Lily Ray on AI Slop, GEO, and What Actually Works

**Ross Hudgens** (0:11)
Lily, we're excited to do a version two of this, two.
Where last time we were just in front of a Zoom camera, I'm excited to talk to you in person about so much has changed, and so much has changed for you too. So you're still at Amsive, but you've got a new consulting shop. I don't know if that's the right word, Algorithmic. Tell us about that, what's new in your life.

**Lily Ray** (0:33)
Yeah, it's a one-woman shop.
Yeah, so I've been building towards this for a long time. I think I have a unique approach, a unique set of skills, and I have a lot of companies who just want to work with me, usually to consult or plug in to their existing SEO or AEO, GEO programs. So I'm really excited to be able to take on some select clients and work on projects that sound interesting to me and where I think my skills are a good fit, while still being able to work with my amazing team at Amsive. So I feel like I got the best of both worlds right now. I'm really excited.

**Ross Hudgens** (1:06)
Is there a specific type of client you're taking on personally for people's awareness?

**Lily Ray** (1:10)
Yeah. I have a lot of companies that get caught up with Google's algorithms and manual actions that I tend to specialize in that because I've worked on that for a long time.
But there's certain types of strategic projects where maybe they need to think about what's the vision going forward for AI search. Maybe they have a really unique challenge or some type of traffic loss or something that I like to jump into. For more standard, just like we just want to grow, we need a big team, that's where I think my team at Amsive can plug in.

**Ross Hudgens** (1:44)
Makes sense. Nice. Well, congrats.

**Lily Ray** (1:46)
Thank you.

**Ross Hudgens** (1:46)
That's exciting. Yeah, that's fun. So, I mean, we can jump into the spicy stuff. You've got some great takes and smart takes about what's impacting GEO, AO.

**Lily Ray** (1:59)
Sure.

**Ross Hudgens** (1:59)
Some ways we've had differ, but I don't think they're conflicting opinions on listicles and things like that. You've come out against them, I think, smartly.
What's your view on that tactic in particular right now? What's happening in the world? It was specifically the best X-type roundups, first-party delivered that we're seeing so much proliferation of on the web.

**Lily Ray** (2:27)
Yeah. It's been a really interesting tactic and almost like case study because it's one of those rare opportunities where something is just so easy to influence for both SEO and AI search. The fact that language models, first of all, these pages rank well in search. They tend to be new, they tend to be updated. I also think there's been a bit of a void of that type of article answering that question for a long time because people haven't been as focused.
If you told a client five years ago, let's make a page about how we're the best and your competitors are not as great as you. They'd be like, what are you talking about? But now because of AI search, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon and doing it and it does work. I think we've seen this working really well. The problem, number one, for me, I think as a brand, it's a weird look to call yourself number one. There's all types of even FTC regulations about being transparent, being honest, talking about you actually have tested all your competitors and things like that. I think a lot of companies are not actually doing that due diligence, so there's that problem. But beyond that, the real thing that's interesting to me here is that because listicles do work, I'm not saying they don't, they have worked this whole time.
When something works and when something is relatively easy like that, where it's like publish one page and you see it working in AI search in a week, and everyone learns that and everyone talks about that and everyone goes on YouTube and conferences and all types of marketing around this really works. Even Ahrefs did a big article about this works.
When thousands and thousands of people learn something works, and now we have AI to amplify it, there's probably hundreds of thousands of these pages being built right now. When Google and Bing and other companies see this type of pattern, they view it as exploitation of their algorithms or manipulation of their algorithms. They don't want it to be this easy. They want to reflect more broad consensus that's not really as influenced by the brand. So I think they patch it up as if it's an exploit. So I think where something started is maybe like in genuine, like we're trying to do this the right way. Because so many people jump on the bandwagon and because it becomes such a big footprint, they see it as spam. And I think we see this happen all the time in the SEO space.