EPISODE 2: Beyond The Search Bar - David Vernon & Sara Kavanagh talking about the case for SEO in an AI-First World

(upbeat music) The podcast has a new name and that earned it. For the last couple of years, the conversations on SEO success stories have changed. We've been talking about other platforms outside of Google. We've been talking about all our invisibility. We've been talking about marketplace optimization. We've been talking about optimizing content on social. We've been talking multi-platform, growth visibility, organic growth, overall. So we've already been talking about if the conversations have been heading there, the user behavior, our bio behavior, is very much in a place well outside of Google. So now the show is called up. Beyond the search bar is the new show, same feed, same deep conversations, but a much broader range of guests, not just from within SEO traditionally, but content marketers, strategists, ads, gurus. We're gonna have them on our show and we're gonna be talking about this new world that we're in right now. I can't wait to share it with you. So if you're really interested in seeing where search and marketing and advertising in general are going, you're in the right place. Let's get to it. (upbeat music) Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Search Bar. Now on today's episode, David Vernon, I had on the old podcast SEO success stories, so you'll be familiar with his voice, G'day, David. - Hello. - And what an intro. (laughing) - Good to have you. - Good to have you again. - Great to have you back. And we've got with him, his co-founder, at Sirts Theory, which is a great name and all I wanna ask about that, Sarah Kavanaugh, G'day, Sarah. - Hiya. - Hi. Cool. Now, I am gonna ask, I'm gonna throw one question out there and I believe Sarah, you're gonna take this for your own. So I would like to know, what is your hot take on search marketing in 2026 as we look forward? - Slightly controversial, but I just don't think, G-O, A-E-O, A-I-O-O is a thing. And it seems silly to say, but I think, good ol' SEO basics is the future of search. Which is maybe old school controversial for everybody that's starting their G-O agencies, but I think really that's kind of where we're seeing 2026, go and LLMs go or search marketing go. - Yep, if you can hear that rapturous applause, is the sound of thousands of SEO professionals going, it's true, true. Go, David. I completely agree with it as well. And I think I've been pretty vocal on social media, to be fair, I've gotten roasted for my opinion, from the other side of the SEO community, who are selling G-O and, I guess everyone does what they want to at the end of the day and everyone has different opinions, but I think where it crosses the line for me is, when it goes from fact to complete fiction, and people start to blur the lines between what is actually traditional SEO that's worked for decades to this packaging a whole new thing, relabeling SEO as a new thing, because they're capitalizing on FOMO and the industry change, and really selling what feels like snake oil, because we've had so many clients and people ask us about, "Are you guys doing G-O?" And you have to go through like an educational half an hour chat with these clients to show them the data and say, "Well, fundamentally, and even Google have said this themselves, "Good G-O is good SEO." And fundamentally, yes, search has changed, but not from a technological standpoint, it's from a behavioral standpoint, and what we're seeing now, and this is what we're not blind to, and today, and this is why we start a search theory, behavior has changed massively around how people search and what platforms they use, and for example, if you're buying a car, I guess back in the day, you would see an advertisement for a car on the television, you'd see a banner, "Oh, I'll go to the dealership," and maybe I'll view some cars, and there's a few other dealers around the area, because that's how they set up, and I'll go buy a car. These days, it's very different. The user journey has gotten much longer, much more fragmented, and decisions ultimately are pulled in many different directions throughout the buyer process, because if you want to look at buying a car, you might search for one, go on the website, but then you're also watching a review on YouTube, and that might change your mind, and then you go on TikTok and you search for, you know, other cars, or the coolest cars in '26, or maybe electric cars, 'cause you're interested in that, and then you go back to Google, and then you ask Chuck G.P.T. and say, "Can you do the maths on the finance offer? "I've got on these four different cars "that I'm shortlisting." And so, as search marketers, you know, yes, things have evolved, but fundamentally, you know, the main thing that has changed is the behavior, and I guess following off the back of Sarah's controversial take, she's absolutely right, you know, GEO, AIO, AEO, whatever people are calling it these days, are creating more confusion in the market than more solutions, and it's really frustrated, you know? - Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, I mean, I'm actually hosting a webinar later today, is GEO snake oil, because it's a big thing, you know, is it just a real thing? And we'll get into that. In terms of the labels