Wil Reynolds has spent his career helping people find the answers they’re seeking.
A former high school economics teacher, Wil is the founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Seer Interactive, and one of the world’s top speakers on SEO and digital marketing.
Strategy over shortcuts: “I focus on people trying to get answers to questions”
With two decades of experience in search and marketing, Wil has had a front-row seat to the many changes and shifts online: the advent of social media, the growth of search engine optimization, and of course, the explosion of AI.
Wil has approached each of these changes with an open mind and a positive outlook.
“At the heart of every major technological change of the last few decades is creating less friction for users,” he explains.
For Wil, these advancements boil down to two main goals:
- How do we get people the answers they’re seeking?
- How do we better interpret brand and trust signals?
Whether it’s AI or the different updates Google has introduced over time that change search, Wil says the goal has always been to remove low-quality content to make it easier for people to find the answers they’re actually looking for.
While some marketers and SEO pros chase each new update and look for ways to manipulate the system to rank in search results, Will has always had a longer-term vision. This mindset has made it easier for him to avoid riding the wave of tricks and loopholes, instead staying laser-focused on strategy over short-term gains.
“My strategy has always been: you know where [Google and AI companies] are going: Get people answers, make it easy for them to get those answers, and make sure the answers are high quality,” he says.
An important discovery: ChatGPT 5.5’s fan out patterns reveal the importance of brand
With that personal ethos, it probably comes as no surprise that Wil has been researching and exploring how AI can help surface answers that include him and his clients, in a legitimate, useful way.
Wil wrote in a blog post: “The tactics that were getting brands into AI answers were almost uniformly low on quality and high on scalability, listicles mainly. I could have done that for Seer and for our clients and won for them a year ago. It felt like I was watching someone stuff a ballot box (low quality GEO agencies) and waiting for the election commission (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) to catch on.”
The LLMs did catch on, which led Wil to make a pretty interesting discovery: When ChatGPT 5.5 researches a question, it generates sub-queries or fan-outs before answering.
Let’s take a step back. What’s a fan-out?
“When you type a prompt, regardless of length, AI takes that big prompt and breaks it down into what would I need to go search for to find those answers?” Wil explains. “That process is called a query fan-out, meaning the query — or the prompt — you put in is broken into a bunch of single queries that all fan out at the same time, and then they get the information.”
An example of a “fan out” search that queries multiple pages to assemble an answer.
Here’s what a fan-out looks like in action: Wil and his team ran the same prompt 30 times in ChatGPT 5.5.
The prompt: "As a VP of growth looking to future-proof our search strategy, I want to know which agencies are leading the conversation on AI search rather than just reacting to it."
Wil discovered that those fan-out queries started containing a significant number of brand names.
For example, instead of: "top GEO agencies"
Wil saw results like: "Seer Interactive GEO research" / "iPullRank AI search study” / “Lily Ray 2025 GEO penalty”
“Now ChatGPT has realized that these fan-outs are an opportunity to insert in its knowledge of an industry before it does these generic top X software searches,” Will says.
For so long, Wil explains, if a company wanted to rank for a certain keyword or topic, they’d put the word enough times at the bottom of a page or create a low-quality listicle and find themselves at the top of the Google search results.
“There is no strategy in creating a listicle that lists you at the top of a list of people with no validation,” Wil says. “It's a loophole.”
These tactics no longer work, so it’s time to get even more strategic.
You can’t listicle your way to the top of the search results page, and this update proves it
This discovery told Wil something important: when your brand is in fan-outs for a non-branded prompt like the example shared above, you have become hardwired to the AI some percent of the time.
A massive win. This means the quality content you’re creating is actually working.
For search experts and marketers like Wil, who have been putting in the work for years, this result brought up a surprising emotion — relief.
“For the first time, I am rewarded for having done the actual work, not getting rewarded for having written a page of content that's built to say I did the work that has no receipts on whether or not I actually did it,” he says.
Plus, Wil was pleased to see that all the personal branding work he’d done over the years was also making an impact.
Some of the fan-outs had his name in them, not just the name of the company. When he typed in “top generative engine optimization researcher,” his name came back in some of the searches, linking to articles he published or places he was interviewed.
So what does this change mean for marketers? It means that companies and brands need to actually do the work — and do the work over years to prove you’re a company that does this particular thing well.
“You will no longer be able to listicle your way to the top of these results anymore,” Wil says. “The ability to create wins in silos is about to get really hard.”
Next steps for marketers who want to appear in AI search results
Whether you’ve been doing the work for years, like Wil, or if you’re just getting started with this new strategy, here are some next steps to consider.
1. Have an honest, tough conversation with your client or manager. If you’re working with a company or brand that has always done things the old way, it’s time for a tough-love conversation and some re-education.
For companies starting from scratch, this might mean needing to wait to see results — building social proof takes time; it’s not as simple as stuffing keywords at the bottom of a page.
Once your client or company leadership is on board, the real work can begin.
2. Work cross-functionally. To win in the AI world, marketers are going to need to work much more cross-functionally than ever before to get the social proof needed to make a difference in AI visibility.
“Start spending more time saying, ‘how can I make connections across the enterprise in a way where other people are helping give me their receipts so I can show up for these things?’” he says.
3. Set your baseline. Take a look at your fan-outs by repeating Wil’s experiment. Open ChatGPT and run a prompt to see what kind of results you get.
“These things are probabilistic, which means the answers are going to slightly change every time, which also means the fanouts might change from time to time,” Wil says. “There is no rhyme or reason. So, do not run a query once.”
As Wil shared, he runs each query at least 30 times.
“Do it incognito. Do it over the API a few times. Do it through multiple sources because you will get different answers,” he says.
4. Revamp your content strategy. Put your strategy hat on, and start thinking about the type of content you’re creating for your own website, along with others. This includes:
- Blog posts.
- Proprietary data.
- Social media posts.
- Earned media, like podcast interviews or mentions in articles.
- Bylined pieces.
- And more.
A final note from Wil: AI is always changing.
What works in ChatGPT 5.5 might not work in the next model. Wil recommends staying on top of the different model updates, while still staying the course with a steady content strategy that can really stand the test of time and technology.
