← Embracing Marketing Mistakes
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- [00:00]
Chris
Today's guest needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. Rand Fishkin built Moz into the biggest name in SEO. He raised $30 million in venture capital and then watched his decision nearly break him. He stepped down as a CEO during a battle with depression, walked away, and started again the very next day. Now he runs SparkToro, a company a 20th the size of Moss, and he's happier, healthier, and making much more money. In this episode, Rand tells us why raising venture capital was his biggest mistake, why traffic has always been a vanity metric, and why your boss is wrong to give Google the credit for your branded search Traffic. This one is brutally honest and I think it's one of our best episodes ever. You need to listen to this. Let's get into it. Enjoy. Rand Fishkin, welcome to the show.
- [01:00]
Rand Fishkin
Thanks for having me, Chris. Great to be here.
- [01:01]
Chris
I mean, thanks. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Delighted to have you. I know you from Moz fame from many, many years ago. So Will and I are that old that we've, we've. Before we ran this PR agency, we used to work. We used to work in another PR agency together. And I was massively into SEO as a pr. There wasn't a thing called digital PR back then. And so I was sort of like a PR doing social media and SEO. And I used to get a lot of my information from Moz. And obviously we had the. You had the little mozrank scoring system and everything. And that was all developed by you. I mean, well, not all of it, but it was your idea initially. So do you want to just give us a bit of a rundown for how you came about, set up Moz? Because I think that story is fascinating for us and people will like to hear it.
- [01:58]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, yeah. Old story. So this is, yeah, you know, I, I wrote this book about it, Lost and Founder. But the, you know, the introduction is basically me dropping out of college, two classes away from graduating at the University of Washington here in Seattle, and then working with my mom, Jillian, who'd been running a, you know, solo one person marketing consultancy for 20 years at that point. This is 2001 and basically being a bad web designer who, who couldn't get work and couldn't get jobs and couldn't find clients who would pay and got into SEO because we had SEO subcontractors, right, who are doing the SEO for the websites that we built for our clients. And we couldn't afford to pay them, but we needed, you know, we needed the money from our Clients and we had promised the work to them, so I had to learn SEO myself and do it. And it. It turned out that I was pretty good at. Just became a, you know, a passion for. For a long time. Right. I basically was at Moz, the company that became moz for. For 17 years. I became the CEO in 07 after we had sort of moved from being a consulting business to starting a software company. I had all these software things that I wanted us to build, and we eventually did and then raised lots of venture capital, which. Which in retrospect was a mistake. Big mistake. I'm not sure it's a marketing mistake, but. Oh, my God, what a.
- [03:30]
Chris
It can be. Founder mistakes are good as well. I did say that we're allowed founder mistakes.
- [03:34]
Will
Yeah. Dive into that. Because obviously you raise capital in order to scale the business, but it. It created an enormous pressure, didn't it, for you?
- [03:44]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah. And it's not just the pressure.
- [03:46]
Will
You.
- [03:47]
Rand Fishkin
You shift the company from being product, customer and team focused to being low chance of $1 billion return focused. Right. So rather than lots of board meetings.
- [04:03]
Chris
Right.
- [04:04]
Rand Fishkin
If the three of us. Let's say the three of us built software. Right. We're SparkToro.
- [04:08]
Will
Right.
- [04:08]
Rand Fishkin
SparkToro is one of my current companies. Does audience research software. Right. And when. When Casey and I get together and we talk about what do we want to build? Who are we building it for? Why are we building it? What are our plans? You know, I got a giant whiteboard in front of me on the other side of the screen, you can't see, that's got, you know, all these. All these different data sources, things that our customers have told us we wanted. We run surveys. Board of directors at Moz doesn't really care about that at all. Right. The venture investors care about is this a giant total addressable market, and how are we going to become the monopoly in a giant total addressable market space? Building things for at the time. Right? Building things for SEO professionals and PRs who have to do SEO. You know, that's. That's little stuff like, don't worry about that. Tell me how we're going to compete with HubSpot. How are we going to get this to a public company size, focusing on Google and SEO? That's too small a market. We need to go big. How are you going to go big? That's when things go crazy. And that is the mistake that I made, especially the first round of venture was so small. It was 1.1 million in 2007. It really didn't Change the company all that much. And it did. Well, to your point, it gave us the money to build what we needed to build, which was, you know, we wanted to build that link index of the web. Right Chris, to your point, around Mozrank and Domain Authority and those things, it let us build that, that was incredible. But man, you know, once, once we raised $30 million, that's different story, right? So I, I raised that money foolishly, stepped down as CEO during about with depression in 2014 and then sort of negotiated a very painful departure from the company that, that got me out at the start of 2018 and, and I started Sparktoro the very next day.
- [06:13]
Will
I was going to say, I mean you, you've, you, I mean we'll, we'll dive into some of your current business concerns. But you, you're, you know, you now have three businesses. How have things kind of changed? I mean, presumably it's now on your own terms and there's a much healthier kind of balance. You're in control of your own destiny. Talk to us about that.
- [06:31]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the most powerful things about making big, awful, terrible, life changing mistakes is that you get the opportunity to rectify them. You can change. This is one of the most beautiful things about human beings is that we can change our minds, right? We can go from people who stand on stages and glorify, you know, the money that we've raised and how powerful and important our company is because of our investor backing and how we're going to take over the world and how, you know, we're making 40 or $50 million a year at our business. You know what's, you know, what's true and deeply embarrassing is I, I am more financially successful, I am more emotionally healthy. I am more day to day happy. I am a better partner and friend and human being and family member today than, than I, than I ever was when I was very successful, right, making, making $50 million a year. You know, Sparktoro is still a, you know, under $5 million a year. Not even, not even a tenth, not even a twentieth the size of Moz and so, so much better. And I'm, and I'm making more money. It's really weird. It doesn't make any sense.
- [07:57]
Chris
You know, that's why you feel happier. You've got, you're making more money and you're not as, under as much pressure. But it's also your baby as well. You. Is it, is it? I always, when I see people so obviously me and Will haven't sold out, so we, we own our business. Is it the fact that you're relinquishing control and that when somebody else then has control of your business and you're. Then you know they're in control of you rather than you're in control of your own destiny, then is that where the stress comes from? This is a message from the show's sponsors. Prohibition pr. We're Yorkshire's biggest PR agency and we specialize in delivering amazing video content and podcasting content. And we guarantee we can get your podcast, whether new or created by us, or if you've already got one, into a top 20 category in any country. Just drop me a line if you're interested in that. But meanwhile, we've got loads and loads of free stuff. We've got an entire events catalog packed for you with more than 15 webinars available free and on demand. Whenever you want to watch them or listen to them, it's. It's me and the lovely Will talking through all sorts of topics from social media, public relations, content marketing, video execution. You name it, we talk about it. And we've also got two live events coming up, both in June, July. So the June and July ones is from creators to closers. It's all about influencer marketing and influencer ambassadorship and all that. We've got another event in September and October called how to Create Scroll Stopping Content that Convert. Bit of a mouthful, but amazing. All completely free. So if you want to come along to our events for free, this is your bag. You enjoy the show. First of all, give us a like and subscribe. And please, please give us a review because we've got about 20 and we've got like 365,000 downloads, so it'd be nice to hear from you. I'll give you a shout out, but if you want to listen, if you want to register for the events, you can go to prohibitionpr.co.uk and click on upcoming events. Really easy to do. Register and yeah, Will and I will see you there and we'll have a chat with you. Thanks for listening. We'll. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoy the show.
- [10:14]
Rand Fishkin
Okay, here. This is even more embarrassing to admit, I think, when that happens. And Chris, I've talked to plenty of founders. I talked to a founder friend of mine, gosh, two weeks ago, who, from the outside looks incredibly successful. Like his business is doing what looks amazing, but it turns out behind the scenes there's a private equity deal and he's just in these chains and he's paying huge amounts of interest on debt that he had to do in order to get a deal done. It's just awful. So, yes, that can cause a tremendous amount of stress. But when I was CEO of Moz, all of the pressure was self created. My documents with my investors said that they couldn't replace me if I had not chosen to step down as CEO. I owned two of the four board seats. I had veto rights on nearly everything. I like, we really negotiated extremely well in all these deals. I would not. It was the cultural environment. It was the cultural environment that caused that pressure. And I. I felt an obligation, a deep obligation to, you know, live up to this promise of, how am I going to get you 10 times your money back in the next seven years? Or whatever it is, right? So, you know, they put in 30. I need to get them 300 every year. It's like, all right, we got to make another 25 million this year. We only made 10. Like.
- [11:51]
Chris
Oh, right.
- [11:55]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, yeah. It's. It's really weird. I. I should have just stood at those boarding board meetings and said, hey, you can tell me whatever you want. This is what we're going to do. We're going to run a highly successful, profitable business that serves this particular niche. I bet Moz would have been, you know, it would have been SEM Rush or. Or Ahrefs today, right? With. With hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and happy customers and, you know, still a market leader. But instead we chase this, you know, this other outcome. And that is completely my fault. Completely my fault. You know, there's no. There's no. You know, we can talk about the circumstances that created that environment, but there's no one to blame but me.
- [12:38]
Chris
I mean, wow, this is like. I mean, we had. We've had some things on here, but that is the most honest thing I think I've ever heard. I mean, the pressure. Do you know what it sounded like? It sounded like an episode of Succession when you were reading it out. The pressure that they. With each one of them trying to succeed their dad, and they're under all that pressure. And I was just thinking of you in that role also. You're wearing a suit, and I could see you as the CEO.
- [13:02]
Rand Fishkin
Oh, I'm. I'm no suit.
- [13:04]
Chris
This is a.
- [13:04]
Rand Fishkin
This is a waistcoat. You know, a little knitted waistcoat and a knitted tie. I'm trying to bring the formality level down here.
- [13:10]
Chris
Yeah, right. You're bringing. You bring it. You're bringing the snap to the. To the show. Anyway, you've talked a lot about zero click search.
- [13:20]
Rand Fishkin
Yes.
- [13:22]
Chris
So, I mean, for marketers out there listening and that aren't geeky, a bit like we are. How could you explain zero click search today in 2026?
- [13:34]
Rand Fishkin
You know what the easiest way to explain it to you is? This is 10 minutes before I came on your show. Geraldine, my wife and I are getting ready for our day, right? She's, she's going out somewhere and I'm getting ready for this and she is looking at her phone and she says, I just googled something. Where are the results?
- [13:55]
Chris
Right.
- [13:56]
Rand Fishkin
Where, where are the websites? I can't click on anything. It's just, it's all answers and AI and suggestions and stuff that's inside Google. That is the zero click world that we're living in. It's inside Google. It's inside all your AI tools, it's inside all of your social media. Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn and Reddit and TikTok and Instagram.
- [14:20]
Chris
Right.
- [14:21]
Rand Fishkin
All of these platforms and environments want to keep you within their ecosystem. They don't want anybody clicking out that doesn't do anything for them unless you pay.
- [14:32]
Will
Right.
