How Search Is Changing and What Food Bloggers Need to Do About It with Casey Markee

Disclaimer: this transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably become very accustomed to spending a lot of time on traditional SEO, optimizing posts, updating old content, and tracking to see if that helps you show up in Google search results. And tools like the Yoast SEO Premium plugin have helped make that process a lot easier for WordPres creators. But now there’s a new place people are searching AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. And a lot of creators have no idea how their sites are showing up in those answers. That’s where Yoast SEO AI Plus comes in. If you upgrade to Yoast SEO AI+, you can see if your brand is actually being mentioned in AI generated responses, whether AI is speaking positively about your content and how often your site appears compared to other sites. And it now scans across ChatGPT Perplexity and Gemini. If you want to discover how your site is appearing in AI responses, head to Yoast and use the code Foodblogger10%. That’s F-O-O-D-B-L-O-G-G-E-R–1–0-% sign at checkout for 10% off Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce, or Yoast SEO AI Plus.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Casey Markee who likely needs no introduction for most of you. Casey is the SEO expert behind MediaWyse and he is also the SEO expert within the Food Blogger Pro membership. This is his sixth, maybe even seventh appearance on the Food Blogger Pro podcast and we are thrilled to welcome him back. If you’ve been feeling like search and traffic have gotten harder to figure out lately, you’re not imagining it and you’re not alone. The rules are definitely changing and they’re changing pretty fast. In this episode, Casey breaks down the biggest shift happening in search right now, the move away from the traditional 10 blue links model toward a semantic AI powered model. For food bloggers, this means that publishing a well-optimized recipe is no longer enough and Casey explains exactly what it takes to thrive in the search landscape that’s replacing it.

Bjork and Casey chat about the technical fundamentals that still matter, the growing importance of building a content ecosystem and genuine topical authority and how to make yourself and your brand visible beyond your website. It’s an essential episode for every food blogger out there and we hope you’ll get a lot out of it. Without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Welcome back to the podcast.

Casey Markee: Bjork, thanks so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think this is maybe six or seven. I think you might be the most … Yeah. Other than like Lindsay and Emily who are team members, you might be the most frequent podcast guest. There’s a reason for that and it’s because you are deep in the world of industry and a niche that we talk about and that’s really important, which is SEO for people who are publishing food content on the web. That world is changing. It’s always changed fast, but it feels like it’s changing faster than it ever has before. Does that feel true from your end? You’ve had two decades of experience in search. Does it feel like it’s changing faster than it normally has? You

Casey Markee: Saying just two decades.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, three.

Casey Markee: Because I am old.

Bjork Ostrom: Four.

Casey Markee: 1998

Bjork Ostrom: Is

Casey Markee: When I first started in SEO. I remember the good old days of Dogpile and Lykos and overture.com. But yeah, it is a substantial change now. We’ve gone from that nice big set of blue links to where now Google is pulling from multiple sources to construct a kind of algamated Frankenstein type answer where their goal is to pull multiple sources from various places, provide follow-up tasks that the user might want to complete and make sure that everything that they’re doing is on Google so that they could keep you on their listing. Completely different than what it used to be, which is one of the best documents to rank for a query and then sending this thing called traffic to bloggers for so many years.That’s changed considerably for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so what you’re talking about is kind of multifactorial. One version of it would be AI overviews and most creators, most bloggers are familiar with this idea of AI overview. Even if I’m talking to family and friends and they’re like, “How’s work going? ” I’m like, “Well, things are changing.” And I give the example and I say, we used to get a lot of traffic from Google that was really important, but now a lot of times when you search, you might notice that the answer is provided by Google. So that’s AI overviews. The other piece that I think is really important that you talked about is there’s the AI overview, but then if you click to say show more, it folds down into an interactive experience where then you are interacting like you would with Claude or ChatGPT. You are interacting with that query that you had in order to gather additional information.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that kind of what you’re talking about is the changing landscape with search, one of the ways that it’s changing?

Casey Markee: Right. I mean, you’re basically referring to what’s called query fanout, which is where Google issues multiple related searches across subtopics and they use multiple sources from many different sites to build a layered response. That’s obviously very different from the classic one query, one serve, and those 10 blue links that we used to have. And basically when we talk about old SEO, we’re talking about, “Hey, here’s the keyword, here’s a title, here’s H2s.” That’s how you rank. Now Google has basically moved to this … It’s a lot more dense. Google has moved from a lexical model of search to a more semantic model of search.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you see those two words again? The first one was-

Casey Markee: Lexical.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. And can you define, yeah, lexical? Yeah.

Casey Markee: So lexical is basically when things are in a list. Lexical means that, “Hey, I’ve got this, this is your query and now I’m providing you a list of 10 results to answer that query. Here are the best documents that we want to rank for that query.” Now Google has moved to a semantic answer and that basically means that it’s an answer constructed from multiple sources and Google provides you a list of sources and they provide follow-up tasks to refine that list of sources and then Google’s whole goal is what can we do to help you so that you stay on Google? That’s where we get with the somatic, the AI and the fan out. So Google’s using multiple related sources across subtopics and sources. And so it used to be we had keywords, titles, H2s, and that would be what bloggers need to concentrate on and ranking for. Now with this modern SEO, as Google likes to call it, we have everything from topic clarity to answer clarity to entity classification to technical probability to structured data accuracy. All of this goes in to the results that Google is returning in the search results.