in this ridiculous, you know, thrown around, all these different acronyms for it, what's interesting is what I'm finding people outside of SEO, are calling it AI search. Like that's a sense to be like a kind of broad catchal term, which, you know, it captures, it actually it captures more than just, you know, the ALLMs, or sorry, the apps, the ALLMs, but also things like, you know, Rufus with an Amazon, and the different marketplace options as well. So, I think we're going to find, at some point, you know, a bit of a consolidation of the labeling and also of how we're approaching it. We are definitely right now, as of April, 2026, in a really weird, fragmented stage, is to this new era of search. And what it actually means for SEO is what it means for the discipline of SEO. And today, it's point there, what it means to how people in the industry are packaging it and selling it. Quickly, just to get an understanding of what's the search theory is for anyone, you know, just curious as they're listening right now. Do you want me to go Sarah or go for it? Yeah, so search theory is a search first agency. So, all of our services are centered around SEO, paid, and digital PR initially. And we are expanding into other areas as we grow. But fundamentally, the agency was started to tackle quite a large problem in the search industry at the minute. And that's, that is completely fragmented. It's almost getting like politics at the minute. Really, it's like 50/50. You've got half of the people on that side of, you know, traditional search. And you've got half of the people on that side of this, you know, AI search. And I think it just comes from the wrong place. And it's just a lack of education. So, you know, search theory, we initially discussed the idea as an educational platform. So we could be, you know, helpful and teach young people and people coming into the search industry on what actually makes it work. Like, real data. Because as you know, there's a lot of different opinions in the market at the moment about, oh, this is what you have to do is get rankings. Oh, this is what you have to do is get cited in LLM's and this and this and this. But rarely there is any data or scientific proof behind it, right? So we exist in the market to solve that problem. So we are very much an experimental search agency. And we like to run different tests of our own in the background on what makes search work. So, you know, how can you get top three rankings on Google? Because it has 90% market share. How can you get cited in LLM's? Realistically, what does it take? How can you create demand in the search market instead of just, just capturing it? And we take all of these learnings and experiments that we do. And we put it into a cohesive kind of formula of like, okay, well, this is what makes search work works. And that's based on real time data. We take that and then apply it to client campaigns. So, you know, if we get approached by someone in the retail industry or your common industry and they want to rank for a category of products, for example, you know, we know the types of things based on the business profile on what could get them ranking, what could generate that search demand that they're looking for and do all the things. But also at the same time, throughout this journey, that means Sarah kind of going on with search, search, Siri, we really want to educate the market as well. And education is something that is lacking so much because, like I said, there are just so many opinions at the minute. There's so much controversy. But there's not any education and people are just becoming lazy. They don't want to educate. They just want to sell, sell, sell, sell. And that's that's really frustrated for me. It was like people would come to me and go, oh, you need to sell GEO. And it's like, I don't want to be forced to sell anything. I'd rather educate clients and people on what actually works. I don't need a new acronym to package something different and make a client think that it's a whole new thing. And they get something different. So just done that. So I'd love to ask Sarah, in terms of your education in space, tell me a bit about yourself. Like, obviously, you're the more technical, am I right? Like, in terms of like on the tools SEO, right? What's, give me a bit of your background. And then I'd love to understand how you are educating yourself, whether that's through, however that is. Yeah. Yeah. So, similarly to David, I did start out in marketing. My first ever job was social content. And that kind of just generic marketing job, everybody got 10, 15 years ago, slowly moved into more kind of content SEO and then eventually just fully SEO. All the bits, like you said, more technical SEO, everything from kind of that side, some of digital PR as well. Because at the time that was part of SEO, rather than its own thing as it is now. So I guess to kind of David's point, from my side, a lot of education. I was there understanding what Google saying. And following all the algorithm updates, what it's chat GPT saying, people excluded and ignored Bing for years, but now we find out that a big portion of chat GPT is fed by Bing. So people are starting to care about it again. So kind of my job to all of that and educating myself on it is staying on top of essentially all of