Ross Hudgens sits down with Marat Gaziev, VP of SEO & GEO at IGN, for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens to publishing when the 20-year bargain between search engines and content creators (free content in exchange for traffic) quietly falls apart.
Marat breaks down Ziff Davis’s lawsuit against OpenAI in plain terms: the copyright and trademark-dilution claims, how their properties ended up in the WebText training set, and why the judge dismissed the robots.txt argument with a memorable “lock on the back door while the front door is open” analogy.
From there they get into the emerging economics of licensing (RSL, Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace, and whether AI companies can even afford to pay publishers), the shift from driving clicks to driving citations and mentions, and why sponsored content and authentic, authoritative voices may matter more than ever.
Show Notes
00:00 Inside Ziff Davis and IGN
03:10 Why Ziff Davis sued OpenAI
10:16 RSL and content marketplaces
20:18 Monetizing in a post-click world
26:41 Are LLMs too naive
33:45 20 years of SEO history
38:34 Using vector embeddings to match intent
45:03 Rewriting search and SEO
51:12 Personalization in the AI era
Show Links
- Marat at LinkedIn
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