Casey Markee: That’s literally what Gemini is designed to do to provide you a complete answer, not necessarily the best singular answer.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. I almost think about it within the context of talking to an expert. Let’s say I were to go in and I were to talk to my doctor, describe something that I’m navigating, it would be as if the previous version of Google would’ve been like he would’ve handed me a document. It’s like, “Okay, here’s your response.” So it’s like you say a thing and it’s like, “Here’s your response.” Today what’s happening is you’re kind of going in, you’re having that same thing, you’re expressing something and then it’s like, here’s a custom response based on that specific query or that specific question that you had. It’s more crafted and similarly, it’s like what your doctor would actually do. They know your history, they know context about you, they’d be able to surface a response. There was something you had talked about where Google’s gathering information from.

Bjork Ostrom: You talked about clarity was one of the words that you’d use. Can you talk a litle bit about that to help us understand what’s happening here in terms of how those answers are being generated and what Google is considering when it is generating those answers?

Casey Markee: Well, and the best way to explain is if we’ll just use food bloggers as an example. For food bloggers, Google is trying to understand who you are, who the individual blogger is, what their site is about, what cuisines topics that food blogger specifically specializes in, whether the recipes that they’re being returned and the search results are tested, how these posts that they’re returning relate to each other, that’s where we get these fan out queries. If someone’s typing in Salisbury Steak is very common for it also to pull out related dishes that might be best served with Salisbury Steak now with regards to Gemini when you go full on into AI mode. And then the most important question is why does that person’s version, that content creator, that author, that recipe writer, that blogger, why is their version enough to be referenced? And so Google is basically pulling all of that information.

Casey Markee: It’s no longer where people can’t … The days of you just being able to publish a recipe and say, “Okay, I think I got the best recipe out there. I’m

Bjork Ostrom: Going to publish

Casey Markee: This recipe and it’s going to rank.“ The odds are it’s not going to rank because the world doesn’t need another Salisbury recipe recipe as an example. There’s just a lot more that go into the landscape now for the average blogger. And I think that’s why they’re struggling. A lot of people are thinking, ”Okay, well, I need to put together this post with what I’ve learned previously.” And what they’ve learned previously is not necessarily how Google is returning the results they’re returning at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And what I hear you saying is Google as well as some of these other platforms, specifically speaking about Google, is getting better at understanding not just the piece of content like, okay, you could get really good at SEO optimizing a single post. You could be the best at the world in that, but if you don’t have an ecosystem of content and authority and maybe social media and maybe email activity around the domain, if you don’t have that ecosystem built around it, then you are going to really struggle. If somebody just started today and the only thing they did was posted perfectly optimized SEO content on a blog, that would be difficult because they don’t have the ecosystem around them. Is that a litle bit of what you’re alluding to and where Google is going with how they make decisions around what to surface?

Casey Markee: Oh, that’s very true. I mean, there are tons of courses out there that will quote teach you how to write a recipe post. Unfortunately, none of them are very good. The problem with that is that you’re going to get these bloggers who’ll come out, “Okay, I’ve got these 50, 100, 150 recipes. I’m going to start putting these recipes together.” And it’s like they’re yelling into an empty room initially. We’ve already talked initially previously about the fact that we don’t need more recipes. We are literally at a recipe incursion point now where there are enough recipes to go around. There has never been more food bloggers in the history of the world than there is right now.

Casey Markee: That is good and bad. That means that it’s incredibly competitive. That also means that there’s less room for new bloggers to come into the fray. Someone could use a piece of software, someone could use a template and they have all these recipes and they put them on there, but that is not enough. The on- page signals still exist, but Google is very clear when they’re talking about what do you need to do to rank with Google’s AI? They literally list in their documentation. It’s crawlability, it’s internal links, it’s page experience, it’s textual content, it’s images and video, it’s making sure that you have structured data matching visible text. It’s all of these continual best practices a lot of bloggers struggle with out of the gate. Someone could come in and start a brand new site and they might not know that their site is just horribly incorrectly set up.

Casey Markee: Maybe they haven’t used the correct schema. Maybe their internal links are completely non-existent. Maybe they haven’t optimized and fully passed core web vitals. Maybe the site itself is not set up in a way to make it as algorithmically attractive as possible. That’s just the onsite stuff. But as you mentioned, the bloggers that do the best are the ones that are looking offsite, the ones that are reinforcing their own expertise. All I do is audit food blogs twenty four seven, 365 days a year. And one of the biggest issues I get with Quadras, whether it’s new bloggers, established bloggers, or even the bigger bloggers, is that they don’t realize that the days of just sitting behind a desk and publishing a recipe is over.

Casey Markee: Cannot do that and be successful. You have to literally be your biggest cheerleader. I show them how to use whatever LLM of choice they have, whether it’s ChatGPT, Cloud or whatever, to go out and push their authority virtually, here’s how you can use ChatGPT to find local festivals and a contact list for all of the print, radio and TV stations in your area. These are areas that you need to do to push your authority because if you do not have that authority, it’s very hard for Google or any AI in general to take you as a serious creator.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the things that I think was really appealing about the world of food blogging and having a blog, whether it be food or fashion or whatever it might be, is that for a certain individual, it was really appealing this idea that you could be at your computer, you could create a recipe, you could do keyword research and you could rank and earn an income from that. And what we’re seeing and same thing that you’re seeing is there’s this shift, an industry shift. And with that, there’s a shift around what skills are rewarded the most. Previously, you might’ve been rewarded if you had the ability to create a system and a process around keyword research and ranking a blog post and doing more keyword research and ranking that. Now what we’re seeing is like, hey, if you are kind of a creator forward, you have a strong following on different platforms, you have a connected audience, you have people who respond to the content that you’re creating and then, and we’re seeing a decent amount of this downstream, you are creating a site ensuring that has best practices like you talked about built around it.

