My co-author, and our certified agency
He named the thing you do all day.
In 1995 a phone rang at three in the morning.
The industry got its name before breakfast.
It was the summer of 1995.
Bob was running audience development at Cybernautics.
The manager of Jefferson Starship was on the phone,
and he was not happy.
Why isn't the band's website coming up first?Jefferson Starship's manager · 1995
Nobody had a name for that complaint yet.
Nobody had a job title for fixing it either.
The team worked out that ranking followed keyword frequency.
So they repeated the band's name on the page.
In tiny black text, on a black background.
The site went to the top.
Then Bob and Leland Harden gave the work a name.
Search Engine Optimization.
They hired the first person to hold that title.
Thirty years later it is an industry.
It worked because the engines counted words
and nobody had thought to game the count yet.
It would get you penalised today, instantly.
That is the point: the rules move, the instinct does not.
Find the gap between how a system is said to work
and how it actually works. Then build for the real one.
A marketer filed to trademark the term SEO,
claiming he had coined it in an email in 2007.
Bob pointed at 1995 and the paperwork behind it.
The claim failed. The word stayed everybody's.
In September 2025 Rob Garner went back through it
for Search Engine Land, and interviewed Bob.
He found five people reaching for optimization
at the same time, between 1995 and 1997.
And in my interview with Heyman for this article, one other new name came up: Viktor Grant.Rob Garner · Search Engine Land · 24 September 2025
The article credits me with IP and agent targeting,
serving different pages to robots and to people.
Years later the industry named that cloaking.
At the time it was just a script that read the header.
Bob named the field. I was busy testing its edges.
Danny Sullivan then carried the word everywhere,
through Search Engine Watch.
Why this page exists at all.
Two people who shaped the last era of search
are now working on the next one together.
You can read the whole piece yourself.
We would rather you did.
Anybody can use Earthgrid.
Reselling it to your own clients takes certification.
Today one agency has it: Digital Engagement Group.
Not because the door is closed.
Because they are the first ones through it.
Certification means somebody stands behind the work.
A logo on a website does not.
They do not resell a tool they half understand.
They use it on their own client work.
Hire them and you get Earthgrid,
run by people who were trained on it.
There is a path, and it is the same one for everybody.
So this list will grow.
DEG is the first name on it, not the only one there will be.
Generative engine optimization, and audits of it.
Being named by the models, not ranked by a crawler.
Search optimization, by the people who named it.
AI consulting, website redesign, strategy and the ROI case.
Their line is: we invented SEO, now we are inventing GEO.
They have earned the right to say it.
If somebody else claims to resell Earthgrid today,
they are not certified yet. Ask us and we will tell you.
Talk to DEG How AI decides who gets named
Digital Engagement Group, +1-707-773-7727.The name of the book changed while we wrote it,
which tells you how fast this is moving.
The question underneath it did not change.
Who decides which names an answer contains?
For thirty years that was a ranking.
Now it is a sentence a model writes.
Bob named the first era.
We are trying to be useful about the second.
Bob is my co-author.
That is the whole relationship, and it is enough.
Neither of us works for the other.
We cover ground the other one cannot, and we write together.
Earthgrid is education plus tools,
and you can absolutely run it yourself.
If you would rather hand it to somebody,
today that somebody is the people who named the field.