Ted Lindblom

I look at SEO and AI search like a game. What are Google and ChatGPT actually incentivized to do? Figure that out, and you can get ahead of the next shift instead of chasing it.

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Ted Lindblom, smiling, sitting on a tiled staircase

I've done the actual work.

Eight years in digital marketing, all of it rooted in SEO. I started out building links, worked my way up to running SEO, then consulting on it.

These days I'm an enterprise account executive at Ahrefs, which means I spend my week talking with big in-house SEO and content teams about what's actually working, what's breaking, and what they're nervous about with AI search.

The lens I keep coming back to is game theory. Every platform is a player with its own incentives. Google wants people to keep searching. ChatGPT wants people to trust its answers and stay in the chat. When you map out what each player wants, a lot of the "surprise" algorithm updates stop being surprises. You can kind of see the wave coming and paddle out early, instead of getting knocked over by it.

That's what this site is. Me thinking out loud, running experiments, and reacting to new Ahrefs studies, mostly adapted from my videos.