Bjork Ostrom: Then what you have is you have this following of an engaged audience and you a lot of times naturally are a marketer. You create an Instagram reel, you create shorts, you are publishing emails, you’re maybe doing a live event, you’re doing something on TV. The downstream effects of that are that as long as you also have a site and that site is optimized, you’re going to be able to capture some of the value there. But like you said, it doesn’t exist in the same way that it did five, 10 years ago where you’re able to just play this game of create and rank. It’s like you have to create, you have to market, you have to connect, you have to be seen. And then if you do those things and you have a well structured, highly optimized site, you will also then be able to catch some of the benefit there.

Bjork Ostrom: But what are the things that you’re seeing that are most impactful? You mentioned this great example of like, hey, use Cloud or ChatGPT to come up with a list of 10 different opportunities local opportunities and they’re dying to have people on. They love having those- They

Casey Markee: Really are. The biggest thing is the local affiliates, whether it’s NBC, CBS or ABC, especially they are dying for local community interest content. I just say, “Here, look, I’m going to show you. ” I’ll go into ChatTV and I’ll show you the prompt. And I said, “Okay, here’s where you are and we’re going to bring up this. Here’s a list of all the local prime radio and TV opportunities in your area. Here is the public available list of the people that we would send a email to, to introduce yourself.” And you’re basically just going to say, “Hey, I’m a food blogger. I’m a content creator. Here is my side. I would love to come in and do a cooking demo or provide some content to assist you in the morning or wherever you feel is appropriate.” And trust me, you’d be surprised at how successful that is.

Casey Markee: It is incredibly … But a lot of bloggers struggle with this. I literally have two sets of basically two communities of loggers these days. I’m finding with a growing minority, so to speak, of my audits, you’ve got audience number one that is a successful blogger and they’ve been a successful logger for a while. They know that they need to update their practices. They know that they haven’t spent as much time on social media and being the public face of their site and they’re totally open to doing that and that’s fine. And you’ve got this other group where they are shy. As you said, they were comfortable sitting behind the desk for years and just publishing recipes weren’t very active on social media, had built a relatively strong email list, but that’s all. And they just cannot bring themselves to market their site. They just, “I can’t do it, Casey.

Casey Markee: I can’t do it. I am not the kind of person who goes to a farmer’s market. I am not the kind of person that you’re ever going to see on TV in the morning. I cannot do that. “ And I say, ”That’s totally fine.” We have them advance in other directions, but they also accept that they are not going to be as successful as these bloggers who are more social,

Casey Markee: As these bloggers who are able to go out and say, “Hey, here’s me with this doing video and here’s why my Salisbury stake is better than the million of others. And here’s some tips that I want you to understand.” And they’re very personable. There are just some people out there who are not at that level and that’s totally fine. I don’t fault them for it, but they always come to me and says, “Can I be successful without doing this? ” I’m like, “You can be successful to an extent.” I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t take you from 20,000 sessions a month to two million sessions a month if you’re shy or if you can’t get behind a camera or if you’re not going to go out and pound the pavement and get interviews and brand mentions and become the number one person in the United States with your name.

Casey Markee: That’s the goal. I mean, whenever we talk to bloggers on the call, one of the things I look is first thing I’m doing is I typing their name into Google. Are they visibly on the front page? Sometimes it is impossible to be number one for your name. I am the number one Casey Market in the world because I have gone out and killed every other Casey Marquee-

Bjork Ostrom: Strategic. On the globe.

Casey Markee: It took me a couple years, that’s fine.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s another session.

Casey Markee: Not do that. Some people share their name with someone famous and so they’re always that the top is always going to be dominated by a knowledge graph that they can’t compete with. That is not the case with everyone. I just had an audit with an Australian blogger who shares her name with the local personality. And so what we did is we used her full name with her middle name so that she could get a knowledge graph, a knowledge panel. And that is something that bloggers have to start thinking of because you get a knowledge panel, your traffic goes up 20% immediately.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that, what a knowledge panel is and then what creators can do to help get a knowledge panel?

Casey Markee: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Because I think it relates closely to all of this.

Casey Markee: Right. If you go into Google and type in Casey Marquee, sometimes I get this full knowledge panel, takes up the entire top of the page.

Casey Markee: Sometimes it’s only half of the page. It’s really strange. It’s funny. Sometimes I’ll look at it and put Casey Marquee in parentheses and it comes up with this full knowledge panel where I dominate everything. The knowledge panel is basically you being number one for your name. You get position zero mastery. You basically are, you get links to your interviews, you get links to your YouTube podcasts or local podcasts or anything. And it’s basically, it’s called the Squeaky Will Syndrome. It’s those bloggers who have gone out and really focused on claiming their brand can generate a knowledge graph. Now-

Bjork Ostrom: Their brand being their name.

Casey Markee: Their brand being their name and their name being tied to their site in many cases. Now in these cases, it’s a lot easier for the average food buyer to get a knowledge graph if they have two things, a cookbook and a large social following because the cookbook tends to come with an ISVN number and the ISBN number is something that we can apply directly to the Google Knowledge Graph by means of structured data. So it’s relatively easy to add you as a known Wikipoint on the knowledge graph when you have things like an ISVN number or when you have a lot of known basically public PR mentions. I have a significant amount of PR mentions. I do not have a cookbook. I do not have a book.

Bjork Ostrom: Podcast interviews, speaking at conferences And

Casey Markee: Those for the many years, those reinforce the entity disambiguation of my name. Google knows clearly who Casey Marque is. So when I have a blogging audit and one of the things I’ll bring up is, “Hey, do you have a cookbook?” And they’re like, “Yeah, I have a cookbook, but I haven’t really done anything with it. Or I had a cookbook in 2011 and I look and they don’t have a knowledge graph.” That’s actually very exciting because they can get a knowledge graph even if they have a cookbook or these press release mentions are older, they just didn’t realize there are specific steps to take to apply that information onto a graph. We call it entity disambiguation. The goal, of course, is to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand you as a person and the various entities that go into your individual content, including your recipes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting Lindsay doesn’t have a knowledge graph if you search her her name, has a strong social following, but there’s also doesn’t have a cookbook, but there’s also another Lindsay Olstrom who’s like a craft blogger And so we haven’t worked super hard on it, but just recently, especially as Google has started to release some of their creator profile stuff, we’ve come back around to it and we’re like, “Hey, I wonder if … ”

Casey Markee: There’s no reason she shouldn’t have it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What would your advice be for us if we’re trying to get after getting a knowledge graph for Lindsay?

Casey Markee: Well, the first thing I would do is I would try to, I would find those and she has a cookbook, doesn’t she?

Bjork Ostrom: No cookbook.

Casey Markee: No cookbook. Okay. You know what?

Bjork Ostrom: Write a cookbook. You

Casey Markee: Don’t even

Bjork Ostrom: Have

Casey Markee: To set up an ebook.You don’t have to set up a cookbook. You can set up anything through Google Books. The

Bjork Ostrom: Goal is

Casey Markee: To get an ISV number. Once you have the ISVN number, we can get you on Amazon, GoodReads, Barnes & Noble, all of those. And once you have that, that is a piece, a very important piece of Wikidata information. And then it’s just a matter of applying that to the knowledge graph. There are various ways to submit that information so that we could start creating an entity and fill that into the out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Oftentimes you hear people talk about how a cookbook is beneficial just beyond the revenue from the cookbook itself.

Casey Markee: Well, and let’s talk about that because I mean, I think you would agree. I mean, in my experience, most people do not make a lot of money off of their first cookbook. As a matter of fact, that’s all blogger is you’re not buying the cookbook, you’re not doing a cookbook because you’re going to be any money off of it, far be it. No, you’re doing the cookbook because it is a way for you to generate that ISPN number to have something that in the hands of someone who’s practiced fill out all this information. I mean, a good example is Louis Gafari with Urban Farm and Kitchen has a fantastic knowledge panel. If you talk about Louis Gafari, if you type in Urban Farm and Kitchen, he comes up. He did not have any of that until he published his cookbook a couple years ago and then he was able to start going out there and putting all of these farm to table and other mentions together. And of course it helps that there’s not a lot of Louis Gafaris there, but there are other Louis Gafaris. He’s competing against a journalist, an architect and several others and he is the one that has the knowledge panel. So all of that is possible. It’s just a matter of being able to put all those into these together in a framework that’s easy for Google specifically to pick out.

Bjork Ostrom: And the benefit of that, you talked about a search lift that comes from it. Where does that search lift come from if you have a knowledge panel?

Casey Markee: Well, the knowledge graph, Google has its own

Bjork Ostrom: Knowledge graph. Knowledge graph, yeah.

Casey Markee: The knowledge graph has been around since 2007. Google’s knowledge graph used to be based on two sources, which is hilarious. The Wikipedia

Casey Markee: And the CIA World Fact Book. Well, the CIA World Fact Book was sunset earlier this year. It no longer exists. So Wikipedia is still kind of the largest external third party way to apply entities and to kind of simulate so to speak what our placement on the Google knowledge graph would look like. So when someone is trying to save practice into the disambiguation, every time someone writes a recipe, there are various entities on the page. How can we get Google to find and process those entities as easily as possible? Well, there’s fantastic tools out there. Of them is called NLinks. That’s enlinks.net. NLinks has their own way to inject actual structured data in a way to make it easy for Google to crawl a page and pull out the entities. I always explain it to bloggers when we’re talking during our audits. Think of Google as a rat.

Casey Markee: Entities are little pieces of cheese and your site is a maze. Your goal is to use schema to lead the rat that is Google through the maze that is your site to find these entities and you do that by using structured data.

Bjork Ostrom: A recipe is the most obvious example. It’s like, here’s the recipe, Google.

Casey Markee: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: But there’s lots of other versions of that that exist.

Casey Markee: For example, Yoast has built-in schema called Knows About. You could actually go in and optimize your user account with your awards and your experience and topics. And if you do that correctly, a lot of people don’t even realize that this is built into Yost Premium. You can go in and when someone takes one of your recipes and puts them into the rich snippets test right Google, you’ll see all the recipe schema, but you’ll also see that this person is a recipe developer or a certified dietician. There’ll be literally fields that you can control there to make it to-

Bjork Ostrom: Give Google context as to who you are. Does that show up within search results or it’s more like information that Google potentially takes into

Casey Markee: It? It shows up in the rich results tool, but it won’t show

Bjork Ostrom: Up

Casey Markee: As a forward-facing verth snippet, so to speak. But it’s data, anything we could do. And that becomes more important now because you’ve heard me say for years, we want to optimize for toddlers and drunk adults. Well, now we’re optimizing for toddlers, drunk adults and LLMs and LLMs are not smart. And that’s why things like this structured data, whether it’s webpage, schema, recipe, schema, knows about schema, all of these things going together to help with this entity disambiguation, to make it easier for Google to understand not keywords but entities. And that’s really what bloggers are struggling with is they’re the days of you, okay, here’s a keyword that I’m going after and I know that I need to put the keyword in this heading and this heading and in the meta description and things like that. That’s just outdated advice. That’s not going to help you these days.

Casey Markee: It’s very rare that you can rank at the top of Google by following an old keyword first optimization strategy.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It feels like generally speaking, the shift, if I were to put it in a phrase and let me know if this resonates, is that there was a season where your content was the product. You create a blog post. It might matter if it’s you that did it, it might not matter. If you can figure out how to get it to rank, that is the product. I think continually the product is the person. It is your following your expertise from you. You are creating these, in our case it’s recipes, but you’re creating this content, but it’s really more about you and brand following engagement and less about this individual post that will matter moving forward. The knowledge panel that displays is an example of that. The other thing that Google recently released is, I don’t know what it’s called, but these creator profiles, which feels like adjacent to this a litle bit.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what those are and if that’s something that we should be filling out?

Casey Markee: Well, the creator profiles, you’re talking about the ones that are only available if you have a very specific number of social media profiles. I think it’s like a hundred thousand people on Twitter, 100,000 people on X and 200,000 on TikTok or something like that because you have to

Bjork Ostrom: Download. Yeah. There’s certain numbers that you have to hit in order to apply for these creator profiles where then you can follow these creators on Google. But we just recently did this for Pinter Viam and essentially it compiles all of our social content in one profile. I don’t have a clear understanding right now of the benefit of it.

Casey Markee: Well, that’s the issue. There is really no noticeable benefit other than it’s an ego trip, the fact that you qualify for a creator profile, but they’re not sending any traffic. As a matter of fact, the one thing that is actually helping bloggers is being voted as a preferred source. The Google-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that was going to be the next question I was going to ask. We were actually just talking about this as a team this morning. Yeah,

Casey Markee: That’s taken off. I was literally one of the first people to push that last year. It’s been over a year now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I remember having a conversation about it.

Casey Markee: We put it on Leads Colon Area and David’s site has been an incredibly early benefactor of that. He was literally one of the first three sites that we put that on. We put it on every page. Again, there’s a lot of things he’s done that others haven’t done or that he’s done that have been more successful, but he has quote, never had more traffic than he’s had at any point in his career than right now. And a lot of that is because he has been pushing these signals out that Google wants to see.

Bjork Ostrom: One of those signals that being the preferred source. Can you talk about what’s happening behind the scenes with that? Essentially, and people could just Google and find this.

Casey Markee: Contest.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. People are saying, “I prefer this site.” And you can just use a link that you send to people via email or include in a post. Process. Yeah.

Casey Markee: You have the button and then someone clicks on the button and then they have to go in and specifically bookmark that site on their list of internal preferred links in their Google account. Basically, the whole point of this initially was discover feed optimization. But then Google came out and said that it’s an actual ranking factor. It is something that they take into account-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. …

Casey Markee: In the returning account. It’s a worldwide ranking factor now, which is very interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: So it now factors into a search algorithm as to what content they show.

Casey Markee: Right. So if you are able to generate enough of these preferred saves, who knows what it is? I mean, it’s like core web vitals. Core web vitals is a ranking factor, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Nobody knows. It’s probably so

Casey Markee: Low that it’s not really anything more than a tiebreaker, but

Bjork Ostrom: Every

Casey Markee: Little bit helps. And so this preferred source is very easy to implement. It’s built into the feast themes. It’s built into the HubBub plugin. Shareaholic now has introduced it. It’s very easy to implement or you can just download the code yourself and make your own custom button. But yeah, it should be almost every page for every food blogger operated out there. It’s very easy to

Bjork Ostrom: Implement. And the places that I would immediately think of having it would be within a post itself where you’d have some call to action, add Pinch of Yum is a preferred source and then email, you’re sending it out as an email. Is it just people who have a Gmail account then? Do you know if they have to be signed into a Google

Casey Markee: Account? But no, as far as I know, no. It’s applied to … Every site generates the button once they get to a preferred level of traffic. So for example, I had an audit with a client the other day and she was only doing about 5,000 or less searches a month, very relatively new site, less than a year and a half old. She did not have a Google preferred option yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, you couldn’t even do it if you wanted to.

Casey Markee: Nope, because Google didn’t provide the option to enable that for

Bjork Ostrom: Herself

Casey Markee: Yet.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Casey Markee: There is clearly a minimum required to generate and you can’t just create a new site and in a couple of months have this preferred button profile. It’s for you behind the scenes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you know then, can you see how many people have … Are there any analytics around preferred sites or is it like you just are hoping that people are doing it?

Casey Markee: The only analytics, the only way to attract it would be to put on button tracking, which is what David did.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So you can see in Google Analytics how many clicks. Yeah. He’s

Casey Markee: Getting dozens of people a day using it. So that’s why he realized, yeah, might as well keep it.

Bjork Ostrom: You

Casey Markee: Could also use Clarity. I mean, Clarity, you could track buttons just like you would track how many people are clicking on an FAQ.

Bjork Ostrom: Microsoft Clarity?

Casey Markee: Microsoft Clarity. You could use that. Anything you could do to track that. I’m a big believer in that. There’s no reason you shouldn’t meet tracking. It’s just like the AI buttons. People always say, “Oh my gosh, I’m not getting any traffic from those.” I’m like, “Yeah, you are, because I can look right in your search console and see that there’s traffic.” Or if you’re using Hubbub, Hubbub actually has enabled tracking anyway and it’s right on your post screen. You can see if you’ve got any clicks on those.

Bjork Ostrom: You were saying with the AI button, to be clear for people who aren’t familiar, the AI button is something that exists on your site. You click on it and it pre-populates a prompt into ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever AI tool you use.

Casey Markee: ChatGPT, Gemini, Cloud.

Bjork Ostrom: With a prompt to remember information about me or about this site. And what you’re saying is you can, number one, see how many people click on that. There’s integrations that you can have with a tool like Google Analytics where you can track if you have the right code or you mentioned some of the others that you could track. And then you’re also able to see now within Google Search Console the LLM impressions. What would it be technically? Yeah.

Casey Markee: Which is interesting. So that’s rolling out slowly, but it is rolling out and I actually ran across another profile this morning and there are a thousand of LLM impressions, but it doesn’t give you any click data. So it’s basically useless.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. In Google search console, not everybody will have this. It’s slowly rolling out this. It’s

Casey Markee: Called generative AI. It’s called generative impressions.

Bjork Ostrom: How often are you showing up when there’s a generative answer, which is like-

Casey Markee: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: In our world, it doesn’t matter because 99% of people are generating revenue through traffic and impressions. It probably does matter if you’re a brand and you’re a shoe brand or a food brand where you’re selling granola because then it does matter if you’re showing up because just an impression is value, but more so in our world, it’s traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So some really important things for us to be thinking about as the search landscape changes as we continue to think about, hey, are we showing up in AI overviews or across multiple sites? I’d be curious if you have thoughts on, do you feel like the goal is still traffic or are there ways that you are seeing other people get creative with their site with search as we move to a more impression-based world? Because I think that’s one of the bigger shifts that is happening is like, man, if people are getting an answer from an AI overview, but you are a part of that answer, that’s maybe good. And you might have a link that’s referenced within it and we’re seeing that a little bit more now where links are starting to be included in AI overviews, but you still don’t get the traffic the same amount.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a little bit of a prediction question. As you look out a year, two, three years, where do you see things going and what do you think bloggers need to be thinking about in order to start the process of moving in the right direction if they haven’t made any big changes yet?

Casey Markee: Well, and that’s interesting because there are a significant amount of bloggers who are still growing traffic. Again, I’ve been very fortunate. I mean, the average traffic increase from one of my audience is still around 25, 26% and then we can get anywhere from 17 to 23% increases in just RPMs. But a lot of that isn’t necessarily because there’s more traffic now. There’s actually less traffic. It’s just that bloggers routinely don’t know how to do SEO in this new age. And so when we go in and we make changes on their site, whether it’s on the technical side or on the content side, we’re making their site incredibly more algorithmically attractive to both Gemini and LLMs in general than previously and they’re getting the results of that. For most bloggers, the big theme in 2026 and beyond is clarity. Clarity really has to be something that the average blogger embraces that.

Casey Markee: AI summaries equal clarity, helpful content is clarity, UX signals are clarity. That’s what Google and AI systems reward. They’re rewarding direct answers, clear intent matching and clean structure. And that’s why respectfully, if you think you can do that on your own, you’re probably not going to be successful because there is a right and a wrong way to do that. And that’s, again, why I consider my audit so incredibly successful because that’s what I’m training on. We’re showing how AI functions and how AI views your site. So I’ll be able to go in and use tracking to see, okay, well, this is what is sticky, or we’ll send off one of your recipes to a focus group. And the focus group will say, “Well, I don’t know why she has five photos of the finished dish,” or, “Gosh, to be 1500 words to get down to the information I need,” or whatever.

Casey Markee: That’s direct feedback that I can give the content creators so that we can change their template and at least help them on the onsite side.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s optimizing. That’s a great example of optimizing for people. It’s

Casey Markee: Great. I mean, that’s the thing is that you, and I love Feast. I think Skylar has done a fantastic job with Feast, but if you are on the call and you’re using the Feast template to optimize your posts, you are not going to build traffic because you have horribly underoptimized your posts and you’ve made your recipes if you’re like 6,000 other sites. You are not going to ring competitively. An LLM requires the keyword on the page. It’s common sense. So if you’ve been told, “Hey, I’m not going to put any keywords, any focus keywords at headings,” you are literally shooting yourself in the foot. It is 100% okay to have, maybe you have a recipe overview with the keyword, maybe you have a how-to or step-by-step section where it literally says how to make Salisbury steak. Maybe you have a section further down that says expert tips to make this Salisbury stink.

Casey Markee: There is nothing wrong with that. And anyone who tells you that’s over optimization, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in the Arizona desert

Casey Markee: Because it’s not remotely the case and the bloggers who are understanding and unwinding some of that advice, because as you can imagine, I get a lot of fee sites coming to me and I’m like, “Who told you to do this? Well, you don’t want you in this documentation here.” Well, again, no one Google and LLMs are crawling your site. They have to know what the recipe is about. You can’t just have an H1 and an H2 on your page with keyword and expect that you’re going to compete against these other sites that dominate page one of Google and do not remotely use this template.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And your point- Those are

Casey Markee: Little things like that

Bjork Ostrom: You

Casey Markee: Kind of have to unwind.

