https://page2pod.com - Clicks are disappearing. Derek Hobson makes the case that direct traffic is the AI search signal most teams aren't measuring.

Derek Hobson — SEO strategist, writer behind SEO Humorist, and former Senior Director of SEO and AI Search at Brainlabs — argues that when organic clicks shrink, the proof of impact moves elsewhere: direct sessions, log files, and query fan-out data. On several of his accounts, direct and organic tracked in parallel for years until direct broke upward right as clicks fell and impressions climbed. His read: people research a brand inside an LLM, then go straight to the site. He can't prove it yet, and he says so out loud to clients — but directionally, it's the number he'd watch.

The second argument is organizational. Off-page SEO can't sit in an optional package anymore now that answer engines scrape, aggregate, and synthesize third-party sources. That means SEO, paid, PR, and social have to actually talk to each other — and most companies are still built around separate teams, separate budgets, and separate reporting.

Jon Clark and Joe DeVita also get into automating reporting with Apps Script, why LLM referral numbers in analytics are almost certainly wrong, and why Derek thinks every SEO should investigate a win as aggressively as a loss.

📊 In This Episode

- Is direct traffic the AI search signal most teams are ignoring?

- Who actually owns the direct channel — and why nobody claims it

- Why off-page SEO stopped being an optional line item

- Query fan-out and grounding queries: what the Gemini API and Microsoft Clarity now expose

- Why LLM referral traffic looks impossibly small in analytics

- Building a paid-and-organic gap analysis that starts real cross-team conversations

- Automating monthly data pulls with Apps Script and pattern-matching keywords with embeddings

- Investigating positive results the same way you'd investigate a drop

A practical look at what "proving the work" looks like when the click is no longer the unit of measurement.

Subscribe for new Page 2 Podcast episodes with the practitioners actually doing this work.

Comment: who owns direct traffic at your company — and have you seen the same uptick Derek describes?

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

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Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

Find Derek Hobson

✅ SEO Humorist → https://seohumorist.com

✅ Derek Hobson on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dereknhobson/

✅ Derek Hobson on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@seohumorist

✅ Derek Hobson on Reddit → https://www.reddit.com/user/SEO_Humorist/

✅ Derek Hobson on Instagram → https://instagram.com/seohumorist✅ Derek Hobson on Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/seohumorist.bsky.social✅ Derek Hobson on X → https://x.com/Seo_humorist✅ Derek Hobson on TikTok → https://tiktok.com/@seohumorist

https://page2pod.com - Sophie Brannon bans new hires from touching AI for three months. Here's how an SEO agency builds AI workflows without losing the thinking underneath them.

Sophie Brannon is co-founder and director of StudioHawk US, the Atlanta arm of the global SEO agency, which she launched from scratch and grew to $1.4M in its first nine months. Her position: AI is genuinely compressing agency delivery timelines — content briefs, IA mapping, and audits that took weeks now take days — but a junior who reaches for ChatGPT before they understand the work never develops the strategic judgment that becomes their actual job. So new StudioHawk hires do everything manually for their first three months, then earn access back.

She also lays out the commercial side nobody's solved yet: token budgets replacing headcount budgets, the possibility of agencies pricing retainers on estimated token usage instead of hours, and why AI visibility means very little until you can tie it to traffic and revenue — across roughly 100 brands StudioHawk surveyed, AI search accounted for about 0.07% of total revenue.

Jon Clark and Joe DeVita dig into the agency mechanics too: why StudioHawk runs direct-to-specialist with no account managers, why they refuse long-term contracts, how link costs get absorbed while digital PR runs on a points-based money-back guarantee, and what Sophie still won't hand to a model.

🤖 In This Episode

- Why new hires are banned from using AI for their first three months

- What do clients actually ask about AI search — and how to answer without jargon

- The AI search tracking stack: GA4 AI organic, Peak, SEMrush AI, Ahrefs Rank Tracker

- Which AI search metrics matter: visibility, citations, mentions, and the revenue line underneath them

- Digital PR's points system — a link is 1 point, an unlinked mention is 0.5, with a pro-rata money-back guarantee

- Will agencies charge clients based on token usage instead of hours?