- [14:32]
Rand Fishkin
And so inside this zero click world, what's happening is people are completing their entire customer journey from very top of funnel and problem discovery all the way down to brand preference and brand choice and product choice. But they're doing it in an environment that's not your website. They're doing it inside of Instagram, they're doing it inside of Reddit, they're doing it inside of Google AI mode, they're doing it inside of Google's instant answers. They're doing it in chat, GPT and Claude. Because of that, you need to embrace this idea. We all need to embrace this idea that is completely counter to what we've done for the last quarter century of zero click marketing. Doing marketing even when it draws no click, but creates influence in the platform and the place where your audience is paying attention. And so this is, you know, this is the book that Amanda and I are writing that's coming out this fall. And we're, we're, we're hoping we can help a lot of folks who, you know, have this historic mindset that, that really worked until like 22, 23. It's not, it's not all that new. Right, Right. But it's also just a massive sea change. I mean, you guys think about, you know, you did pr, right? Pr. PR is one of those marketing channels that has always struggled to get attribution and now Every channel struggles to get attribution because there's no click. You can't look in your analytics and see it. You and I both know, right, that if my friend Scott Heimendanger gets his ultrasonic chef's knife, you know, a fantastic review in the Guardian, it's going to drive a ton of sales. And it did, right? This, this happened like a few weeks ago, I think. Ton of sales, right? You can log into his sales dashboard, you see this big spike, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that it came from the Guardian. Does this mean Scott should stop doing pr? No, no, that's absolutely mental. But the, the model that so many business owners, so many CEOs and CFOs and boards of directors and, and CMOs have is that if it's not in their analytics dashboard, if they can't see it in the numbers, it doesn't matter. It's not real.
- [16:54]
Chris
So the thing that Will and I were just talking about before you came on, we've been talking about it today. We've talked about. We were in Paris last week at the WorldCom conference and we were talking about something that I'm fascinated with, being a bit of an analytics and SEO geek traffic. So about nine months ago, when, ironically, it was April, I think it was not nine months ago, it was over a year ago now, April 2035, just after the AI overview, I put two and two together here. Traffic had dropped on our website, I think it was by 48%. But inquiries. Yeah, 48%. And then we, we did some anal. I jumped into the analytics and went through with Will and we were looking at what the problem was. Then I looked at Daily Mail, their traffic was down 62%, I think I've done a whole, there's a whole YouTube webinar we did on it and we had like 800 people come on it. We probably do a new version of that anyway. That's fine. Delved into and I saw that the, the leads on our website, which we come through HubSpot and various places were going fine. They stayed the same. Traffic down 50% leads, not down at all. However, the last eight weeks, leads are now down, traffic's going down still. And I'm wondering. And because we, our business, we get a lot of referrals. You know, we're a big, we're fair, we're a medium sized PR agency, the biggest in Yorkshire, which is the biggest state in the uk. So we get a lot of referrals and we get. But we get quite a lot from search marketing, PPC and stuff like that. But inquiries, leads has started to drop off quite a lot and not from referrals because obviously we know those people. And I Will and I were discussing it. Are we starting to see the disruption that people were talking about from, is it artificial intelligence and is this tied to your zero click search? Is this AI crash 2.0 that we saw in the 2000s, is that what's happening now and is it going to be worse? And this is a big question, so I'm open. I just thought it'd be fascinating to get your insight.
- [18:57]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah. Okay, so lots of things going on here. One is for tons of businesses that we've observed and sort of people who've given us access to their metrics. We can see exactly what you're describing, right? This, this phenomenon. I wrote a popular blog post about this, right, that traffic's down but revenue's up. It, it doesn't seem to make any sense, right? And, and the answer is traffic was always a vanity metric. All of this, you know, hey, we're going to create great content and then we're gonna drive people up to our website and from our website, some percent are going to become leads, some small percent are going to sign up for our email list. That whole ecosystem is sort of falling apart as all of the big tech platforms try to create ownership and control inside their ecosystems. Now this being said, if you're, if you're the Daily Mail, right, If you're a publishing and I, you know, I don't think anyone here is going to shed a tear for them. But the, if, if you are, you know, a, a publisher, well, what model do you have except traffic? Traffic is how you monetize traffic is revenue. I think for those folks this world is apocalyptic, right? And they, the, the only, the only solution is to find another way to monetize your business. Find another, another business path. Great. You know, two good examples that I always point to. One is Bloomberg, right? Bloomberg is a giant publishing engine in the financial field. But they don't need traffic. They're happy to keep their, you know, millions of, of people who are exposed to their content on YouTube or inside of Google or you know, license their data to third parties because the real value in their publishing is from people using the terminal and trading stocks and bonds, right? And being part of the market, that's, that's where they benefit. So they don't, they don't need 10 million visitors on their website if they have 10 million viewers to their YouTube. And that's exactly what they're, they're finding. The other good example is the New York Times, which the New York Times has become a games company. Almost two thirds of New York Times visitors subscribers visit nothing except the games and cooking section. Nothing.
- [21:17]
Will
Wow.
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Rand Fishkin
They're not subscribing to the New York Times, they're subscribing to wordle.
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Chris
Right.
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Rand Fishkin
And it's been hugely successful for them. Right. They're essentially a games platform with this ancient publishing appendage. What is that like, like a prehensile tale, you know, and this is, this is kind of the model going forward. It's really, you know, it's quite tragic. If you're someone who believes in the power of the free press and, and you want to see sort of great journalism, I think there's going to have to be a huge upheaval around that before, before we see something settle. But I would point to the second thing you talked about, which is like, hey, now we're seeing our leads drop. One of the things that I would, you know, that I would encourage you to do is, is sort of to build a new form of analytics dashboard to be able to reverse engineer what's happening, right? So at the, at the top of your kind of marketing funnel, my suspicion is there are people who find you via, you know, three or four primary sources. One is sort of press media and blogs and email newsletters and sort of, you know, things in our field that send you referrals. They might not even send direct traffic, but your name comes up in those places. Podcasts, Absolutely. Podcast. Great. Yeah, podcasts, YouTube, webinars, right. All that kind of stuff, right. And you can see some rough stuff, right? Like if you use, I don't know, you probably use something higher tier or more expensive than Alert Mouse. But like, you know, we, I use Alert Mouse for this because one of my companies and see, like, hey, here's all the mentions of SparkToro, here's how many we've gotten, here's how high impact those are, you know, and if that, if that graph starts dropping, I'm like, aha. Our press and media presence is dropping, right? Our sort of third party, the second, the second one is Google, right? So like it's not clicks, but it's impressions. How many times did our brand come up in Google's results? They're, they're now surfacing. How many times it came up in AI Answers, right. They just launched that yesterday, I think that test. So you're going to be able to see that soon. You can do this too with third party. You know, I use Gumshoe, which is a company here in Seattle. But like Gumshoe will tell me, hey, you know, you're, here's whatever 5,000 different prompts that people might enter around all the topics of SparkToro and audience research and like, hey, great, you know, here's how many times you were mentioned versus your competitors. Terrific. Like that, that really helps too. That tells me what's going on in AI and then social media. What's my LinkedIn impression count? What's my Twitter impression count? What's my threads impression count? What's my Reddit impressions count? What's my YouTube views? All of those. So, you know, you put sort of put things into these four categories and then you can see if one of them is declining. I don't know if it's the AI apocalypse yet. My suspicion is no, it's not. It's probably something that's going on in one of these four channels where, you know, maybe Google started recommending one of your competitors more than you because of this is a theory. But a lot of people are doing AI spamming these days. It's really easy, right. If you want to create a fake PR firm tomorrow and we can contact a bunch of people I know and be like, hey, make this the top PR firm that's most mentioned for public relations in Yorkshire, no problem.
- [24:46]
Chris
Can we speak to your mate? Because that'd be quite handy.
- [24:51]
Rand Fishkin
I mean the question is whether you want to do risky things with your, with your real company.
- [24:57]
Chris
No, I suppose. And I'll let Will come in in a minute. I just wanted to ask one more question. So did. Because that ties to what we talk about a lot on this show, which is about the power of Brand. It's not why we started the podcast, by the way, but Brand actually has done us quite well with the podcast because the brand, the podcast doing well. Number one on Apple, by the way. In business. No, not in business, in marketing. Three in business in the uk. Um, but yeah, it's pot is like Brand really the it sounds to me because I, I, when we're discussing it our side, we felt Brand's the way to go because Brand will stay strong if you've got a strong brand that'll perform. Might not right now, but it will hold better than these little tricks as all these black hatting AI robotic monsters pop up like they did with SEO and like they did with social media. Is that, well, 100%, aren't we?
- [25:55]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, 100% agree with you. I look, there's lots of AI tricks I think it's fun to play with. I think it's fun to, you know, become the thing that ChatGPT recommends the most or Claude recommends the most. And, and then three months later, right, you fall off because, you know, their, their systems get more sophisticated, just like the early days of SEO. But I'd be very cautious about doing that with your primary brand that you're trying to build for the long term. Brand plays on compound interest, right? People know you like you, trust you, they use you, they refer more people to you. You keep that same brand name, you keep that same focus. This is how Moz was built, right? Moz was SEO software. It was track your rankings, it was get your domain authority, was see the links that are coming to you. It was, you know, all these things, right? Crawl your website and find errors and opportunities and then, and then it tried to be 10 other things and the brand got diluted by the product, by the marketing, by the, by the CEO, right? And yeah, huge, huge mistake in judgment and really compromised, you know, sort of took the legs out from under the brand's ability to benefit from compound interest. So sometimes, you know, we've done this at SparkToro before, you kind of go hedgehog mode, right, where you're just like burrow down, keep trying to keep staying focused on your one thing, your little hole in the ground and you, you wait out these challenges and you emerge stronger on the other side with more opportunity while a bunch of people are flailing around and trying to figure this out. It's, yeah, it can be tough. And I don't think this AI apocalypse is quite going to hit marketing yet. I think where the AI apocalypse is going to hit is on the financial side, right? There's just this $8 trillion of build out for data centers that can't possibly monetize. I think the number has to be something like five times the revenue of all big tech companies combined within four years.
- [28:03]
Chris
The numbers don't work, do they?
- [28:05]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, no one thinks the numbers work, right? And so you can see all these market players are like, well, you know, I kind of just got my finger on the sell button waiting for it to. Waiting for a big reception.
- [28:17]
Chris
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:19]
Will
So I've got a question and you've sort of touched on this, Rand, but you talked earlier about zero click marketing, you know, the need to be kind of proactive when it comes to zero click marketing. Now you've about talked, talked about things like building brand, you know, and this is probably quite a big question, but where should, where should brands be focusing their time and effort? And the second part to that question is, can anyone do it? You know, if we're a mum and dad, corner shop or restaurant, can we compete?
- [28:48]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah. Yeah, fantastic question, Will. Okay, so here's one of my pet peeves about Marketing World is that the stories in marketing that often get the most attention go big and viral. Everyone points to, they come from big brands. And there is not a lot that a mom and pop shop that a small service business or a retail business or a restaurant can learn from what Nike did right with their rebrand or what Apple did wrong. Or like all those case studies are just really useless if you're not doing $1 billion a turnover. Okay, my recommendation, my recommendation for anyone who is trying to do zero click marketing or really marketing of any kind, if you're small, stay very focused. You're going to hear advice from, you know, people like Gary Vaynerchuk or, you know, those, those types of folks where they're like, you got to be everywhere. Your customers are in these, you know, 15 different social channels and Google and AI tools and you might have heard us talking today about a bunch of different channels and, you know, these four different columns. You don't have to be in all those places if you are great at one or two forms of marketing, just keep hitting those channels, almost any of them for a small business, for a medium sized business, even if you're doing a few million pounds of turnover, totally big enough that, that is completely big enough to go after two channels, right? So you might say, hey, you know what I'm saying? I'm actually really good at answering people's questions on Reddit. I got an account there, I read it all the time. I sort of get the culture and the lingo and the vibe. Keep contributing to Reddit, keep being a helpful person in the, you know, the whatever, H vac subreddit, right, for people who are installing air conditioning in the UK because global warming means that temperatures in the UK are going crazy in the spring. Great, fantastic. Like, like, do it. Get in there. Be that person. Maybe you hate Reddit, maybe you think it's just a cesspool, but you're pretty good on video. YouTube Shorts is just waiting for you, right? Or you hate video, you hate Reddit. No way are you doing those things. But turns out, you know, you got a killer voice for radio. You're really good at going on other people's podcasts. You have a bunch of Interesting things to say. Guess what? There's going to be. I don't care what industry you're in, there's a thousand podcasts in your industry. Webinars and you know, people with other channels, pitch them, do interesting research, do interesting things, have interesting stories to tell, and then go pitch those stories and that research on those interesting things. This, this can work in literally any channel you can think of. Maybe you're terrible at all those things, but you are absolutely fantastic at on the street marketing, right? Like fantastic storefront, great window display and design. Maybe you're excellent at, you know, in real life advertising, right? So putting up posters and billboards and you know, and ads like that. Fantastic. Lean into it. Like, don't, don't let the world of digital tell you that you can't still bring people to your business in the real world. You absolutely can. This is about leaning into three things. One, is my audience actually paying attention to this place, whatever it is, right? This channel, if you're going after podcasts, but you're in H Vac, I'm not sure, like, it's a little dicey, right? It might, might not work so well. So that's the first one. The second one is, are you, do you have unique value that you can offer there, something that is different from what the rest of the market is doing and differentiate it? And the third one is, do you have passion and interest around this? It's not just the value you provide, right? If you, I've never heard anyone say, for example, will never heard this. I hate Instagram so much. I wish that app would just fall in the ocean, but I'm so good at it. Nope, it doesn't happen. So there's a thing that you hate and you think you're supposed to do it. Maybe go find the thing that you like, the thing that brings you energy, because even if you suck at that thing today, you will be burning, putting more energy and more revolutions into it. And like we said, the most powerful force in marketing is compound interest of brand.
- [33:08]
Will
Love it, love it. And then specifically, if I'm going to push you specifically, do certain channels have undue influence when it comes to zero click marketing? Geo summaries, you know, if, if, if we, if we're serious about being seen in those. I know it varies platform to platform, but you know, is it, is it pr, is it earned media, is it directories? Where should we be looking?
- [33:30]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so if we're talking about specifically zero click marketing for AI answers or instant search results, Right at the top of Google, the AI overviews, AI mode, Claude chatgpt, all that kind of stuff, that kind of. We call it like zero click marketing for AI or SEO as opposed to for social or PR or content. Those draw from two kinds of sources. And this is, it's quite frustrating to understand. We sort of wrote a whole chapter on this in the book with a bunch of research. But okay, there, there's two ways that they come up with this. One is called. Is is pulled from the training models themselves, right? The models train on a bunch of content that is crawled from the Internet and taken from books and taken from YouTube transcripts and, and television transcripts and podcasts. Podcast transcripts, right. It's like this historical mass of data that tells them which words frequently come after other words. This is why a lot of people call AI spicy autocomplete, which I think is a good shorthand for it. So if your brand gets mentioned alongside the words and phrases, right, you want to be the most mentioned PR agency in Yorkshire in ChatGPT. Well, all the documents on the web, especially the recent web, the last six months, nine months, if a high percentage of them who say PR agency or public relations agency or any other synonym also mention your agency, boom, you are going to be in those top few results. The second kind on the training data is called RAG R A G. It's retrieval, augmented generation. And this is when the AI tool which, which can be Google as well, does a search, a classic web search or many web searches, which is called called Query Fan out, which you don't need to know too much about, but. But essentially is performing a bunch of searches just like a human being might, to figure out what are the top sources or things that it should pull from or, or missed opportunities. Rag is happening a lot now. You know, it used to be maybe 10% of AI prompts would result in a rag returned, but now it's 60%. 70% could be higher depending on your industry. And in those cases you need to do two things. You've got to be in that training data and you need to be in those top results. So this gets weird, right? Like suddenly I'm doing classic SEO to rank well or be in the results. It doesn't have to be your website that comes up, it can just be your brand that's mentioned on a page that does well in the results. But you want to be in those top results not because anyone's ever going to see you or click you there, but because the AI, right, is going to perform this search and then show you. So it's. Yeah, and I do want to say this, right, and we talk about this in the book too, the last 90 seconds of advice that I've given you. You ask me again in six months, the answer might totally change. Like AI is. So it's. It changes so frequently, right? Like that last year people were talking about how basically you could. You could submit 10 posts to a bunch of subreddits that had never existed before yesterday with zero upvotes. No one's ever upvoted them. There's no comments, no conversation. And you could, like that, instantly improve your ChatGPT mentions, right? Like ChatGPT was just pulling from Reddit, like there's no tomorrow and it didn't care whether there was any. And then, of course, that changed. And then. And then there was like a YouTube era that we're currently in a bit of a YouTube era with Google's AI answers where you guys have probably seen this, right? You can put up a bunch of YouTube videos with your brand name. Even if they get zero views, you can get a lot of pull there. Is that going to last? No way. Google's not going to let that stand for long. That would totally undermine their result quality. But it works today. And I don't know, are the three of us going to tell people, you shouldn't spam AI?
