Wil Reynolds

Every day, you have opportunities to do something like this for someone, keep your head up today & maybe you'll find a way to put some good in the world for someone.

Press Release Spam - AI Optimization edition is BACK. While I am searching Google here, I can't help but think this raw repetition could work in AI answers - I see it helping a bit in ChatGPT for this brand, anyone else got tests? First time I tested a press release for an industry conference I was presenting on in banking, it didn't seem to do squat for me.

@ramit I'm surpised you didn't add, "they lowered their taxable income by moving to X state" :)

It’s your funeral. Your friend is giving a eulogy and mentions you & money What one do you want them to say about you? “They were always talking about their savings rate” “Why was he always so worried about $?” “She really knew how to spend money on the important things”

Great reminder for all of us managers.

@PeterEmad37 Scrunch

@wilreynolds Really interesting! How are you tracking the number of your citations? Are you using SEMrush/Ahrefs?

This one UGLY page got a month over month 1900% increase in ChatGPT citations. Here's the page, what we built, why we built it, where it might be risky, and how poorly it correlated with other metrics.

@bdefig We don't have one I don't think

@wilreynolds Love it. How does this compare to your llms.txt page?

Ok so I have an agent that the team built that takes inputs (posts on LinkedIn, old blogs, etc) and using vapi will give me a call or I can use the web to get interviewed about a topic. It's been super helpful to use the AI not to write for me, but to pull what I believe out of me and then give me starter copy. It can ingest my old presentations, podcasts, readwise highlights, etc all before it does deep research on the topic and calls me. A lot of people go, how good could it be? I've been using it for 8 months (20+ year some) and a bunch of clients who have 15-20 year SMEs in technical areas are loving it. The stack is simple vapi, twilio, and perplexity sonar. My content is LinkedIn export (or phantombuster scrape), YouTube transcripts, and readwise MCP.

Content engineer. I feel like a a horse salesman when Henry Ford's on his come up. I make content by having an idea, posting it, seeing reactions, and then iterating but also just making it up as I go. Very successful for me. But that's not how it's happening anymore. It feels like the ballers are looking at data and AI to 10x output. Their content and media teams look closer to engineers than they do creative. They're setting up interesting systems that turn one piece of content into many. It's appears to be 10 times more effective. My question to anyone who's in this world: what have you seen that's working as it relates to content and using AI? Personally I've not cracked the code but I want to know what everyone else is doing for systems. Pat Walls at Starter Story had one of the most amazing workflows I've ever seen where his two or three person team is putting out two to three long-form YouTube videos a week and many short-form posts. They track is all like crazy. He's using AI in such a wonderful way.

Look at me having to repeatedly beat Gemini flash into submission that the eagles won two superbowls. This is why you must put things you already know well I to AI models all the time and calibrate your gut / intuition on what to check and not check for.

@JonathanDunnett Claude + data is in bigquery

@wilreynolds What’s your software you’re using to analyze this? The one with the graphs?

Gladys Knight is touring!!!! October 7th in Philly. 82 years old and still going.

@JHTScherck Say more boss what are you thinking?

What the #SEO industry should be, is more openly critical of itself. We should be brutal to each other. Regina George type behavior. Start rumors, spread gossip, write burn books, talk copious amounts of shit, steal back Aaron Samuels. It’s the only way to save us from ourselves

@ethanspotts Thank you!

ALL of this

So interesting when you compare 1996 to 2026 in terms of what % of things people did required another human back then vs now.

Something to think about, ChatGPT, copilot, anthropic are all competing with Google in some way. That's made Google try things like personal intelligence, which is data they never used to make search results better, why? Because in a search box world they dominated. No need. Now they are taking photos, Gmail, calendar, YouTube history all of which they had for 10+ years and never used to personalize your search results. I'm a fan of the competition.

@lilyraynyc @gaganghotra_ @TomekRudzki Yo lily you seeing aio missing for near me queries more than others? I remember seeing that a while back

“In my recent analysis of 500,000 prompts, AI Overviews showed up 86% of the time. And yet, AI Overviews barely features in most SEO and GEO conversations I'm part of, even as ChatGPT and Perplexity dominate the discussion.” 👏🏽👏🏽 @TomekRudzki peec.ai/blog/ai-overvi…

@gregisenberg What would you want them to say?

Every CEO layoff letter in 2026 follows the same template. "Hardest decision I've ever made. AI changed everything. New roles designed for AI-native work. We owe it to our customers. We're choosing to compete." I feel like I'm reading the same letter with different logos

You're definitely not taking crazy pills here. I think the people who have a problem with it are probably looking at companies that have raised private equity or venture capital money. More than likely they've been sold some kind of a dream around an exit and what the company could be worth. This could have been part of how they got recruited into the organization in the first place: this potential for massive upside. I think for a company that's going to be worth single-digit millions or low double digits, a phantom equity program is a great way to say there is a legal contract that if I choose to sell this business, you can have a part of the proceeds. That is a lot better than every other company I ever worked at, where there was no even potential for upside. People are talking about capital gains. Capital gains are only things that rich people worry about. If your company sells for 25 million and your number two has 15%, they get a nice payout and yes it does get hit with regular income as the tax structure but I don't think they're complaining about the fact that they got that 1.5 million dollars. The advice I would give you is the sooner you do it the better because I have tried to do things to turn my phantom equity into real equity but the company was worth way too much and the taxable event for people in my organization was just way too high.

How higher taxes? I don’t see giant or high tech companies taking this approach. Equity stake is too embedded as an expectation. But for lots of other industries, it’s not a matter of ownership vs phantom ownership. It’s phantom ownership vs nothing beyond salary. There’s no reason the agreement cannot provide for retained “equity” for some length of time after leaving. That can be an option, if the company wants to offer it. As an employee, I see this as a great perk to reward my time, effort and contribution. And(again outside of high-tech, which I have worked in) I don’t personally feel entitled to anything from a company after I leave. On the company side, I’m a small business owner now, I see this as a way to reward talent, a perk to keep them while also them sharing in the benefits. I don’t want the cost or effort to set up equity - nor do I want to give up any ownership. If I sell one day, it’ll be for a few million, not 10’s or 100’s of millions. I own it all, but would want to express appreciation to those who helped build the company, but no, they have no ownership in it. I have 100% self funded my company, and I have zero problem with maintaining full ownership. I’ve taken all the risk and made the sacrifices to make it happen. My employees have worked hard, but most certainly have not sacrificed at the level of an owner. I dunno. I don’t see this as a problem. If a worker doesn’t like it, don’t apply there. There may have been greater context of that clip (I’m sure there was as it was an interview) — some of which may cause me to rethink my position. But on its own, I see it as a perfectly viable option - with pros and cons. Greatly appreciate an actual answer though!

This is unequivocally not the cleanest way to recruit people and is in fact pretty awful

@Bobbyvickers @Austen I make my phantom equity into profit distributions, so there is less of a "when will these be worth something" and now its I got paid well via my phantom shares after wil secured the mask for him and his family.

@Bobbyvickers @Austen I am active, whats up.