I called it the golden age of SEO, from about 2010 to 2020, and I meant it as an insult.
That was the decade you could bury your head, never talk to another department, and still get paid. I once had a gig where a customer support rep on the agency side talked to an account manager on the client side, who talked to somebody else, who eventually talked to the person whose website I was working on. Three steps removed. I was playing telephone with my own reporting.
That does not fly anymore, and on the first Unscripted SEO panel I asked three people building tools in this space how you are supposed to position yourself now. Patrick Stox, ex-Ahrefs and ex-IBM. Ben Wills, who has been in SEO since 2001 and spent most of the last decade writing C. Ben Senescu, who is one person running an open source competitor to Semrush.
None of them gave me the answer I expected.
Patrick never stayed in his lane in the first place
His response to the whole question was, essentially, that the premise was already wrong.
He is known for technical SEO. He has also led massive content projects, and gets involved in analytics, paid, data quality and website design. His argument is not that the job changed. It is that working across teams was always how anything actually got shipped, and now there is no version of the work where you can avoid it.
Paid and organic is the pairing everybody already knows. The one that surprised me was accessibility. Inside a large company, come together with the accessibility team and suddenly you can sell a change to the organisation, because you are no longer one person with an opinion — you are two functions with a shared requirement. That is how you implement anything at scale.
His framing of the alternative is worth reading twice: if you are trying to push a grassroots change through, it has to be people, people, people, people. Otherwise it is top-down whatever leadership says, and everyone reacts to that instead of asking what needs to happen for the org to change.
Ben Wills is building for the PR team
Ben is taking the same idea and baking it into a product. He is asking how OppAlerts supports the PR team, the product team, and whoever handles reputation management — not just the person with SEO in their title.
His reason is technical, and it is the clearest explanation I have heard of why the job broadened.
Search engines work on keywords, all the way down to how the data sits on disk and how an inverted index gets built. Words, phrases, phrase length, specificity, how closely a phrase matches a query. You could optimize that from a corner desk because the surface was words on pages.
“With LLMs, it’s completely nebulous now… The LLMs are built by gathering all the information together, forming a sense of what the business is, and then referring to that as it generates the response.” — Ben Wills
If the machine is forming a sense of what your business is, then everything that shapes that impression is in scope. Your support docs. Your press coverage. What your product actually does when somebody uses it. None of that lives in the SEO team’s backlog, which is why Ben describes the AI search marketer as somebody nudging every function in the right direction rather than handing out instructions.
He also has the study that makes this concrete. Tell a model you are renting a car in Los Angeles, and the hotel it recommends changes depending on whether you said Corolla or BMW. One word. And because ChatGPT keeps a memory, that word can come from a conversation you had four chats ago.
Ben Senescu is already living in the version you are about to
Here is the part that stuck with me. Ben runs OpenSEO as a team of one, and he has had to write down what every role does, because he is the one doing all of them.
What does the marketer do. What is the positioning of the brand. What are the facts we want written down. How should this behave. He is not doing that as an exercise — that definition is the input now, both for the AI he works alongside and for the humans he will eventually hire.
His advice, and I think it is the most portable thing on the whole panel: do not get too stuck in a single job description. Ask how you can be maximally useful to the business.
That is going to age well, because the alternative — a narrow title defended carefully — is exactly what the golden age produced, and exactly what stopped working.
What this means if you are the only SEO in the building
You do not need a reorg to act on any of this. You need a couple of conversations you have been avoiding.
- Go sit with customer support. They collect the complaints about the parts of the product that are broken. That is your content roadmap and your reputation problem in the same notebook.
- Ask PR what they are pitching next quarter. If a model is forming a sense of what your company is, coverage is not a vanity metric — it is training input and retrieval fodder at the same time.
- Write down what your company actually does, in plain words, somewhere a machine can read it. If you make it guess, it will guess.
- Find the second team whose goals your work already serves — accessibility, product, paid — and go make the joint case instead of the solo one.
The three of them disagreed about plenty on that call. They did not disagree about this at all.
The full panel recap is on the podcast site. Their solo interviews are worth the time as well: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era, Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing, and Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling.