David Wilson has been doing this since AltaVista. The Zozimus executive vice president argues that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation: findability wherever a customer looks, rather than rankings for their own sake.

Key takeaways

• Findability, not rankings. Social, models and Google are all places a decision gets made, and only one of them has a rank tracker pointed at it.
• The expected-CTR model turns Search Console into a gap list. Compare what a position should earn against what it does earn, and the shortfall is the work.
• Internal linking still works after a decade. The least fashionable tactic in the field remains one of the most reliable.
• Digital PR and brand are the new link building. Unbranded search is eroding, so being known has to carry more of the load.
• A competitor teardown method that uses several models. Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude feeding NotebookLM, so no single model’s blind spots go unnoticed.
• The About page is now an AI asset. It is where a model learns who you are and whether to trust you.

On this page

• Search everywhere optimisation
• The expected-CTR model
• Internal linking and digital PR
• The multi-model competitor teardown
• Moats, faces and the About page
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Search everywhere optimisation

The reframe is not a rebrand. David’s point is that customers dream, search and decide across several surfaces, and optimising only the one with a rank tracker attached means you are measuring the part you can see rather than the part that matters.

Coming from the AltaVista era gives him a useful immunity to panic. He has watched the interface change several times already, and the underlying job of being findable and credible has not.

The expected-CTR model

This is the most immediately usable thing in the episode. Take raw Google Search Console data, model what click-through rate a given position ought to produce, then compare it to what the page is actually getting.

The gap is the answer. It converts a report nobody reads into a ranked list of pages leaving traffic on the table, which is a conversation a client can act on.

The organic CTR table is the version of that lookup you can pick up and use.

Internal linking and digital PR

David’s point about internal linking is that it has been quietly effective for ten years while the field chased other things. It costs nothing, it is entirely within your control, and most sites do it badly.

On external links his position has shifted with the market. As unbranded search erodes, digital PR stops being a link tactic and starts being the way a brand becomes something a model has heard of.

The multi-model competitor teardown

His method for finding a competitor’s weak points runs several models against the same question and then collects the output in NotebookLM to compare.

1. Ask the same structured questions of Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude separately.
2. Collect all three answers into NotebookLM as source material.
3. Look for where they disagree. Disagreement usually marks a thin spot in the public record about that competitor.
4. Turn the thin spots into the content plan.

The reason to use three is not thoroughness for its own sake. Each model has its own gaps, and running one alone means inheriting them silently.

Moats, faces and the About page

Two related questions close the conversation. Whether a faceless brand can still work, and what actually constitutes a defensible position now that content is cheap to produce.

His answer to both runs through identity. Put a face forward and you get a thing competitors cannot copy. Neglect the About page and you leave the single clearest statement of who you are to be inferred by a machine from fragments.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Zozimus	The agency where David is executive vice president
Search everywhere optimisation	Findability across social, models and search rather than rankings alone
Expected CTR model	Comparing modelled click-through rate at a position against actual performance
NotebookLM	Where he collects multi-model output for comparison
AltaVista	Where his career in search began
The About page	Reframed as the asset a model reads to learn who you are

Questions this episode answers

• What is search everywhere optimisation?
• How do I use expected CTR to find missed traffic in Search Console?
• Does internal linking still work?
• Is digital PR replacing link building?
• How do I use several AI models to analyse a competitor?
• Can a faceless brand still compete?
• Why does the About page matter for AI visibility?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• David Wilson on LinkedIn.
• Federico Fancinelli on entity coherence, which is the research behind the About page argument.
• The Search Console regex guide, if you want to slice the data before you model the gaps.

Find David Wilson

He is at Zozimus. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Wilson, David. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Search Everywhere Optimization.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/search-everywhere-optimization-with-david-wilson-of-zozimus