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Will Scott
Will Scott has been working online since 1994. From a time when most people hadn't even heard of the internet, Will was putting it to work for business. As a former Vice-President of Local Matters a decade ago Will Scott was at the forefront of Online Directories. From Directories to Small Businesses to White Label services for Directories, Will has been getting top of page rankings for clients since the turn of the century. Search Influence, Will Scott's current initiative is a scalable production house for Search Engine Optimization, Local SEO and Social Media for small and midsize businesses. Whether direct or through their white-label partners, Search Influence compete successfully and profitably online. Nothing gives Scott more joy than watching his team members grow into top-notch online marketers.
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Why “AI Keeps Changing” Is the Wrong Reason to Skip AI Search Optimization
TL;DR “AI keeps changing” is true, and it’s also not a reason to skip content structure and entity work. Retrieval, semantic matching, and passage-level ranking, the mechanics that decide whether AI answers cite you, were built into production search between 2011 and 2021, a decade before ChatGPT existed. Betting on …
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The AI SEO Guide: From Concepts to Application
Note: This post was updated by Will Scott on July 28th, 2026 to reflect current best practices. It was originally published on May 8th, 2025. TL;DR: AI SEO is the practice of optimizing content so it performs well with both human readers and AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s …
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Website Readiness for AI Search: Seven Foundations Every University Needs
TL;DR: AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews answer prospective students directly, and they pull those answers from websites that are crawlable, structured, and accurate. Universities don’t need new technology to compete. They need seven specific foundations in place, and most can be checked in an afternoon. Key …
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What Is Query Fan-Out in AI Search?
Query fan-out is how AI search engines answer a question by breaking it into many sub-queries. What it is, and how to optimize content for it.
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What Is Information Gain in SEO?
Information gain is how much new information a page adds beyond what’s already published. What it means for SEO, and how to add it.
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We Didn’t Automate Our Content. We Automated the Tedium.
Search Influence automated the research behind content, not the writing: query fan-out, information gain, and authoritative sourcing that gets pages cited by AI search.
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Reddit AI Search Strategy: GEO, AI Citations, and Off-Page Visibility
At Search Influence, we have been giving clients some version of this counsel for a while now: if AI search is pulling answers from the public web, then your brand has to show up in the places AI systems are likely to trust. Not just your website. Not just your …
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AI SEO Tracking Tools 2026: Comparative Analysis of Over 15 Platforms
Co-Author: Collin Guedon This post was updated by Will Scott & Collin Guedon on 5/26/2026 to reflect current best practices. It was originally published on 8/20/2025. Key Insights: AI search adoption is surging: With AI search nearing 1 billion users and tools like ChatGPT becoming mainstream, tracking brand visibility in …
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Best AI SEO Tracking Tools Under $50/Month (2026)
TL;DR If you have under $50/month and want to start tracking how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity: Waikay.io (free tier) if you’ve never tracked AI visibility before and want to test the waters RankScale ($20/mo) if you want analytics-driven testing across the broadest set …
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What Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization Explained
Key Insights GEO gets your brand cited in AI answers, not just ranked on a SERP. Built on SEO basics (site health, schema, depth, authority) but optimized for what an LLM cites, not what a user clicks. Attribution is messy. AI traffic often shows up as Direct in GA4. Most …
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