- [37:52]
Chris
Let's start spamming AI. AI spamming everybody. I see so many people, so many people run. So many people ranting on LinkedIn now, ranting about AI slop. And the fact that in fact there was. There was an interview today on one of the news sites in the UK and it was. It was journalists moaning that PRs are now using AI to pitch to them. Even really good quality ones are using it, I think. Yeah. But then you could flip that on its head. Journalists. There was a couple of examples where a journalist. And it's an article. It was published right at the bottom it said the usual bit that it says, would you like me to amend this? And that was in the article. He'd obviously forgot. They cut and pasted it, the article, and left the. Would you like me to the actual prompt from the AI. Also, why do they leave that bit in on the copy and paste? I never know. You know what? Nobody. Nobody. If you're listening out there, Mr. Altman, if you're listening out there, get rid of the copy of the end of the conversation. We just want the content copied that way. Who wants that?
- [39:00]
Rand Fishkin
My God. So it's a wild era. For AI and content creation. You know, I think in 10 years, 20 years, people are going to look back and be like, oh, my God, what were, what were they thinking? What were they doing?
- [39:16]
Chris
Right?
- [39:16]
Rand Fishkin
How did they let this technology just run amok? They were letting students use it for, for school. People learn nothing. You know, it's just. Yeah. And this is how it goes with new technologies.
- [39:28]
Will
Right.
- [39:29]
Rand Fishkin
There's always, there's always that pushback. I'm sure you guys remember because you look like you're about my age, right? The, the late 90s, early 2000s, when there was tons of media and journalism about how the web was ruining kids and ruining social relationships and, you know, ruining the planet and, and, and how we would all give it up. Right. The World Wide Web would be used by only a handful of businesses in a few years. It's just.
- [39:55]
Chris
Yeah, yeah, we're now getting to the. I mean, we're in the bloody social media policy. Governments are now talking about control. You know, Australia are controlling age groups. We're now getting into that era of where social media is, is the. Each government is trying to find a way to control it and make it, well, not as corrosive and horrible.
- [40:16]
Rand Fishkin
I mean, it's, you know, it's equally, I think from a health perspective and from a societal perspective, it's equally dangerous as cigarettes or alcohol or opium or any of these other things. Right. And it always takes time, it takes years and decades before human beings and societies and eventually governments take action to regulate and control. I've often thought to myself that there will be a time in the future when human societies look back and they say, wait a minute, you let anyone post anything they want to social media, then you built algorithms to optimize not, not for the health and, and truth of any of that, but for engagement. And then you were surprised when fascists came into power, you know, and started wars. How can you be surprised about that, you idiots? You know? Right? And so like this, this feels like the type of thing where, you know, it's like carbon monoxide, you know, you got to regulate it. You can't just be spewing unlimited quantities into the atmosphere.
- [41:19]
Chris
No. So we haven't really. We've touched on a mistake you've made and you found. Have you got a marketing mistake to share on the show then?
- [41:26]
Rand Fishkin
Oh, man, so many. God, have I done marketing mistakes. Yeah. So let's see. Some of. I think my biggest recent marketing mistakes have, have been with positioning. Positioning is one of those things that I, I think because my background Was SEO. You know, when you, I, I like to say, you know, when you, when you hand in an SEO a problem, they, they, they think every, they just take their, their keyword rankings, hammer to it, right? So for, you know, for 17 years of my career, all I thought about was how do I move up in position in Google, how do I, how do I become higher ranked in Google and get more clicks and then turn more of those clicks into conversions? And what I never thought about was why does this business exist? Why is this business the, a better alternative to solving this customer problem than anything else they might consider? And then how do I make that really clear over and over again in the places where my audience pays attention? That, that was not really a consideration. I think I accidentally was good at it with moz, but with SparkToro, we got positioning wrong several times. We might not even have it right now. You know, we, we started, we started as sort of a social, social intelligence riff on social listening data. That, that was not really what we were, but we thought we should describe ourselves that way because we had this sort of graph of all the social data that we were using to provide, you know, information about like, where do you, where do your audience go and, and what do they pay attention to, what are they listening to, what are they following, what are they watching on YouTube, which podcast they subscribing to, what conferences they go to? So we had all this great data, but we were describing ourselves in a way that people didn't quickly understand and that they didn't associate with the problem we were solving. Then we pivoted to audience intelligence. We were like, okay, we're going to create this category of audience intelligence. Category creation is very expensive, very time consuming, super resource heavy. And we were a two person team with, you know, a million dollars of funding that we needed to spend on, you know, our software, again, didn't, didn't really work. We pivoted a third time. We are now in audience research, which is basically like, I want to understand more about my customers and potential customers. Yeah. So we, you know, that, that thing of like, what's the problem that you solve and how do you describe both that problem and your solution in a compelling way? That has just been a ongoing battle for us and I think never, never quite quite hit. So if you guys have great ideas, I'm, I'm open to it. But this has been a, you know, it's a real thorny pickle.
- [44:35]
Will
It's interesting hearing you explain it like that because actually it's so simple. Isn't it? You know, it's, it's, it's, you know, what, what's unique about yourself and how do you communicate that and engage? And it's amazing how easy it is to forget that and get caught up in a tweet.
- [44:50]
Chris
In a tweet. That's. That was the beauty of Twitter, wasn't it? You had to get it in 140 characters. And really, Rand, you should be able to do your elevator pitch in 140 characters. And I should know exactly what you are, who you are and what you do.
- [45:02]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, sometimes, you know, so I practiced this a bunch, right? Where it's like, hey, you, what you. What you want to do, right, as a marketer is try or founder is try and talk to a whole bunch of people who are your target customer and look for the lines where their eyes light up and they can't wait to do the thing, right? They go from, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, what? Wait, what did you just say? You do this. Oh, my God, I've been dying for that.
- [45:29]
Chris
That.