Bjork Ostrom: Your point with clarity is that you need to be as a … If you’re structuring a blog post, you’re publishing, putting together a recipe post, you need to be ultra clear in what that is about because an LLM will come and they’ll read it. A bot will come and it will try to understand what it’s about. You do that through the actual content that you’re creating as well as structured data. But then my guess is the other piece that you need to get really clear with is who you are as a creator. Urban Farm and Kitchen is a great example where it’s like it is clear what he is creating content about. And so there’s the macro level clarity as well. Really

Casey Markee: Includes what are called real testing notes, real testing notes or clear firsthand expertise. I am shocked at how many times I’ll have it on and on a blog and they don’t have any of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Casey Markee: You’ve made this recipe. Hopefully you’ve made this recipe dozens, if not hundreds of times. Why does that expertise not come through when I’m reading this recipe post?

Bjork Ostrom: Like the notes and the insights and …

Casey Markee: And this is where I think the recipe summaries that I’ve been pushing relentlessly have come into play and why I will literally die on that hill. The bloggers who have the recipe summaries at the top, the bloggers who are literally spoonfeeding their audience and the LLMs, here are the main points of view. This is why this recipe works. This is what I’m doing to differentiate myself. The bloggers who are doing that are the ones that continually send me emails saying, “Oh my gosh, Casey, my traffic has never been this high in June. It’s never been this high in July or May.” That is allowing you to differentiate yourself. LLMs are stupid, but we also know that LLMs prioritize the first 300 to 500 words on a page. If I’m at the top and you have a teaser text and then I have to navigate through four paragraphs of the history of why you made this recipe, think of all the information that you did not provide there earlier that would allow both the user and the LM to make an informed decision on whether your recipe is of highest to be seens enough to be considered for future.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And what you’re talking about, it’s like a call out box at the top that gives an overview of like, here’s the specifics of it’s kind of like what you can expect here. I think maybe importantly, it’s different than a table of contents.

Casey Markee: Here’s what you need to know. Yeah, it’s definitely not a table of contents.

Casey Markee: Table of contents could still work. I mean, the reason that table of contents were a big deal initially was because Google gave you jump links. You would go into the search results and you would see, okay, I’m on page on or two and right below my meta description, there is a section, there’s a jump link linking to ingredients. There’s a jump link linking to step by steps. Here’s a jump link link in expert tips. Those exist, but they have been incredibly deprecated. The amount of those rich snippets that exist now, and they’re literally non-existent in AI mode, they don’t exist. So again, if you can use a table of contents as a way to be helpful, especially if you’ve got at least five plus headings, H2s on a page, our research clearly shows that people still use them. But understand that the benefit of those, just like with FAQs, there’s no real rich snippets for those anymore, but we still use FAQs because they’re easy for us to qualify, but the people also ask accordions.

Casey Markee: Just to understand that what worked three years ago isn’t nearly as effective as what works now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So if you had a table of contents before, you might see that replicated within a search result. It’s another link that could be clicked. What you’re saying is like, “Hey, it still might show up now. Probably not going to show up a ton.” Not nearly

Casey Markee: As much as it did

Bjork Ostrom: Before. Yeah, especially not in AI mode, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. It might still be helpful. It might still be beneficial for a user. And that’s what a lot of this comes back to is finding that balance between, you talk about structured data, schema, markup, the flow of a post, some of these tactical things that are important to do, but then there’s also user testing where you have somebody look at a piece of content as a person, not as a bot, not as an LLM and say, “What is it like for you to use this? ” And if they’re like, “Hey, this is a bad user experience,” that also should go into considerations that you have as a content creator. And that’s what we talk about a lot, which is the art and the science of this. It’s both of those

Casey Markee: Things. It really is because sometimes we rely on advice from our ad companies. Ad companies, again, will provide some advice and some of the advice will be helpful. Some of the advice will not be helpful. I remember that at a conference a year ago, an ad company who will shall not be named told everyone in the audiences you should stop grouping their blocks.

Bjork Ostrom: Stop what?

Casey Markee: An audience grouping their blocks.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Casey Markee: Okay. And people grouped their blocks because it was known to improve readability. It was also known to better control where ads pop in. If you have a lot of ads on your site and you have four or five paragraphs in a row, you might have an ad popping in every two paragraphs, which is going to lower your readability and cause an exit very quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning that you’d have more from an ad ops perspective, it’s like there’s more opportunities for an ad to show up. From a readability perspective, the more ads that are showing up-

Casey Markee: For the user to exit the page.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That it becomes too many ads.

Casey Markee: So we started recommending grouping blocks and it was very successful because one of the worst things that you can have is to go to a page, there is a teaser paragraph and then right below that, an ad pops in before you even see the featured image.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Casey Markee: That’s a terrible experience for users. No one has any data that says it’s not. It doesn’t exist. So all you did was you grouped the teaser text with that featured image so that the user can actually invest in the post and scroll down before they’re actually confronted with an ad.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s one of the great things- Oh, go ahead.

Casey Markee: … said, “Hey, remove all of this group.” And so every blogger in that conference literally went in and removed all of their ad groupings and you know what happened? Their exit rate went through the roof.

