Host: Sean Barber - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrbarber/ - He & Him

In this episode of Search With Sean, I’m joined by Mike King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, founder of SEO Week, and one of the most respected voices in the search industry. Mike is an award-winning marketing technologist, regular BrightonSEO speaker, and someone who has spent years researching how search engines and AI systems actually work.

We discuss how AI is fundamentally changing search, why websites may become more like data sources for AI agents, and why SEOs need to think beyond traditional optimisation tactics.

Mike shares his thoughts on relevance engineering, agentic RAG, machine media, AI visibility measurement, structured data, experimentation, automation, and why the future of SEO requires marketers to become more strategic and cross-functional.

Mike discusses:

- Why websites are becoming centralised data stores for AI systems

- How content could be delivered through different formats and interfaces

- The rise of "machine media" and creating content for bots

- Why AI search should be viewed differently from traditional search

- Measuring AI visibility beyond rankings and traffic

- The importance of share of voice, citations and entity signals

- Why LLM tracking needs consistent methodologies

- Why SEOs need to move beyond checklist SEO

- What relevance engineering means and why it goes beyond SEO

- Reverse engineering AI systems to understand how they work

- Why experimentation will become increasingly important

- The future of agentic commerce and AI assistants

Topics covered:

- Will websites become data sources for AI agents?

- How brands will interact with users in an AI-first world

- Content becoming multidimensional across formats and platforms

- Creating content for machines as well as humans

- The difference between Google’s ecosystem and AI platforms

- Preparing websites for AI agents, APIs and protocols

- Why structured data and accessibility matter more than ever

- How organisations should prepare for AI search

- Measuring AI search success through three different buckets: Performance measurement / Brand measurement / Input measurement

- Why citation accuracy and share of voice matter

- The challenges of measuring AI visibility

- Why no SEO tool is perfectly accurate

- Profound, AI search tracking and the future of measurement

- Why AI search is bigger than SEO

- How Reddit, YouTube, digital PR and other channels create content surface area

- Why SEOs need to become more strategic marketers

- Moving from tactics towards business outcomes

- What relevance engineering means

- Why SEO is becoming a broader discipline

- Reverse engineering Google's AI Overviews and RAG systems

- How Mike built Raggle to understand SGE before launch

- Why chunking and content structure matter for retrieval systems

- Managing bot activity and using log files

- Why 499 errors could impact AI visibility

- Automation, vibe coding and the future SEO workflow

- Hyper-personalisation and the future of search

- Agentic commerce and AI-powered purchasing

Connect With Mike - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkingphilly/

Relevant Link - https://searchengineland.com/how-search-generative-experience-works-and-why-retrieval-augmented-generation-is-our-future-433393

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