- [45:30]
Rand Fishkin
That's the thing you want to find, and it is hard. Is hard to find. I think you got to have a lot of conversations with a lot of people. You got to figure out whether the ones that you're talking to are a big enough market and the right market and the right match, and whether they have the authority and influence to make the purchase decision, and whether they can convince their boss or team or clients or whatever to jump on board with this idea. It's a challenging thing. And sometimes I think one of the big challenges with SparkToro is that we're in a new space. Right prior to SparkToro, if you came to me and you're like, hey, Rand, I really need to know what podcasts chemical engineers in the UK listen to. I'd be like, well, we're going to have a $50,000, you know, budget for a big old market research survey, and we're going to do a bunch of interviews and we're going to, you know, try and do an audit of a whole bunch of podcasts and their audience data and pull this all together, you know, and now you can just be like, chemical engineers in the UK, type it into SparkToro, and then scroll down to the podcast list, and it's like, here's one through 50. Ta da.
- [46:49]
Will
I've got a quick question, Rand. I appreciate we're approaching the hour mark. This is a little bit like asking somebody who their favorite child is, but you've got three very different Businesses. Snapbar Studio Alert Mouse, Sparktoro or sparktoro. Have you got which, which one are you most excited about? You know which, which have you got a favorite? You know, where's, where's. Where's your. Where does your true passion lie?
- [47:14]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, let's see. So I. Sparktoro is wonderful in a million ways. I would say it is where I put the vast majority of my effort. And it's certainly you can, you can hear like when I talk about zero click marketing and like trying to change marketers minds and stuff. This is like my, my long term big mission is to make it such that even though big tech is trying to screw you, you're going to turn around and have success despite all their nefarious efforts to own and control the web. That, you know, that's a big long mission for me.
- [47:55]
Will
I.
- [47:59]
Rand Fishkin
So it's hard, it's hard not, not to say that one but, but I will say you guys running a video game company is so fun. It is so delightful. Every day I here look this morning our, our animator Adrian, he's, he's working on, you know, this. So the video game, if you guys, if you guys haven't seen it, I don't know if you played around with snack bar at all. But it is, you know, you play this chef in a magical version of 1960s Italy and you have to fight all these ingredients, right? Magical ingredients that you bring back to your restaurant. And so for example, like here you can see he animated the onion, the little chipola that you're gonna have to fight in the wilds and bring back to your restaurant so that you can make your risotto Milanese or whatever it is and it's just delightful. You know, here's a, a guy who's working in town on an engine, you know, any. And yeah, the game is just so enjoyable to work on. The team is wonderful recruiting for. It has been a fascinating experience and it's super different from B2B software, right? So SparkToro and AlertMouse and Moz, right? My previous company, the whole goal guys was how do you remove friction, right? How do you, how do you take friction away from the user experience, make it easier for them to solve the problem? When you make a video game, which is also software development, you are trying to intentionally add friction. You are trying to create problems for the user that they can enjoyably solve and then you complexify those problems into just this, right, you know, cadence and, and mode. It is, it's mind meltingly interesting and so different so that's been a total joy to work on. Working with creatives, I absolutely love it, right? Artists and engineers and sound designers and sound effects people and animators and illustrators and narrative designers. What a joy. So that's certainly. That one's the most fun.
- [50:21]
Chris
So that gives you joy. What's the most annoying thing in marketing in 2026?
- [50:28]
Rand Fishkin
Historical addiction to attribution. The. The CFOs and CEOs and CMOs who, who cannot get it out of their head that they have to be able to not just measure a channel, but perfectly attribute it or. Or attribute it in some way. And so they refuse to invest in sources of influence that they can't see in a dashboard. Right? If this, if a whole bunch of people who listen to this podcast are like, wait a minute, wait a minute, you have a better version of Google Alerts? I'm gonna go Google Alert Mouse. And then, like, we see a spike in signups for Alert Mouse. Well, we can't prove that it came from this podcast. It could have been anything, right? Like, Alert Mouse is going to get mentioned a bunch of times on the air. Someone posted about it on LinkedIn just this morning, and it's like, well, does that mean Ran should stop talking about it on podcasts? You know, and that, that addiction to attribution is just. Drives me insane because here's what happens. You hear about Alert Mouse on a podcast or any product, you hear about it on a podcast, you see a sign on the street, your friend tells you about it, you get an email about it, it comes up in an AI answer. And then what's the first thing you do? You go to Google and you search for that brand. And then when you search for that brand in your analytics, Google gets the credit. And so the boss thinks, hey, let's put more budget into Google. And it drives me bananas. Google did not all branded traffic. Anyone who searches for your brand in Google, Google should get zero credit for that because they did not create that demand, right? They are merely a navigation source. They're just the road that took you. You know what, whatever street you're on, you know, if you're on, I don't know, Barnaby street, like, Barnaby street shouldn't get credit for driving traffic to your florist.
- [52:26]
Chris
That's not.
- [52:27]
Rand Fishkin
It just happened to be there, right? And Google is the same way. They're just a navigation path. So that, that's the thing that drives me the most bananas. And for some reason, I think you know this. These 25 years of people being addicted to attribution and learning to do that and just being basically saying like, hey, Rand, I agree with you. The zero click world is real. A lot of branded traffic Google shouldn't get credit for. But what am I going to do? I got to prove it. I got to prove my marketing or I'm never going to get buy in and investment. I'm sorry, you know, like, you make a great case, but we're just going to keep putting money toward paid channels where I know I've got attribution. It just makes me pull out my hair.
- [53:11]
Chris
Have you been interviewing our customers? I've had 25 years of that with PR. We know it's important for reputation. We know reputation's the most important thing about being in business because our share price. But what's the ROI of a press release in a national newspaper if AVE isn't real? Oh, just all these questions we get asked all the time in prison.
