So if I'm a client of yours, if I'm trying to expand our visibility both in search and AI search today for Superpath content marketing community, if I'm going out and saying, "Hey, there's an opportunity," like we're identifying a gap.

We have some third party sources that are driving a lot of citations in AI search. Maybe one of them, let's say, is some third party source that's recommending the best content marketing communities, and they list five of them, and we're not on there, and we go to them and see if we can get mentioned there. Does the link itself actually matter? Like, if I'm going on that list, then, you know, what if they just mention Superpath?

Does the link matter in AI search, or is it just the brand mention these days? Like, to what role does that actual link play? Yeah. So I think you have to look at two things.

That's a very good one because you gotta remember when we think about traditional link building, when you're talking about we are building links into a publication or a page to rank somewhere, you know- Right... for keywords, versus a link out on a page, uh, to your site specifically. So in a kind of listicle, you know, you could be ranked in, in position six. It's not so much that that link counts then.

It's more that the piece of content an LLM has found re- relevant for the query, and it can parse that brand mention. So it's not like you need the link f- From that page to your site. The thing is, the only reason that you're actually reaching out to that third-party publication is because it is actually being used in, as a resource that is citing brands within your niche. Right.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Is there anything that you were advising three to four years ago that you're just not advising for your clients anymore? This is kind of one of the ongoing discussions, is like, hey, you know, AEO, it's obviously different.

It works in different ways, but it's still good to have on a lot of these SEO foundations, and so you really shouldn't drop any of the things that you were doing in the past. I'm curious, one, do you buy into that? And two, are there a few things that you're like, well, this thing used to be helpful in the previous era, but, like, really it's not worth your time anymore? Yeah.

I don't buy into it. I, I, I don't. I'm not, like, screaming at the clouds here about SEO. It's, like, I've been deep into LLMs for over a year, to be honest with you, and it's like this.

A lot of people talk a lot of crap about what LLMs do and don't do, right? Mm-hmm. But you have to remember, if there was no Google or any other index, right, LLMs don't work, because there's no place to retrieve data. Mm-hmm.

Right? And if you follow a path with an LLM, they will go, it's classic, right? You do this as a kind of thought experiment stuff, right? They will go, you know, "We judge things by its authority, by blahdy, blah, blah, by this."

And you go, "Well, how are you judging authority?" "Well, it's many indications, blah, blah." But it will always come back to, they judge authority kind of being a parasite on indexes. So basically, they go, well, if you're in Google, and you're in these positions, by default we know that Google uses these metrics, be it content, linking, internal linking, technical.

So we can infer that if you're already within Google and these indexes, then you're doing all these things right. So- Mm-hmm... that ticks that. So when you look at SEO like that, it hasn't changed.

Do you think that will always be the case, or do you think that's kind of just the first version of how these operate? That's a good question, and I think you have to understand that the way Google or Bing crawls the web, and they built this infrastructure over decades. Like, their ability to crawl the web, to index, to do all of these things, it's like they own the infrastructure of the internet. Mm-hmm.

And this is a good point that goes back to earlier. See, government, ChatGPT, and LLMs are basically... Remember before we had phone networks. Everyone had the state ATS, blahdy, blahdy, blah.

And then there was monopolies. So people come in, they're like, "No, you can't just have ATS. We have to allow competition." But these competitions built on the old infrastructure.

So, the problem or I see is that, is we already know the cost that LLMs, like how much money it takes to even do a response or do whatever. Yeah. Like, so the amount of investment they would need to make, like they would basically need to make a Google internally for themselves. But then you got the question is, even if they do that and crawl the web, which would be vastly expensive, even if they do that, then they have to then have those quality metrics that Google have.

So a web crawler in itself is useless if you've got, like, to crawl the whole web. Yeah. Like, you know, they don't follow links on pages. They don't go through your internal links.

They don't do anything like that, so they'd need to build it. And then, right, we've got this. Now, we can have the old Google that was back 20 years ago, that every SEO manipulated. We can have that, but now there's a problem because Google spent a lot of money over the ensuing years on understanding what is authority and what's not.

So I don't see how they escape that. But again, I'm only an SEO, but just on a kind of foundational technical level, implementation level, I just think it would be, like you're talking of reinventing Google or Bing, and why do it when it's already there? Mm-hmm. Now, you've obviously been watching the development of this over the past few years.

I'm curious, as you look at the direction we're headed, what would you imagine starts to change in the next 18 months if you were to kind of put your predictions in the way this space continues to develop? I think there's a couple of things around it. I think anyone that says that it's gonna stay the same is wrong. It's not.

