Will Critchlow
@willcritchlow
Founder and CEO at SearchPilot. Previously founded Distilled (acquired by Brainlabs). Interest in basketball, whisky, cooking, auction theory and of course organic search.
Prompt tracking has its place. Just like rank tracking did for SEO. But the plan can't just be "keep tracking this number and see what happens".
"I’ve had more questions from leadership in the last 6 months than in the preceding 10 years." If you work in SEO or digital marketing, does this sound familiar? The C-Suite is officially obsessed with AI search. Are you ready for the spotlight?
Anyone else find that business wins are a bit like trying to see yourself blink in the mirror? By the time you stop to look, they're gone and it's on to the next thing. Anyway, we celebrated a little milestone @searchpilot.bsky.social with some branded lego:
Too much confident guessing about GEO on this platform. We're bringing numbers. We can now measure LLM referral traffic and Google organic in the same A/B test, and we've just published our first GEO case study with Omio.
How an experienced enterprise retail SEO team works with finance to get EVERYONE excited about their work.
Jobs that don't require tons of experience can be hard to find right now. SearchPilot is hiring an analyst onto our US team. Check out the opportunity by heading to the careers page on our website. Tell your friends.
I made my first little personal disposable app to put my claude usage limit in my mac toolbar so I don't keep having to root around to find out how close I am.
Too much SEO reporting compares this year to last year. Seems reasonable until you consider how much changed in between. My colleague Demetria broke it down in her webinar last week and you can rewatch the whole thing for free. Here's a clip. Full link below.
The other day, I was thinking about resources I wished someone had put together and I realised I wanted someone to collate the current state of play of how traffic referred from different AI sources shows up in server logs and web analytics.
CMO, VP marketing, VP digital, like any leadership role, can be a lonely place to be. @paddymoogan.bsky.social breaks it down:
I've been collating how the different AI platforms tag (or don't tag!) their referral traffic, and how that means it will show up in your analytics by default. Lotta dark traffic out there, folks:
We’ve been playing around with vibe-coding some free SEO tools over the last few months. Which sounds like the setup for a terrible idea, except that the tools are built on things we’ve learned from years of helping large sites test SEO changes properly.
The Prime Minister is dying on the steps of no 10 Downing Street. The corridors of power lie empty... In its last days, the Government enacts the Tomorrow Project. A desperate plan to save humanity.
Her latest book, The Tomorrow Project, is out today in paperback and it's stunning. If you've read her previous crime podcaster books in the Cal Lovett series, this one's a bit different, but might be my favourite (shhh! I don't know if I'm allowed favourites).
And now for something totally different... Some of you know that my wonderful talented wife @heathercritchlow.bsky.social is an author...
Find out why @britneymuller.bsky.social got absolutely flamed in a company-wide Slack 💀. Her AI lore is wild. It's pretty shocking given where LLMs are today, but she kept the receipts.
1. I would have guessed there'd be an AI overview for this 2. I wouldn't have expected "regular" search results to be this good
Honing and refining an ideal customer profile is scary! Saying no to prospects who aren't a good fit is even worse. But both help you grow AND stay true to your values.
The bet on trust - a snippet from my conversation with @patrickhathaway.bsky.social :
GEO is SEO but with more panic... ...in conversation with Katelyn Geary and Patrick Hathaway:
Katelyn Geary talking sense in discussion last week with me and Patrick Hathaway: "AI search is a team effort":
I don't like SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET so I was initially sceptical about a series of tests exploring capitals in titles. In fact, what we learned from our analysis of the data was one of the most interesting test outcomes we've had @searchpilot.bsky.social .
My colleague Demetria gave a masterclass webinar in both sides of the AI-in-SEO story: 1. When, how, and why to use AI to help improve your website 2. How to measure the impact of website changes on AI discovery (GEO) Here's a short clip but I'll link to the full thing below.
I agree with @timsoulo.bsky.social : the AIO / GEO loopholes that you see people boasting about exploiting are going to get closed:
What have we learned from thousands of tests? One thing is that they don't generalise. There are too many differences between specific verticals, competitors, and websites so every situation is a little different. Here is me talking to Jonathan Clark and Joe DeVita about it on The Page 2 Podcast
