Video: Search pioneer Mike Grehan on everything from the early days of SEO to AI’s role in paid and organic search

It’s been 15 years since their first interview, but Search Engine Land’s contributing editor Barry Schwartz recently had the honor to talk with search industry pioneer Mike Grehan once again. As Barry puts it, “Mike has been in the industry before there was an industry.”

The two discussed the early days of search, how far the industry has come since Mike opened his internet marketing agency in 1995, and the ways technologies like AI and machine learning are impacting both search ads and organic search.

“Google search is the biggest on the planet,” says Mike, “The world’s largest parallelized computing system. Nothing in history has ever existed like this. One of the worries they’ve always had is ‘it’s nice when it’s working, but if it breaks, what are we going to do because we might not know how to fix it.”

Barry and Mike expand on this question and Mike finally settles the ongoing dispute over who first came up with term search engine optimization.

Follow Mike on Twitter at: @MikeGrehan.

You can watch Barry’s full interview with Mike here:

Barry started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to Barry’s YouTube channel by clicking here.