- [53:39]
Rand Fishkin
Hey, I got, I got a weird question for you. Have you found the AI era to be helpful as a, as a sort of point of leverage for pr? Because you can, you basically say, hey, it's not just about the, whatever the mention. Even if no one reads this story, AI will read this story and start associating your brand, you know, with the problem that you solve. And so like, is that helping your pitches now?
- [54:01]
Chris
Yeah, it is, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of Geo aeo, SEO bullshit out there that I think a lot of all the same people that sprung up when they were industry and suddenly they're now experts in this. And we've deliberately tried, we've done a couple of webinars, but we've not really launched massive services and things like that.
- [54:22]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, you know, one thing that I have found to be true for sure, Chris, and that I fully believe in long term, right? We talked about like all these short term hacks where you know, oh, hey, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff to Reddit or post a bunch of stuff to YouTube or send out a bunch of low quality press releases, right? And then the AI tools will, will put my brand at the top. But I 100% believe that in order to get sophisticated in the long term, what's going to happen is the same PR techniques that got people paying attention, real people paying attention, and that click data and usage data that will eventually make its way into the models. And so five years from now, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever replaces them, Google as well. They're not going to care about all these like sort of spam techniques, but they are going to care if you got into the publications in media and sources that your audience actually pays attention to. That's the only thing they're going to care about.
- [55:19]
Chris
A strong brand and a strong reputation is always going to be a strong reputation. You can fake it and you can fake it till you make it, but you've got to make it. You've got to have a strong reputation. And that, that is the same in 1998, 2000 when Google came out and it's when social media came out because you want it to be a high profile and reputation on social. And now it's going to be. So yeah, I suppose it's. We should look at it as a great opportunity and not an AI apocalypse. What a great place to end it.
- [55:48]
Rand Fishkin
The old, the older I get, the older I get, the more respect I have for people who did great marketing in 1825 and 1925 and 2025. Right? Because, because the same principles worked because human psychology has not changed. We have not evolved as a species all that much in that time. And so a lot of those things of like, hey, build a brand that people know like trust and remember that's easy to spell and easy to say and easy to associate with the problem. Number two, do your positioning so that people know what is the unique value that you provide, right? Why they should choose you over any other, you know, problem solving choice. Three, make the problem that you solve clear in the pain points.
- [56:33]
Will
Right.
- [56:33]
Rand Fishkin
And, and repeat that message over and over again in the places where people pay attention. People. Where people pay attention. You know, I hacked at SEO for forever and did all sorts of stuff that nobody ever saw but it influenced Google. So I did it. Now a bunch of people are doing a whole bunch of things that nobody sees. But they influence AI and Google, right? And so people do it and I. It's not going to last, right? Just like all those other tricks in SEO, it's not going to last.
- [57:00]
Chris
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Ron. That's really great.
- [57:04]
Will
People will want to, people will want to order this book that you're writing. You said it comes out in full. Is there any kind of pre order or can they register interest in it? I mean, and how do they connect
- [57:13]
Chris
with you as well?
- [57:14]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, yeah. Pre orders launched just a couple weeks ago. If you're in the UK or outside the United States, I recommend waiting a few more months. I think September, it'll Be available on like, you know, Waterstones and Barnes and Noble and Amazon and all that. And the shipping cost goes way down. Shipping costs right now is insane because of weird Trump stuff. So just. I would, I would wait to pre order. If you're outside the U.S. if you're in the U.S. you can pre order now and the shipping price is normal. I think it's very low. But everywhere else, wait until September.
- [57:50]
Chris
And the last question we ask every guest before we go, which is you've been on the show, now you know how it works. If you were us, who's the next person you would interview on this show and why?
- [58:02]
Rand Fishkin
Ooh.
- [58:04]
Chris
Okay.
- [58:05]
Rand Fishkin
I have so I have so many great people for you. But I. There's a fantastic PR here in Seattle or just outside Seattle. Brit Klons. Do you, do you know her?
- [58:18]
Chris
No. No.
- [58:19]
Rand Fishkin
Yeah, Brit. She does the digital PR explained podcast. I was, I was on her show. I'm also have become friends with her over the last few years. She used to be at Distilled, the search agency in London. And yeah, just a top notch. The stories she got are amazing, right? Like what she's done for clients, especially as a solo pr. Really impressive. Second person I would talk to if you haven't already, emotional targeting author Talia Wolf. She runs, what's the name of her? Yeah, Talia's fantastic. Wait, her company is called Oops Get Uplift and she is, she's very charismatic, like just great, you know, great speaker, great thinker. Her book is excellent. Yeah, I love that. And third, if you are looking for folks who really get and know this sort of world of, of AI SEO and like how are these things being influenced right now and you want someone to go, you know, deep down the rabbit hole of like rag and all that. I, I have been very impressed with some of the research that Cyrus Shepard has been publishing. He used to work with me at Moz and outstanding guy. Also fun fact, he used to be an actor and he was in a bunch of TV shows and movies. So if you ask him about that, he'll be like, oh yeah, that's wild.
- [60:07]
Chris
Thanks for listening to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. You've reached the end of the podcast. Hooray. What can you possibly do to help Chris and will the providers of this show? Well, what you can help us by doing is just please give us some feedback. Positive, negative, constructive. Well, hopefully not negative, but if you could give us a review somewhere, five star review, preferably wherever you get your podcast, it will really help for people to find the show. Because there's loads of other people out there that we'd love to hear about it. And the guests that come on here, we want to give them as much visibility as possible. So, yeah, I want to just thank you personally for listening to the show. I really appreciate it. Because it's a bit weird. We record it in Leeds and wherever you are around the world, from Peru to Estonia to Russia to Africa, I want to thank all of you for listening. Really appreciate it. So, yeah, if you like the show, please give us a review because it means a lot. So thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your week. See you next week.