Chris Garrett: The Pure SEO Is a Myth and Bing Now Feeds the LLMs

Chris Garrett wired a UK college to the internet in 1994, and his first claim on this tape is that the pure SEO does not exist. Ask one what they did all week and you get link bait, pitching, Reddit and social, which is content, PR and audience work under another name. The former Copyblogger and WP Engine marketer, now consulting through ChrisG.com, says clinging to one channel is the real cost. "If you say I'm an SEO, people think technical SEO and they think knowing all the algorithms and the dates of every Google algo change" (9:36). His version of the job: "a pure SEO also needs to be DevOps. They need to be content, copywriting, you know, audience sentiment analysis" (12:16). Jeremy's full write-up, with the clips and the transcript, is at unscriptedseo.com. His own Bing checklist from this conversation is at jeremyriveraseo.com. What you will hear Why Bing, why now. "Now there's AI tools that people are increasingly relying on that look to Bing for their source info" (11:19). What Chris has seen move rankings there: "it's usually they've got a link from a site that's already doing well in Bing" (18:08). Not Ahrefs authority, not keyword density, just Bing's own favourites linking to you.Jeremy's three-part Bing playbook. The IndexNow plugin ("if you are on WordPress and you haven't installed the index now plugin, slap yourself on the forehead because it's stupid easy to configure", 19:23), Bing Places verification for ChatGPT's local map answers, then social and barnacle distribution because Bing has counted social signals since 2010. All of it starts with Bing Webmaster Tools.HCU and the boiling frog. "I'm not convinced that the helpful content update actually provided more helpful content" (28:11), and the bigger complaint: "they've made it so that once you go into Google, you never leave. So what are we supposed to do?" (29:49). Jeremy calls publishers frog soup. Jon Henshaw argued the same case on where Google now sources truth. AI feeding AI, and where the humans went Where does the money come from? Gemini makes podcasts with virtual voices, AI transcribes and summarises them. "Where are the people in all of this? Where does the money come from?" (31:27).The over-caffeinated brain. A copywriter raised on LLMs thinks in hooks and headline structures. Someone who read Scientific Advertising 30 years ago and a Seth Godin book this year makes a connection no model will find, "because it's a human brain making random firing connections, possibly over caffeinated" (36:36). The over-caffeinated human brain gets its own short piece.In person gets a premium. Live experiences "where you know that it's not a hologram" gain value as generated content floods everything else (37:32). Jeremy's answer is real two-expert conversations, which is the whole point of this show. Using AI without shipping vibe code Chris is not an abstainer. He runs a RAG database "that I trained on my own transcripts and my own writing. If I ask it a question, it gives me an accurate answer back about my own stuff. So that's not a plagiarism bot" (44:22). The lin...