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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| 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 |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
He is at Zozimus. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.
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
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