those engines and whatever they may be, whether it's Claude, whether it's perplexity, you know, Google, everything else. And just making sure that whilst we're looking at those things, like David said, testing it. So our biggest test bit is our own website. It's, you know, other websites we might create for testing. And then actually sharing that data, transparently, to say, well, what works and what doesn't work? You know, there's quite a lot of reputable people we see on LinkedIn, like Lily Wright talk about different tests that Dave done, where they've done, you know, they've done a lot of cool tests, where they put a lot of AI content on websites. And it spiked, ranked beautifully, and entangued completely after a month, which just proves that AI content doesn't work. And that's kind of what we try to follow. We see those leaders are actually trying to speak up and say, no, this isn't working. It still needs SEO fundamentals. It still needs well written content by humans and not by chat, GPT or Gemini. And then we implement that. On that point, very, very quickly, because I'm a big fan of Lily Wright as well. And I was going to quote afterwards. With that. So AI content, it gets index, it gets rate, because the machines go, cool, yep, this meets everything we want it. And then it tanks, right? Yeah. And the, you know, statements like that AI content doesn't work. But is it, isn't it more the quality, like it's more about the quality than the producer, I believe. So if it's, if it gets indexed, ranked, great, but then if users are bouncing, if they're not staying on site, we do know that they use the Google, the Chrome uses, so Google uses Chrome's click stream data for engagement on site. So to me, it's more about quality, which I believe as a copyrighter, humans do a much better job of, but I definitely feel that there's a mix there of AI and human that the best brands are utilizing. What are your thoughts? I think you, you know, I think your research, you're kind of getting ideas, getting more of that, you know, information. I think there is a place for AI to help. But I think a lot of it is, you know, aside from the fact like you said, it is the quality, which I think humans are better, I tune to what a human would read. We know that they might, you know, a whole block post is never going to be read. I don't think I've ever gone on a website and actually read it front to end, but I will skip to sections like care about. And I think that is something that humans are much better at spotting and understanding. Whilst AI might help you find different interesting bits you should mention, it won't understand where to put what, what order to put it in, how to structure it. And also Google has come out and said that they actually watermark the content that AI spits out. So they are able to tell if you've copied and pasted what Gemini has given you. So if a lot of these platforms do watermark it, they will know that it isn't actually you creating quality content or even using AI to help you. Because I think having a sentence or two or having some sort of structure than you rewrote and kind of rephrase to what you feel is best is fine. But if you're just chucking and copying and pasting, then obviously like you said, it's noticeable because it's not getting the engagement. It's not getting to click through as people are bouncing. And then it's watermarked and it just I think in the end isn't worth it because it's a very short-lived kind of success that just times afterwards. - That's interesting just seeing about that watermarking. I think anyone could open up their Twitter/X or their LinkedIn and you can scroll through when you can see the content creators that are like copying and pasting that LinkedIn post from Claude or from chat. I know Claude does a better job, but it's still like there is a way that it reads that feels like a machine. And just if you are just gonna grab it straight out and put it in there and it's probably that all the data points that go, you know, align between each and short sentences with this many syllables and this many, like I'm sure it's got the data to prove to itself that this is gonna engage. But we as humans, you know it. It just doesn't feel right. - Do you know what it is? And this is something that I've thought about for the longest time now because you know, back when AI's came out and it was this new thing, I was experimenting and testing things a lot, like creating content with it, trying it out. And then I just went from completely not using it to write new content and instead used it for like refinement. But what I've kind of landed on the conclusion that we can tell AI is AI written because the thing is the models are trained on perfection, right? You know, what is the perfect style of writing? What is the perfect structure? What is the killer hook? What is, what do you say at the end of a blog post or a post? And the thing is as humans, we are imperfect. And that's reality, like we make spelling mistakes, we clutter our words, we change subject, conversation and I think that is a natural part of our language that AI can't really overcome because then it's producing a less than perfect version of content. And so that's such an amazing point. Because you look for the imperfections, honestly, it makes it more real. Like as