- Automated content briefs and IA structure mapping built with n8n and Claude

- The three things Sophie won't automate: strategy, creative, and client comms

A rare look at the operating decisions behind an SEO agency scaling in the AI era, from someone 18 months into building one.

👉 Subscribe for new episodes with the practitioners actually doing this work: https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

💬 Would you ban your junior hires from using AI for their first three months — or is that training them for a world that no longer exists? Tell us in the comments.

Find Sophie Brannon

✅ Sophie Brannon on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-brannon-081bb294/

✅ Sophie Brannon on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/sophiebrannon_seo/

✅ StudioHawk US → https://studiohawk.com

✅ Sophie Brannon's Personal Website → http://sophiebrannon.com

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Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

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✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

https://page2pod.com - Content strategy that moves rankings: Angela Skane took her blog from page 3 to page 1 by optimizing what she already had — not publishing more.

Angela Skane is SEO & Content Strategy Manager at Newfold Digital, where she leads global content strategy for Network Solutions and a portfolio of brands serving small business owners. Fresh off her first SEO Week stage talk, she brings a framework most search teams never look at: the way TikTok Shop creators hook, hold, and convert an audience in under 60 seconds.

Her argument is that attention is earned moment by moment, in an article the same way it is in a video. Every page needs a job. Every section has to keep the reader moving. And a page that technically ranks can still fail if it doesn't speak to the person actually making the decision. Along the way: why traditional demographic personas are too thin, why environmental data about your audience changes how you frame every problem, and why her team allows zero AI-generated content on the blog while using AI heavily for research and synthesis.

🎧 In This Episode

- The four-phase creator arc — hook, name your audience, appeal to emotion, close the action

- Layering psychological triggers by journey stage instead of picking one and running it all year

- What does a "job" for a page actually look like, and how do you tell when a page isn't doing it?

- Page 3 to page 1 in 18 months by optimizing existing content over publishing volume

- Environmental-data personas: small business failure rates, cost pressures, and what else is on the buyer's mind

- Do 3,000-word guides still work? Her top-converting article says yes

- Where AI belongs in the workflow — research and data synthesis, never the paragraph

If your content is ranking but not converting, this one is about the gap between the two.

Subscribe for new practitioner interviews on SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) every week.

Angela says to name your audience explicitly in the copy. Have you tried it — and did engagement actually move? Tell us in the comments.

⏱️ Chapters

0:00 Intro: Attention Is Earned2:08 Meet Angela Skane3:36 What Is Newfold Digital?5:46 From Data Journalism to SEO7:18 Why TikTok Shop Caught Her Eye9:14 The Four-Phase Creator Framework11:40 Applying TikTok Signals to Articles15:07 Which Emotion Fits Which Stage?19:55 Every Page Needs a Job23:03 Are Traditional Personas Still Useful?28:16 How Do You Diagnose a Weak Page?31:09 Do 3,000-Word Guides Still Work?36:39 Should AI Write Your Blog Content?39:28 SEO Pods, Briefs, and Research40:59 How Do You Report Content Value?44:19 How the Teams Actually Collaborate47:11 Rapid-Fire Round

Connect with Angela

✅ Angela Skane on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaskane/

✅ Network Solutions → https://www.networksolutions.com

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media → https://www.movingtrafficmedia.com

Follow the Page 2 Podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Youtube → https://www.youtube.com/@thepage2podcast922

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/company/page2podcast

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/ThePage2Podcast/

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/page2pod

✅ Page 2 Podcast on Tiktok → https://www.tiktok.com/@jonleeclark

Follow Jon Clark

✅ Jon Clark on Twitter → https://x.com/jonlclark

✅ Jon Clark on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlclark

🛠️ Tools & Resources

- TikTok Shop → https://shop.tiktok.com - 2739 — the TikTok Shop coaching community Angela learned the framework → https://www.tiktok.com/discover/2739-membership?lang=en - Dustin Davis — creator who breaks down TikTok content through a psychology lens - Angela's article on the eight human desires in psychology → https://searchengineland.com/persuasive-content-human-psychology-478824 - "What to do after you buy a domain name" — her top-converting article (3,000+ words) → https://www.networksolutions.com/blog/bought-domain-now-what/