Brian Dean

Brian Dean founded Backlinko, which became one of the most established SEO resources anywhere on the web. His track record in search starts in 2012, when a personal finance site gave him his first real organic win. He then grew Backlinko past 500,000 monthly visitors and an email list beyond 170,000 subscribers, off the back of long, practical articles written to solve an actual marketing problem rather than to fill a publishing calendar.

The audience went well beyond the writing. His YouTube videos have pulled in 18 million views, and his methods have been covered outside the industry by Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company and The New York Times. That kind of coverage is rare for a practitioner rather than a company.

Then he proved it was not a one off. Exploding Topics reached 725,000 monthly visitors through search and content discovery, built on the same principles as Backlinko but in a completely different category. Both businesses were later acquired, which settles any argument about whether those audiences were commercially real.

His work has followed the changing basis of search visibility the whole way through, sticking with content that answers a specific need. That carries straight into answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation, where the question is the same one in a new outfit: can a machine find the information, understand it, and cite it.