SEO has no shortage of people with opinions and very few with receipts. This is my list of the people whose work I actually read, grouped by what they’re strongest on, with a note on why each one is here.
It’s a personal list, so it’s biased towards the parts of search I work in and the people whose work I’ve had cause to check. Nobody paid to be on it, and nobody knows they’re on it until it publishes.
How I picked
- They publish something you can check. Tests, data, screenshots, methodology. An opinion with working shown beats a confident take every time.
- They have a track record across updates. Anyone can look sharp in a calm quarter. I care what someone said before, during and after the updates that hurt people.
- They correct themselves in public. The single most reliable signal of someone worth reading. If a person has never publicly changed their mind, they aren’t testing anything.
- They say when they don’t know. Search is a black box with a few lit windows. People who acknowledge that are more useful than people who don’t.
What I didn’t weigh: follower counts, conference badges, and whether they agree with me. Several people here have told me I was wrong about something, which is rather the point.
Algorithm updates and how Google actually works
The small group who dig into the mechanics rather than reacting to volatility charts.
Lily Ray
The most consistent public analyst of core updates and EEAT. She publishes winners-and-losers analysis after every rollout with the data attached, and she’s been doing it long enough that you can check her past calls against what happened. Founder of Algorythmic and VP of SEO and AI Search at Amsive.
Mark Williams-Cook
Found an undocumented Google endpoint leaking internal classification data and analysed 2TB of it across 90 million queries, then disclosed it responsibly and gave the bug bounty to charity. That research is in our library graded as strong evidence. Runs Candour and AlsoAsked.
Dan Petrovic
Australia’s most prolific SEO experimenter, and one of the few people who publishes methodology alongside results. Holds Google awards for discovering APIs that exposed internal systems. If you want to see what a genuine SEO experiment looks like, read his write-ups at DEJAN.
Technical SEO
For crawling, indexing, migrations and the unglamorous work that decides whether anything else you do matters.
Gerry White
Twenty-plus years of enterprise technical SEO, including Just Eat, the BBC and UK Government work. Talks about the constraints real organisations operate under, which most technical advice ignores. Co-founded the Take It Offline unconferences.
Chris Green
Technical SEO with a testing habit: site migrations, large-scale architecture, and applying tooling and automation to SEO work. Worth following for the process behind the recommendation rather than just the recommendation.
Peter Rota
Technical SEO built on audits, and refreshingly boring about it. His consistent argument is that indexing, internal linking and content quality outrank the micro-optimisations people obsess over. Fourteen years in, publishes constantly.
Elie Berreby
Enterprise and international technical SEO treated as infrastructure: crawling, indexing, programmatic SEO at scale. Nineteen years in, and he writes about the systems view rather than the tactic view. Founder of SEM King.
Daniel Foley Carter
In SEO since the late 1990s, which means he’s watched every tactic in circulation get killed at least once. Founded Assertive in 2007 and SEO Stack in 2020. Blunt, and usually right about what won’t work.
Geoff Kennedy
Fifteen years of audit work, plus a stint running marketing at Sitebulb, so he’s seen how crawlers get used inside a lot of teams. Good on recommendations that a small team can actually implement.
Olesia Korobka
Technical SEO and relentless testing, particularly around Knowledge Graph and entity work. Founder of Fajela, based in Kyiv, and one of the more experiment-driven people on this list.
James Burfield
Technical SEO, and a portfolio of my own sites that most of what I publish here gets tested on first. I write everything on Masters of SEO, so apply the same scepticism to me that I’m asking you to apply everywhere else: I lean towards evidence over consensus, I care more about what Google documents than what the industry repeats, and I’ve been wrong in public before.
International and multilingual search
Search stops behaving predictably the moment you cross a border. These are the people who work there full time.
Aleyda Solís
The reference point for international SEO, and through SEOFOMO the closest thing the industry has to a shared weekly briefing. Curates rather than opines, which is exactly what a newsletter should do. Founder of Orainti.
Gianluca Fiorelli
Working in SEO since 2004, Italian, based in Spain, and one of the few people who reliably connects strategy to how retrieval actually works. Former Moz associate, founded The Inbounder.
Natalia Witczyk
Multi-market technical SEO across Europe, Asia and Latin America, including Yandex and Baidu, which very few people in the English-speaking industry can speak to first hand. Runs Mosquita Digital from Barcelona.
Silvia Martin
Technical and international SEO across in-house, agency and independent work, with a strong ecommerce audit background. Also does a lot of unpaid mentoring, which tells you something.
Aoife Mc Ilraith
Twenty-plus years on multilingual content discoverability, including global publishing operations for some very large brands. Former VP of product marketing at Semrush, now runs Luminosity Digital.
Strategy, data and specialist ground
Judith Lewis
In search since before Google existed, which is not a figure of speech. Founder of deCabbit, and genuinely worth hearing on how much of what gets sold as new isn’t. Also one of the industry’s better speakers.
Bengü Sarıca Dinçer
SaaS SEO and analytics, and the person I’d point anyone at who’s fighting with GA4. Writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Moz, and is unusually clear about measurement.
Arnout Hellemans
Technical SEO plus analytics and conversion, freelance since 2009 out of Amsterdam. Good at the join between search performance and whether the business actually made any money.
Will Kennard
SEO for startups and growth-stage businesses, from someone who has also founded things. Practical about the difference between what a large SEO team can do and what a founder with no time can.
Begum Kaya
Technical SEO for B2B and ecommerce, plus local and Google Business Profile work as a Product Expert. Moderates the Opinionated SEO Opinions series, which is worth it for the disagreements alone.
Samy Ben Sadok
Ecommerce and marketplace SEO at scale, currently in crypto, which is about as hostile a vertical as search offers. Posts regularly on the tooling landscape and on competing in crowded verticals.
Blogs and newsletters worth the inbox space
Fewer than you’d think. These earn their place:
- SEOFOMO (Aleyda Solís, weekly). The industry’s shared briefing. If you only subscribe to one thing, this.
- Google Search Central Blog. The primary source. Everything else is commentary on it, this site included.
- Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz, daily). Fast, unglamorous reporting of what changed, with a long memory. It records rather than interprets, which is its strength.
- DEJAN (Dan Petrovic). Where to go when you want an actual experiment.
- SearchPilot case studies. The only regular source of true SEO split tests with control groups. Results are site-specific, and they say so.
- Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. Broad coverage, variable depth. Read the named authors rather than the feed.
How to spot advice that isn’t worth your time
The people above have earned trust. Here’s what I use to filter everyone else, and it’s about behaviour rather than credentials.
- Certainty about things Google hasn’t confirmed. Anyone who states ranking weights as fact is describing their imagination. Nobody outside Google has that number.
- A ranking factors list with percentages. These have been invented since roughly 2005 and remain invented.
- Case studies with the axis labels removed. A rising line proves nothing without dates, volumes and what else changed.
- Correlation presented as cause. Very common in ranking factor studies, and the reason our research library grades evidence rather than just linking it.
- Advice that never changes. Search changed enormously between 2023 and 2026. Anyone giving the same talk they gave 5 years ago stopped checking.
- Recovery guarantees. Covered in the recovery guide: nobody can promise this, and the timelines aren’t in their control.
Suggest someone
This list will grow and it will change. If someone belongs on it, or if you think somebody here doesn’t deserve the spot, tell me and say why via the contact form. Reasoning carries more weight than nominations.