a DJ, I know when I'm listening to a DJ mix, I'm a former DJ, but anyway, I know when I'm listening to a DJ mix, when it's just been like just chucked into Ableton and machine mixed all together and it's gone live versus and my friends and I all the way say, we like to hear a bit of swing in the mix. It's want to hear the mix coming, you want to hear those little bits and it feels more authentic, it feels more real. You feel grittier, you feel more in tune with the person who's doing it, there's just a connection in those imperfections. Ooh, I'm going to use it. I think as humans, we love imperfections. I think that can be proven, the fact that, and this is off topic, topic, but Star Wars, right? The originals, they were janky. They weren't janky, leave them alone. Yeah, well, they weren't completely janky, but like Yoda is a pop it and, you know, visual effects and I think the movie industry is going through a similar thing with AI, to be honest, because like we love the authenticity of, you know, the thing is when you see an alien on screen, your natural human instinct says, well, I know aliens aren't real, so you don't need to make them look completely photorealistic because that's weird to us, it's alien, we've never seen that before. But when you watch Dresset Park and you see the animatronic rhinoceros, you're like, actually, that does, I can't believe that because I know it's not computer generated and someone's made that, but it also looks imperfect, which means it feels more real to me. I literally just went through with my kids, so 12-year-old and nine-year-old, my boys, and we watched the whole Jurassic series, right? But we started with the new ones, because I hadn't seen them all. So we watched all the new ones, Jurassic World, and how fun, they kind of got more and more ridiculous as you went on because all of a sudden it's not dinosaurs, it's monsters, it was a bit dumb. And then we watched the originals, and my kids were both like, this is way better, Dad. Like, I don't know why, and I'm like, it's because it's more real because of the exactly that. It's the imperfections, it just feels more, less like a cartoon, you know? Like it feels more like real life. Yeah, that's the same thing with, like, you know, digital marketing and like Sarah said around, and you've said around content writing, and this is what we've got to be really careful of, you know, when someone sends you an email, that you know that person is not that great of a writer, and it's structured perfectly and bullet-pointed, it's got a conclusion at the bottom. You just know that. Full of text. Your assumption is immediately, well, that didn't come from them. And so you take it less seriously, right? Yeah. And I've made this mistake. Like, I feel like we all have before where, like, you know, you use AI for emails, and you try and make things efficient, but you don't get the responses you used to get, and it doesn't feel as authentic, and then people stop replying, and people stop asking for meetings and things. So I've been pivoting back to trying to write my posts and content, personal content, is personally and human as possible, even if they have mistakes in them. And if I do have a spell I'm mistaken, my LinkedIn posts, I'm not even editing it, because I think it looks way better. because someone goes, "Oh, he must have written that because he's got a spell on error," which is weird. That's the way the world is going now. I will say though, they can pry hyphens out of my cold dead hands. That is not AI. They're just good for writing. I love hyphens. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's a great way to punctuate a story, punctuate a sentence to just pause. Like human pauses for a fit. So Sarah, when you say that, you know, SEO, geo, whatever the acronym term you want to use, right? They're not completely separate disciplines that need to be run by different departments, different terms, etc. What's your strongest defense of that? Like, what hell are you telling brands that actually, I've been doing this for years? Easiest way in a world content. It's honestly that simple. We've obviously worked on content for a very long time and we know how it works. We know what works for Google. Yes, there's a lot of data and studies talking about XYZ, but I think the biggest kind of nice amalgamation of that that we've seen is using good solid internal linking and signals and good solid long form content that's been well written, well researched, has good citations in it, but always links to the pages that we actually want to rank. We've noticed that because that content is then taken seriously, it ranks better. It picks up a ton of relevant keywords or long term kind of long tail keywords. And it starts always passing authority to that landing page. And from what we've seen and kind of our tests, we're then seeing those landing pages appear in those citations. And you're suddenly in AI overviews, you're suddenly in Gemini and chat GPT. And all it is is just creating that web for Google or chat GPT to understand, okay, well, they've written this piece of content about, say, SEO, they talk a lot about different elements of SEO. They always link to this landing page that actually is their SEO service page. You know, I can see the correlation. I can see what they're doing. I