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Business Class Lounge by SearchPilot, hosted by Will Critchlow
Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot, interviewing marketing leaders about leadership, finance, management and more.
Latest episode
17. LLMs don't rank anything. So what are you optimizing for?
40:51||Season 2, Ep. 17Britney Muller is the founder and AI Consultant at Orange Labs. She has gone deep into understanding AI since the earliest days of the recent explosion in capabilities. As a result, she has a unique and detailed perspective on how things actually work and helped me dispel some myths and misconceptions including some in my own understanding. Her strongest argument is that to treat LLMs like search engines is to fundamentally misunderstand how they work. Ranking factors are the wrong mental model.Her ability to speak clearly while building on deep technical accuracy is unsurpassed and she also has some WILD anecdotes from her career in AI.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers understand what works in the age of AI-powered discovery. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
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16. Beyond crawl data: what SEO teams really need from their tools with Patrick Hathaway
37:18||Season 2, Ep. 16Patrick Hathaway is the founder and CEO of Sitebulb. He and his team have built a beloved and powerful tool packed full of insights, and they've done it in quite a different way to SearchPilot. We thought that others might be interested to hear us discussing the differences and similarities in our philosophies and approaches.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers understand what works in the age of AI-powered discovery. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
15. SEO Is a System, Not a Channel: Lessons from Zalando, Omio, and idealo with Norman Nielsen
32:28||Season 2, Ep. 15Norman Nielsen has deep experience across travel, retail, and marketplace sites, and strong opinions about how organic discovery should work. In this episode Will and Norman reminisce about the growth of the web, and the changes to how consumers discover products and services.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers take SEO from react mode to control mode. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
14. From SEO to GEO in 2026 with Tim Soulo
33:40||Season 2, Ep. 14Tim Soulo has an irreverent approach to marketing, and strong opinions about how to approach GEO, grounded in deep experience of the SEO tools market. Join the conversation Will had with Tim about what works in 2026.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers take SEO from react mode to control mode. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
13. Product management lessons for SEO with Abby Gleason
40:47||Season 2, Ep. 13In this episode, Will was joined by Abby Gleason, Senior Product Manager for SEO at Upwork. Abby has a rare blend of experience: she came up through agency SEO, moved into product at Scribd, and now runs SEO in a true product operating model at Upwork, with an engineering team, a roadmap, and a steady drumbeat of experiments.This session was about the system. How Abby picks what matters, writes it up so teams can ship, runs tests that stand up to scrutiny, and keeps growth moving even as the SERPs shift underneath us.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers take SEO from react mode to control mode. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
12. Wayfair's Framework for Picking SEO Tests with Rodney Pérez
31:10||Season 2, Ep. 12Probably the most common question we hear from SearchPilot customers is "how should we pick which tests to run?". In this episode, Will Critchlow asks Rodney Pérez how they do it at Wayfair. Rodney shares the frameworks and thought processes that underpin a large, competitive, and successful SEO organization.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers take SEO from react mode to control mode. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.
11. Building an AI Fluent Team: A Candid Talk with Wil Reynolds
48:48||Season 2, Ep. 11Will Critchlow and Wil Reynolds cover some interesting and different topics in this episode of The Business Class Lounge. This candid conversation covers what Wil is seeing across hundreds of clients, how he is using AI day-to-day and what it takes to keep a 200+ person agency moving while the ground keeps shifting. Listen up for hard truths from Wil about how staying employable means treating AI learning like a second job, being honest about uncertainty, and building a culture of momentum and accountability.This episode is produced by Mark Cotton and hosted by Will Critchlow - you can follow Will on Twitter: @willcritchlow.The Business Class Lounge is a podcast from SearchPilot. SearchPilot helps large ecommerce retailers take SEO from react mode to control mode. Stop trying to predict the future. Experiment to discover it.If you like the sound of the podcast, add the feed to your podcast app if you haven't already, and if you know anyone who you think would enjoy the conversations, please do recommend it to them.You can email us at podcast@searchpilot.com to discuss anything you hear on the show.