As part of our ongoing series, we asked Jake Bentham, Head of SEO, AgencyUK to name the person he admires most in his professional life. Here’s what he told us:
Who is your digital hero?
My digital hero is Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO of SparkToro, Snackbar Studio and Alertmouse.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
Rand was one of the people who made SEO feel accessible at a time when much of the industry was guarding it. Whiteboard Friday was a huge part of that. When I was starting out in my career, it was one of those resources you could keep returning to whenever you wanted to understand why something worked, rather than just being told that it did.
I respected that Rand was willing to share that knowledge openly and for free. He helped make SEO something people could learn and question for themselves, rather than a discipline kept in secrecy behind the curtain of an agency or specialist.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
Rand has consistently raised the bar for the whole discipline. His work helped take SEO from a black box you bought from a specialist to something that clients and marketers could understand and engage with themselves.
His research at SparkToro around zero-click search has been particularly influential. He was the first to highlight that a huge proportion of searches end without someone clicking through to a website. At the time, the industry was slow to take this finding seriously. Now, with AI overviews appearing on a large proportion of SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), we seeing its effect increase.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Measurement in a zero-click landscape is the biggest challenge. In traditional search, we can tell a client with high confidence how they perform in Google and what that visibility is driving in terms of traffic and conversions. AI search makes that much harder.
We can see a brand appearing in an AIO or LLM, but we don’t yet have a reliable way of measuring how often that happens or what helped the brand get there. That makes it difficult for marketers to build a business case for investing in search for AI visibility.
The next generation of search ‘heroes’ will be those who work out how to measure this effectively.
What is your most heroic achievement in digital so far?
Not heroic exactly, but one thing I’m quietly pleased about is refusing to treat GEO and AEO as a new discipline. There was a lot of noise suggesting brands needed an entirely new AI service and budget, when in many cases the fundamentals of search haven’t changed.
I’ve made that argument both internally at AgencyUK and with clients. A technically sound website, clear architecture, content that answers a real question, and enough Domain Authority to be trusted are all still foundations of visibility. The largest change is measurement, not strategy.