I think that one thing we have massively seen, and again, this is only recent as well, like people, how we use prompts or how we interact with LLMs is very different. But also, I think you have to remember that what we use LLMs for, like the amount of people who use LLMs for a task-based thing versus a search-based thing, but yes, it is used for search. I think what would change is, uh, trust, for one thing. Because we do know now, for example, someone will look on ChatGPT, and they will go to Google and look.

This seems to be the behavior. Like, my daughter, for example, like, I saw this, it was about a year and a half ago. She was doing something, and she was on Chat, and then she was on Google, and then on Instagram, and then on Pinterest. Like, my daughter's 14, and I was like, "Wow."

And she goes, "Yeah, this is the way we do it." So, I think the biggest thing that, what I want to understand is how much of a search utility will these LLMs be versus for tasks. Yeah. And we do see that ChatGPT is driving, you know, a lot more referrals, blahdy, blahdy, blah, but it's still a drop in the ocean compared to Google.

Mm. Like, I think people think that, you know, like, ChatGPT, that's it. Google's done. It's like, it's still a drop in the ocean, and there's also a lot of pushback o- on it at the moment, where people are just sick of it.

And if I wanted, like, this, don't hold me to this, no one, I think that Google will still be the dominant player, but maybe not Google Search. I think Gemini is gonna be huge. I think definitely, I wonder how ChatGPT... And this was something I said last year, like, again, it's infrastructure.

Google already owns the infrastructure across so many things. Like, you can integrate- Spreadsheets, Google Docs, you know, AI overviews, AI mode. So I think that Google is still gonna be the dominant player. I just think that people will just use that as the new way to search.

And, and to come back to one last thing, is that, you know, if you kind of do prompt audits, like, and you go, right, this is the URL, this is the business, what are some prompts? ChatGPT will give you a pile of really long tail prompts. Or we get clients that'll go, "These are the prompts we want." And I went, where'd you get those prompts?

And they're like, "You know, this is what we think." And it's like, it's so long tail that no, and it's so different that no other person would ever search for. Yeah. So I think there's also that as we change, actually people today for search still pretty much use that short anchors, like, 'cause we're conditioned to work in Google.

Yeah. That will change over time. But I think that it just becomes another layer of discoverability. I think Gemini will probably dominate.

I think Anthropic or Claude will be used for other stuff. I don't know chat's place in all of this. I think Perplexity are definitely doing their own thing, and there is value in that. But now everyone's releasing agents within browsers.

So again, this is just... A friend once said to me, "If your whole company is a feature that a bigger company can integrate, you're done." Like, look at Zoom back in the day, back in the pandemic. Zoom was Zoom.

But Zoom was just a feature really, that Microsoft could have Teams. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like, so I think there will be a shift in how we search, for sure.

I think that Google will still dominate that space when it comes to, like, the chatbot we're integrating with. But what I would say is that I think that the days of putting all your apples in one box, we should really think about that. I don't think that SEO as we know it or search as we know it, I think that there's a lot of things gonna change. But I do think that having a more broad-based digital marketing strategy is the right play for the future.

If you wanna protect yourself, that is like, as an SEO of 14 years, I will be going... And again, I hate when people build a brand. It's like, you know, this is how you win in L and M, build a brand. It's like, great, I'm a plumber.

How do I build my brand? So, but I do think that is important to a point, but I think that having a siloed marketing strategy is gonna be wrong. I think putting all your eggs in optimizing for ChatGPT, fine now, but again, how much market share is it bringing compared to Google? So I think as a digital marketer say, I'll be going, "Look, you need to really go back and be on the platforms where your audience are, and be delivering content to them through those platforms."

And I think that would be my advice. I think your point, the story about your daughter's really interesting, and it's something I've been thinking a lot more about lately, is just generationally, like, what we default into. And I think, like, you and I are of the, you know, world where you go to Google first, and it's, like, very, it's very hard to kick that. Like, I mean, I even find myself using, like, you know, go to Google search bar, I end up using Gemini 'cause it's just built into there, right?

I'm not... Like, even if I took two more seconds, I might go to my Claude instance, but it's like, ah, it's right here. It's Google. And it'll be very interesting to see other generations, as they don't default to, like, a certain thing that we're used to.

Like- Absolutely... how they go about, how do they prompt? How, like... And that will, I mean, because this is one of these things where it's like, okay, great, when, you know, our generations dominate the workforce, like, this is always gonna be the most applicable.

But as we get, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha coming in, it could be a whole different thing because they're approaching it very differently, and it'll be just very interesting to see how that evolves. How are you today? Like, if you were to do research yourself- Yep... on, I need a tool for this, what are you doing right now?

Well, well, well, you're asking an SEO. So basically- [laughs]... you know, I think, to be quite honest, I would probably be ChatGPT or Gemini first. Yeah.