Bjork Ostrom: UIUX was impacted. And

Casey Markee: UX went to the toilet and I’d have this audit and they would say, “Why did you do this? I mean, here’s your RPM. It did not improve. Here’s your time on site. It went down 20%. What happened?” “Well, I was told to remove all my block grouping, blah, blah, blah. ”And I’m like, ” Yeah, I don’t understand why people give you these recommendations when there’s literally no data there to support it.

Bjork Ostrom: “Yeah. It’s one of the things that we are speaking personally for Pinch APM, I’m constantly trying to, and I’m sure everybody else figure out is like, what is that balance? And I think when we look at our ad density personally, it’s like we’re on the lower end traditionally, but it’s hard when you can play the numbers game and say like- Yeah, I mean, hey,

Casey Markee: I’m only at 18%, but if

Bjork Ostrom: I

Casey Markee: Go to 25

Bjork Ostrom: During

Casey Markee: The holidays, I’m going to make an extra $4,500 a month.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. And acknowledging just as a creator-owned business for anybody listening, that’s hard, but also encouraging you to sit with it and say, and the testing I think is really important. It’s one of the things we constantly come back to is like, how can we run a test on this? How can we let the data speak for itself as to earnings and how can we let the data speak for itself as to engagement and if people do fall off? And so I think it’s one of the great things that you talk about, which is like, okay, let’s just look at the data. You can hear stuff all different places, but as much as possible, how do you go back to the data? You

Casey Markee: Used SEO testing on your site for years. I’ve used seotesting.com. I’ve used focus groups, I’ve used Hotjar. And I’ll just pull out my phone during an audit and I’ll say, look, I want you to pull out your phone. And I’m visually showing them and as we scroll down, they can’t see their content because it’s completely covered. With pop-out ads, maybe they have SMO buttons on their mobile that they totally forgot about. Those are covering the left-hand side of the screen. As we scroll down, maybe they have a full pop-over ad that is becoming more and more popular. I hate those. Those interstitials should be burned at the stake, but those are the kind of things that users, they are putting faith in their ad companies and their ad company is destroying that faith in the purchase of a dollar.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things-You

Casey Markee: Really have to be on top of that, as I tell blogers all the time, just pull out your phones, have a family member look at your site, have them give an honest review of how easy or uneasy it was to navigate the page.

Bjork Ostrom: The user experience piece, for sure, I think is important. And it occurred to anybody who is working with ad company. I don’t know if this is at certain levels or if we work with Raptive and we’re able to do this. I don’t know if Mediavine also does this or any of the other ad companies, but just to see like, “Hey, I’m interested in doing this. ” Or maybe there’s a recommendation saying that, “Can we run a test on it just to see what does that data look like? ” We’re coming to the end here, Casey. We could talk for three hours here because there’s an endless amount of content that we can cover within the world of search. We’ll obviously have you on again for seven or eight, whatever it will be, but if people are interested in working with you for an audit, can you talk about what that process would be like and how they can reach out?

Casey Markee: Well, you can always reach me. I’m on Food Blogger Pro forums. You can always private message me there. You could also drop me an email at [email protected]. That’s M-E-D-I-A-W-Y as in yellow, se.com. My website is mediawise.com. There’s plenty of information on there. I’m currently booking for mid to late July right now. My goal is always to try to provide as many free resources as possible. That’s why we try to have this discussion at least once a year because everything is so dynamic. I suspect, unfortunately, that AI mode will probably go live next year.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about when you say go live, that means it’ll become the default? Because it is live right now, but it will become the default. Yep.

Casey Markee: Yeah. So AI mode possibly will go live probably the second quarter of 2026 would be my guess, but hey, ask my wifi wrong all the time.

Bjork Ostrom: Second quarter of-

Casey Markee: 2027.

Bjork Ostrom: 2027. Okay.

Casey Markee: And if AI mode goes live, it will be jarring. So a lot of bloggers might wake up with a 20% drop in traffic wondering what’s going on Because AI mode, again, is funneling more of that traffic to stay on Google. There are no carousels and all of that will be gone. So we’ll see how it goes. I am fortunate to be going to a couple conferences this summer where we will be speaking directly with Google and I’m interested to see what they are going to say about 2027. They tend to keep a lot of this stuff close to the vest, but there is a lot of traffic that can be had from Google. But if you’re using an SEO piece of software, it is not going to find the information you need to get your site to the level that Google is like, “Oh my gosh, this site is so algorithmically perfect.

Casey Markee: I have no choice but to send it traffic.” And that’s where professionals would always help. So hopefully you’ve gotten some takeaways from this. Great. We’ll see how it goes.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks for coming on. If you continue to do this for decades longer, we’ll continue to have conversations with you about search because you know-

Casey Markee: I’m waiting. As we were talking earlier, I relocated to Colorado recently and I am waiting to become a kept man. I’m waiting for my wife to fully support me. She is killing it. She’s joined a new national wide law firm recently and he’s traveling quite a bit. So

Bjork Ostrom: You have the time and energy to continue. Okay. Yeah, I see.

Casey Markee: House husband in the near future, we’ll

Bjork Ostrom: See. Yeah. Yeah. Those are two options here looking at the future. Deep in SEO or house husband. That’s right. Casey, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Casey Markee: Thank you, Bjork. We’ll see you again soon.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll be back next week with an interview with Sam Vander Wielen, an attorney and the founder of Sam Vander Wielen, LLC. Bjork and Sam will be discussing all of the legal stuff related to growing your business, your blog, posting content online, AI. They’re going to cover it all. It’s going to be a great episode, so we hope you’ll tune in and in the meantime, make it a great week.