Jon Henshaw: It's SEO, It's SEO, It's SEO

Jon Henshaw co-founded Raven Tools, then worked inside CNET, GameSpot, the Paramount Plus launch team, Vimeo and now Yahoo, and writes at Coywolf. He and Jeremy go back a long way, so this one runs long and gets specific: why the SEO industry keeps confusing its own stakeholders, what Google actually uses as a source of truth, and why he thinks the long game belongs to confirmed-human content. Recorded January 2026, on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

"It's SEO, it's SEO, it's SEO. It's just slightly different."

The cleaned-up conversation, with his diagrams of the old and new Google contract, is at Jon Henshaw on AI Hype, Google’s Sources of Truth, and the Long Game for Human Content.

What Jon and Jeremy cover

• Why SEO got harder: misinformation and hype. New acronyms sold as the place the puck is going, read by managers who do not do SEO, from the loudest voices or the people selling something.
• What actually got more important: complete answers written in paragraphs with the question inside them, multimodal content, brand mentions over link building, and technical SEO for the systems that now read your HTML. His Google News guide is the reference version of the technical argument.
• Google changed the contract with publishers, from "we will show your content and link to it" to "we will write our own answer." The loss of traffic is here to stay, and real people are being de-incentivized to create content while slop gets incentivized.
• Originality and humanity. His mug-warmer article ranked third or fourth for "best heated mug" for most of a December on a site that is not about mugs, because it was written the way only a person who tested the thing could write it.
• The Paramount Plus lesson: Google rejected the "Watch" feed because episode durations did not match IMDB. "They use IMDB as a source of truth." If you work in entertainment, reference the IMDB page in your schema.
• 404 Media, all the authority in the world and no Google News for over a year, because they skipped the About page, editorial policies and byline plumbing.
• Raven Tools in hindsight: the biggest lesson was not to overbuild. Death of a thousand cuts while Hootsuite and Buffer each built one focused thing. His notes app Recollect is the corrective.
• Start a partnership like you are ending it. "Approach it like you want to leave and you're breaking up, like you're divorcing in a sense. That is the way." And get a signed agreement that you own every line of contractor code before you ever try to sell.
• The long game: "I can absolutely see a future long-term being where content is confirmed human."

Related episodes

Jeremy's IMDB point comes straight out of Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard, where Jason fixed a knowledge graph entry by editing IMDB rather than his own site. Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era covers the same "it's still SEO" ground from the tooling side, and Zack Kadish on enterprise SEO and the evolving SERP on what Reddit and AI answers did to the results page.

On SEO Arcade, the two plays Jon's answer keeps pointing at: schema markup for AI visibility and information gain content.

Jon writes at coywolf.com and lives on Mastodon, not X. More conversations like this in the AI and the future of search hub.

Host: Jeremy Rivera. Guest: Jon Henshaw, Coywolf.