can see what it's trying to explain as educational is informative. And that page is a lot of intent in it. So I'm going to start citing it because it seems to be important. And that's something that's tried and tested and worked before on just Google or bang, but we're starting to see it also work when it comes to actual LLMS. And I think that's why a lot of kind of our thinking is around you need to have strong content teams more than anything because that's where a lot of those gems lie is that strong content strategies. Are you explaining your landing pages? You almost want to go back to what Google was like 20 years ago or 25 years ago where we had to have really, really explanatory language because Google was so basic and didn't really understand everything yet. And we had to over explain it. And it's almost going back to that because right now you don't have people searching for school trips. You have people searching for school trips in ex location for ex amount of budget. You know, I'm not just buying jeans. I'm buying jeans in this size and in that color. And I want to deliver it in three days. And that's my search now, whether it's chat GP2 or Google. And if you have content pages that actually answer all of those queries, then you're kind of hitting both points no matter where they're searching. Yep. So what I'm hearing is, I mean, SEO has always been about content and optimizing content for crawlers. Yeah. And all I guess the only difference now is that the crawlers are coming from some other different platforms that are driving those. But they're still just looking for the right answer. They're still looking for content, which is, you know, answers the query strongly structured, makes sense, quality, relevant expert or EAT. All these things we've been doing for years anyway, and also kind of leans into what we're seeing a lot more in terms of if you go on to, you know, indeed, or, you know, monster, whatever the job platform of choice is in your home country, more and more, we're seeing job titles like organic growth, director of organic growth, organic visibility, organic. And it's just an understanding that it's not just Google SEO. There are other platforms now, but frankly, it's kind of, it's still just content marketing, isn't it? You're putting your content out there to get used and captured by a platform of choice. What's the use of ranking content if it's not good? You know, that's the point really. And I think, I think brands need to really take a step back and think about what do we actually need to move the needle and what do we need to do to actually make a difference in revenue or brand awareness. And, you know, because we're all looking at, oh, how do we rank in LLMs? And I feel like that's the common question that people are asking today. But have they ever asked themselves, you know, why do you want to rank in LLMs? Is that the most important thing to focus on right now? The thing is search is so diverse now. Like I explained at the start, you've got, you know, Google, which is 90% of market share, you've got Bing, which is more relevance to a B2B customer, which may be important to a certain extent, but it's got less to search for you. You've got YouTube and TikTok. You've got people who go on Reddit now, chat, ebt, perplexity. And I think it's, I think, stay in the search world, it's about understanding, well, based on my products or services, where are my users spending the most time? And can we appear in those search platforms? That those people spend their time in. And that's the solution, right? Not, not just actively thinking, well, how can we spend 10,000 pounds or dollars a month on ranking in LLMs and doing loads of PR work? When actually, it's not really going to move the needle. Yeah. Speaking of PR, I'd love to understand what you take on digital PR is. Given that's one of you, kind of go to market service lines, like firstly, there's a few different definitions of digital PR. So what are you? How do you, Sarah? How do you define digital PR in 2026? I think I define it as, you know, as David mentioned before, it's creating demand. It's going out to correct media with your product and giving your opinion or your insights or your products to what is relevant. I think, you know, back in a day, God, I remember the bucklings day just sitting there and people were buying links and you just had to have, you know, 300,000 links from wherever it didn't matter. And you would be beautiful, you know, you'd rank so well. Whereas I think our stance is very much quality over quantity. We would much rather that it be a proper campaign where we take your data, we take your insights, you know, you might have some market, you know, numbers or kind of things that we can go out to that would be very interesting to national media or international media, or you might have a campaign. It's around a product that is relevant to a specific audience. So you'd find journalists that work in those specific niche areas. And it's going out to the relevant people to talk about that and kind of give those insights. And it is about getting a mention or potentially a link if you can get it out of them. But I'd rather have, you know, three or four links from relevant media, relevant places that actually do talk about the topics or the sectors that you're in. You