You know what I mean? I think that, and again, this is coming back to, I think the revelation that was having everything summed up for you, and, you know, it's, like, lots of data points. Like, I think it does give you that, a very clear, I would say, window or context- Yeah... foundation of what you're looking for.

And then going to Google, and I think the difference is that I would rarely search in Google Search now, as in bada, bada, blah. But- Yeah, yeah... there's also a caveat to that. It depends what I'm looking for, because even though ChatGPT might go these, these, these, I'm probably just gonna go directly to the site itself.

And I would say that, you know, Google Search though, there are still things like, 'cause I know chat, and a lot of people are, are catching on to this. I don't trust the results. Yeah. And I think that's the thing, is that I'm then gonna, I'm gonna open a Ahrefs, do a keyword search in there and see what comes up.

You know what I mean? That would be my discoverability. But that has definitely changed for me. I'm definitely using less Google Search.

But when it comes to serious stuff, I'm gonna trust Google more. And I think there is that. But yeah, certainly for me, like, definitely a lot more, I would say, chat. But also then I think it's very use case specific.

Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Like, 'cause I could ask Perplexity to do some stuff for me. It's like, I think it's also your level of...

Like, it's when you ask me that or I ask you that, like, we're professionals in the space, but I think the, your average person out there searching is probably gonna search first on chat and drop it into Google then to see what's there. Yeah. Like, definitely I don't think there's many people that are bypassing that Google check. Mm-hmm.

And when you're saying... Okay, so, like, walk me through an example here, is, like, you think average person is going into ChatGPT and... Let's, we'll use the super bath example again. Like, somebody's looking for a content marketing community, and they're going into ChatGPT, and they're like, "What are the best content marketing communities?"

It's gonna, you know, give you a list of six. Maybe you ask a few follow-ups of, like, you know, here's my budget, something like this. Maybe you get down to a list of three. You're saying right now you think people are taking those three and then going to Google.

What are they, what do you think they're going to Google with? Right. I'll tell you what they're doing in Google. You get these top three, and then I know you've done...

I'll tell you what, I have- Absolutely. And I've got a great kind of use case for this. It was a financial product that I was interested in, just for personal. Yeah.

And I got these things like these are three at the top. Now, I have absolutely no knowledge of this space. None. So then, like, they get these three recommendations.

Now I'll go straight to Google, and I'm going, "What are the reviews for X brand?" Yeah. So in that case, I'm not trusting chat for that. I'm going straight to Google for that.

And I think in that way, it's like it, you know, you've moved straight from discovery search to a very bottom funnel search within chat to go, "Okay, these are reasons." Then I'm going to Google to go, "Chat says this is the best. What's this like?" And now I'm reading the reviews in Google, because I'm trusting more what Google is saying about this.

I think that's a very good use case. So it's kind of like using, uh, AI for like take all of the things out there, get me down to a few things, but then when I really need the kind of like trusted source, I don't trust ChatGPT to deliver me, like, the honest answer. Yeah. It's like I don't trust ChatGPT, it's that I need more comprehensive data then or- Yeah...

for, or informational points. And I think that's more of the thing, like, at the end of the day, like, when we're talking about anything that has a product at the end, because again, we have to extract different going, how do you plan a trip to Malaga? Yeah. I'm probably gonna do that with ChatGPT.

You know what I mean? Or, or how, how to organize a birthday party. Probably gonna do that in Chat- Yeah... in ChatGPT, but when it's got to do something I'm gonna put money on, I'm probably gonna use chat to kind of...

Because again, like you just said, it will vibe with me to ask questions about, to dig deeper about these are the best solutions. Once it offers me those, then I'm gonna jump on Google, and I'm specific on is Superpath, what are Superpath reviews like? Yeah. Or how is the rating?

I'm gonna get the AI o- overview to start, which I'm gonna skip probably. Okay. And I'm gonna start opening up links. Yeah.

What, which ones are you looking for? And obviously, this depends on the product a little bit, 'cause, like, there's different types of review sites for different things. Are you, like, looking... 'Cause I think about this, and I would follow a very similar pattern, but I do think I'm one of those people that, like, at the point I narrowed down to three, you know, I'm going in there.

If let's say it's a consumer product of some sort or service, I'm immediately going in and going to Google and saying like, like, this product, Reddit, I'm going Reddit to get the takes, and I wanna go directly to that source. Are you looking specifically for a source of reviews when you go to Google, or are you saying, "What review sources does Google populate for me? I'm looking for, you know, maybe it's Trustpilot." Maybe it's like whatever review source that I'm used to.

Yeah. So I think the Reddit thing is a great example. 'Cause when you ask them these questions, it's gonna go based on, on reviews. Yeah.

You know, we see that a lot of people say X, a lot of people say Y. You even see it in the App Store now. Actually, if you go to Reddit itself, it has the same thing. So it's gonna go based on these, this is the sentiment of blahdy-blah.