know, there's no point. If you're, you know, if you're doing food or anything like that and you're being mentioned in business today, who cares? Like New York Times doesn't need to talk about you. That has nothing to do with food. But if you go out to, you know, there's so many different magazines or online portals that talk about food and it might be so interesting to foodies. There's a lot of campaigns that you could do around that. And I think that's what's so different for us is that we're seeing the relevance of going to the right place. And as David said, following the behavior, you know, the audience, the what do they actually want? What are they interested in rather than just spamming loads of links from foreign countries just so you can get some sort of a DA. It doesn't matter if your DA is very high. If none of those links are ever going to bring converting traffic. So at the end of the day, it's about bringing quality rather than that kind of random quantity and kind of forgetting about the users in the middle who need to convert at some point. Yeah. I don't know, David, if you see that differently, but I think that's a good way of saying it. Yeah, we're on the same page of that. And I think, you know, digital PR is very much a rising service. It's always been a thing. Maybe traditional PR 10 years ago was more popular than digital. But I think it's become more important than ever. Probably more so because of LLM's and the fact that brands that brands do want to drive search demand instead of just capturing search volume. And the way we position it is is that, you know, there's kind of two major benefits to do a digital PR alongside an SEO campaign. And, you know, one that we've already touched on, which is, you know, well, to have your brand in the media in front of the right people on the right publications, that's the key important part there can actually help people learn about what you have to offer. So if you're a restaurant and you're up or coming in, you really knew and you're different and you've got, you know, crazy flavors and you come out with this really cool, I don't know, side dish that no one's ever heard of before. Digital PR really helps like get you on the map to get the news out there and drive that demand so people can come to the restaurant and try you out versus someone just searching for local restaurants on their phone, which they'll have many, many choices. The other side of it really is that, you know, what we're seeing value in digital PR is that we understand that. I like dilemmas do site lots of different sources to recommend a result. You'll even see I just did a test on Gemini. Search Siri launched on Monday this week and we add two, I think two press releases land one in prolific north and one in news by wire. And if you search on Gemini, you know, what is search theory agency, then it does find those articles. So we know that LLMs are actively searching the web for credible news sources. So, you know, if LLMs are going to get a good result for a brand, that's the first thing, you know, you need to look at and make sure that's the case. Digital PR can be a good way of getting more citations and sources within the media that LLMs can crawl and search and bring back to the user when they ask for a result. So do you think that LLMs care about links? No, I would think of relevance. It's more like David said, it's that web. Oh, they mentioned that brand and that brand, they're talking about this brand that started SEO and they're an agency that's doing these services and then there's this website that's actually the same brand and I think they're the same thing. So when someone searches for search theory, I'll just show both of them. And again, it's that relevance. I don't think it's truthfully. I don't think AI has the capacity to search every single, you know, if you think about all these websites, I have just tons of random backlinks, just the things that it would spit out would be crazy. So, yeah, I think I even just that point about it. It cares about relevance. Like if, if Claude or Gemini, whatever, was a person in Fabiote, what's the relevance of a link? Why do I care if it's linked or not? If it's talking about it. If there's a question which has asked about a product and a brand that has that product and some people are talking about that in reputable places, why do I care if they're linked to that side or not? Like this isn't exactly. Exactly. This isn't the late, you know, mid 90s with Google trying to figure out the best way to rank websites. Yeah. Interesting. Because Videsio, link is linked to some important Videsio though. Like, you know, it all, okay, cool. Sarah, what do you think? I just don't buy the hype around links. I'm sorry. Maybe that's my second, that's my second controversial take of the day. I just don't get the hype. I think again, we have worked with brands where we had very little links or, you know, only a few important ones, but still a few versus those that had thousands. And if I'm being completely honest from like an organic perspective as organic traffic, you know, new users or actual conversions, they were both doing equally the same. It didn't matter whether they had thousands or not thousands of links. I think for me, it genuinely does not matter. Like, if you want to go by