So I'm using that AI to kind of gauge, and then I'm probably gonna click on Reddit to go there and see what Reddit is saying. And the thing is that there's gonna be always, unless everyone's going brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, there's always gonna be someone vice dissenting against the norm, and you're gonna go, "Okay, I see that because of this." And then I might actually take what they say, drop it back into Google- Yeah... and then check it there again.

So I think that is the layer of where we're at. I think that, you know, we do see a lot of people, you know, we do see a lot of referring, you know, from chat. But again, when people say that, the actual amount of referrals from chat is minuscule. Right.

I mean, it's absolutely min- Like, you can say for a search query on a baseline that if I put X search query into Google, and say in Google it's got 14,000 searches, queries, searches per month, that will probably track along to the same volume within chat of, of someone doing a corresponding thing within chat. But the click-through rate from chat is, like, 2%- Yeah... compared to maybe 36, 28% in Google, and the conversion rate though is a lot higher. Like, if you see something in chat, and then you go to Google, and everything aligns fine.

But this is another thing that I always tell people, like, yes, you wanna be there, but really it's, like, ChatGPT last check was 90% of the LLM space, right? Yeah. It's, it's, I think, 15% of the total search space. Like, you're really gonna optimize for...

Like, let me give you this. I've been an SEO for 14 years. I have never, ever, ever, ever had a client come to me, "We need you to optimize for Bing." Yeah.

You know, and this for me has gone, right, yes, we should be there. You need to be there, but seriously think about it. And also, chat is changing all the time. It's changing what it's saying.

It's changing if it's even gonna give citation links. And I think that actually Google Gemini and AI mode seem to be actually doing that better now. Because they know that if they don't give proper citations or brand mentions, publishers will just go, "Well, screw you." We've already seen it with the Cloudflare CEO way, like this year or just last year, saying that now we're gonna...

You can block crawlers by default. Like, there is that and on the other side of it. Publishers will just block all your content and go, "Screw you," and they will just have different distribution channels. Yeah.

And if that happens, there is no AI. And this is the also the kind of thing. It's like we have to remember that. It's like we were always told to create content, create great content, and it will help you be an authority.

You'll get ranking, you'll get visibility. If you take that away from people, they'll go, "Well, why bother do all that? I can just go to these channels." Like, there was marketing pre-Google.

[laughs] Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? And online marketing pre-Google, and you know, there's like...

And just to finish up, you said like, you know, like my daughter, blahdy, blahdy, blah. But I've seen the change before. Chat, like, I was used to be the head of SEO for a company called Taylor Brown back, back in the day. And this was when TikTok came in, and suddenly TikTok became a search, discovery place, where it's like you had younger people go to TikTok.

This is what they were looking for. So you needed to be there, but the absolute amount of visibility you get on TikTok is just way above anything you're getting on chat. Yeah. You know, so you can make the case go, "Well, actually you're really just contrived big numbers."

But, uh, I think that until we see that with chat or LLM models in general, I still think that you need to be there. Would I be using it as my main marketing source? Would I think that this is the next best, that we need to be there now, this is overtaking Google? No.

I would say optimize for Google. By doing that, AI model, Gemini, et cetera, I think this is still gonna be the thing. I even doubt if ChatGPT will be here next year. Like, it, it looks like it's not having the best time, and Google just came in at all its launch.

So, you know, I think that you have to be cognizant of where the internet is going, and I think that, you know, SEO is definitely changing, but SEO's changed forever. Yeah. It always has been. Like, do you know what I mean?

The sky was falling in when we hit SERP overviews, you know what I mean? So it started falling a long time ago. I just think that savvy marketing is about really knowing your audience, really knowing where they are, and showing up with great content. And I love that, 'cause I hate a world where, as much as links are important, I hate a world where links are the defining thing in a marketing strategy, where I get more links than you to my page, I being A, 'cause then it's just a race to the bottom.

Yeah. And I think this shakeup is a good thing, and I think that those companies that do deliver value to their audience in places where their audience are differentiated as a brand will always win. Yeah. And I think that is, like, to come back to the start of our very conversation, as SEO links, yeah, absolutely, I am, links are still important for that discoverability thing.

But what do I think has changed is that I just don't trust any platform, and I would certainly not be building my business on just Google or chat or anything like that. I think bringing, going back to that old school digital marketing, and remember, I've been doing this for 14 years, so it's like that for me is the hat I wear now. As an SEO, this is what I would be saying. And it's funny because when you actually do that, you're actually feeding all the trust signals that LLMs are looking for regardless.

Yeah. I think that's a great place to wrap, Gordon. Really appreciate you coming on and joining us, and looking forward to having you again down the road. Awesome.

It was really great being here today, man.