yourself, a ton of backlinks go for it, but I just don't think it will make that much of a difference at the end of the day. Love it. And piggy, piggybacking off of what Sarah has just said there because we both agree on this subject. And if you're a brand, that's well known. That's just, that's take that as an example. Naturally, you have loads of different websites constantly going back to you. As social media influencers, you've got digital PR and press releases that go out because the media picks up stories of opening a store and you've got people who do that stuff. So links, there's hundreds of links for most brands, even thousands of links just being built constantly. And Google's constantly recognising these links, some of them reputable, some of them spam some of a bit rubbish. So if a, if a Marxian agency here in SEO agency says, oh, we're going to spend £4,000 this month on 15 links, when the brand's link velocity is like 1000 links a month, just organically without having to do anything. What are you really adding there? Nothing. I think it's, it's only relevant if literally you're, if you're a brand new domain and you know, knows anything about you like, I mean, that's what you are. When you are actually doing authorities. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it's important that you are on list of calls and that you have, you know, news sites, it needs to be relevant. It can't just be spammed. So, you know, me and Sarah have ran campaigns together now for the longest time. And, you know, we've, we've been part of businesses, both of us collectively that have done millions in revenue and work with clients with over a 90% retention rate. And we've had some fantastic results. None of it required a monthly link package. Interesting. Okay. I've got one last question and I maybe each of you could answer it. So just like to close with, what do you think is the most, and it doesn't have to be search related, it doesn't have to be anything we've talked about, but the most underrated marketing tactic right now in 2026. What do you feel? Does someone have an answer that comes straight to mind or what do you think? I have one. Do you want to go on? Go on. I think the most underused tactic in thinking is understanding user intent and user behavior. And I know I mentioned that at the start of the podcast as well. But there are a lot of marketing individuals that I've worked with over the years that go straight into the tactics. And you know, oh, this is the search volume. This is, you know, the social media platforms. These are the emails. This is a custom database. So don't first go into, well, what is the user intent? What is the user behavior? What platforms are they looking at? And so I think strategy is underrated. It's really underrated. And it's usually one of those areas that brands don't have a massive budget for to work on an active strategy, not just one that's done up front at the start of the project and then kind of gathers dust on the shelf, but strategy that is actively worked on fed with new data and updated. And understanding the fundamentals of like where your users spend their time and what they do on those platforms is so valuable. I've spoken and worked with great teams. There's a website called Car Wow and actually invested in this brand as well for a full disclaimer, but they become one of the most famous and popular YouTube channels in the UK and across the US as well, because they do like car review content. And the only reason that is is because when they started the company, basically they facilitate car deals and finance between dealers and the user. So it's a platform really. But they noticed that a lot of people, there was massive search volumes on what is the space in the boot or how does it drive or what's the zero to 60. And they use that data and that behavior to create a YouTube channel to then sell the brand and it's tremendous work. I'd really check them out there. There were brand that have nailed like really capitalizing on user intent, user behavior, the science behind like how to really capture people's attention. And it's so it's so underutilized and that's what we want to do more of. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Sarah David, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I excited to hear about search theory for for yourselves and the journey ahead. What is linked in the best way to catch you if anyone wants to reach out and ask a question. Yes, I'm seeing nods David LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn I'm always active on there. So the best catch me on there. Beautiful. Thank you Sarah. Thank you David. Well, that's been another episode of Beyond the search bar. If you've enjoyed it, go and hit that subscribe button. It'll be in your feed every couple of weeks. If you really enjoyed it, get on the right as five stars on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. Those are the two main places that we are trying to garner that good customer proof. But I'll be back again in two weeks time with another search and or broader content marketing professional to talk about where we are in the state of search marketing in the state of marketing overall. And looking forward to chatting to you next. Thanks again Sarah and David for my amazing. Thanks so much. Bye.