Rand Fishkin

Founder/Wizard of Moz

SparkToro CEO. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

I'm the cofounder and CEO of three companies: SparkToro, software that makes audience research accessible to everyone, indie game maker Snackbar Studio, and the vastly superior alternative to Google Alerts: Alertmouse. I'm also the author of Lost and Founder: (2018), prev founded & led Moz (2001-17) and am a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship topics. But, I'm probably best known as the amateur chef husband of renowned author, Geraldine DeRuiter.

Cofounder & CEO

I co-founded SparkToro (with Casey Henry) to enable high quality audience research for marketers, PR folks, entrepreneurs, and product builders without the need for expensive, time-consuming, inaccurate surveys or impossible-to-scale manual research.

AI responses aren't lies; they're rarely dead wrong. But they're also nowhere near consistent. If you're using Google AI, ChatGPT, or Claude to get lists of recommendations (products, brands, etc.), or if you're trying to track if your own brand/product/entity in their responses, please arm yourself with this knowledge first.

Yesterday I published a heap of charts, graphs, dataviz, and stats... but for some people those don't land. So I made a short video attempting to sum up the painstaking AI consistency research that went near-viral after yesterday's launch (30K views in the first 24hrs!). Thanks to everyone who helped share it, and 🤞 this will help even more to wrap their heads around it 👇

Cofounder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, & Snackbar Studio. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

NEW research: https://lnkd.in/gwyQz_wg

How consistent are AI tools when asked for a list of brands/products?

And do the answers mean those AI tracking tools are selling you a boondoggle of snake oil chicanery?

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because the answer took 3 months, dozens of surveys, thousands of AI requests, and more than a dozen graphs, charts, and visuals to uncover. Below, I've pasted just a little taste (3/15) of the data visualizations in this research, and, apologies, but for the full findings, including the conclusion, you're gonna have to read the post. 😎

p.s. Huge thanks to Patrick O'Donnell from Gumshoe AI for being my research partner on this. Couldn't have done it without him.

Nobody knows how to hate like LinkedIn's algorithm. They hate links with a passion, so much so that the classic "link in comments" workaround is now failing, too. LinkedIn's process? Just hide the comment, too!

But, for y'all who wanna get clever and are willing to put in a bit of work, it's still possible to drive traffic/signups/motivated visits with the right techniques, and that's the focus of this week's #5MinuteWhiteboard 👇

Me: "our brand positioning is audience research for marketers."
Google: "ha ha ha... your brand is whatever we say it is."

My advice:
Step 1 - monitor your search console ratio on branded terms, keeping a special eye on those where clicks:impressions is <65%.
Step 2 - set up brand mention alerts (because what others say about you on the web is how AIs decide what to say about you)
Step 3 - when a mention comes along that says great things about you and fits your positioning... QUOTE IT. CITE IT. LINK IT. SHARE IT.

👇👇👇

When your inventor friend is laid up after surgery, but already paid for a demo slot at CES Unveiled, what do you do?

DAMN RIGHT. You offer to fly to Vegas and present to hundreds of journalists in their stead. (even though you're more than a bit nervous 😅😅😅)

So, friends, especially #PR friends -- we could really use any advice on how to talk to journalists and influencers in the CES tech world.

dbt Labs

Community Engagement

ActiveCampaign

Currently designing a course for active Campaign, on the 
heels of the "I Hate Marketing Automation" manifesto. 

Having worked in Martech for 15+ years, I've seen the power of automation.  
But I've also experienced its underbelly, as a.. well... human.  

We've all been on the receiving end of 
unsolicited, 
unwanted, 
untimely, and 
unforgivingly persistent advances 
from brands that swear they are exactly 
what we need in our life, right at this moment.

Automation technology isn't the problem.

How we use it, is.


I'm working with Casey Hill and Adam Tuttle at ActiveCampaign, 
on the"Bingeworthy Emails" workshop for B2B Marketers.  

This is the future of B2B Email Marketing.

We can do better. 

Let's.

Brand Ambassador

MarTech

Contributing Writer

Demand Wars

Demand Wars is Survivor meets Hunger Games, for B2B Marketers.
B2B Marketing is Broken. 
Welcome to the Rebel Alliance. 
24 ruthless marketers.
4 fierce tribes.
Only ONE ultimate demand warrior.  

You decide their fate. 

Binge the series here: 
https://www.TACKnetwork.com/demand-wars

Director of Content & Community

Hello, Audience.

Content strategy consulting for B2B SaaS brands.

B2B Marketing content contributor for online publications, including:
- AudiencePlus
- MarTech.org.

Author: Before the Funnel newsletter
Host: Demand Wars Show, Season 1 
Host: Binge Podcast, Season 1

Thought leadership featured on:
- Notorious Thought Leader
- Account Based Beverages
- Marketers Talk Marketing
- 2 Pizza Marketers
- The Hype Within
- GTM News
- B2B Nation

Proficient with AI content tools, including:
- MidJourney
- Riverside
- Descript
- Capsule
- Canva
- Opus

TestBox

Led marketing strategy centered around demand creation + demand capture. 
- Rapidly stablished relationships with the top influencers in Customer Support.
- Created 12 episodes and 70 social videos for a new show, 
- resulting in a Top 5% podcast in the world, in month one.
- Achieved 5x user growth and 90% lead acquisition cost reduction.

VP of Marketing

Bevy

Led the Demand Gen Function at Bevy. Including:
-  Growth Marketing, 
- Field Marketing, 
- Partner Marketing, 
- Marketing Operations, and 
- Community Marketing of CMX, 
(the world’s leading community for Community Professionals.)

Senior Director of Demand Generation

Revenue Collective

Led the Revenue Collective of Color community in the Revenue Collective community (now called Pavilion.) Grew membership, increased engagement, and introduced new community programming.

Community Lead, Revenue Collective of Color (Volunteer)

metadata.io

Drove multiple projects across Demand Gen, Sales Engineering & Customer Success. 

- Sales Engineering: Led over four dozen sales calls
- Customer Success: Led several customer churn reversal sessions. 
- Marketing: Built  blueprint for Demand Gen course for LinkedIn Learning.

Director of Demand Generation

Oh Happy Day Marketing

Clients include The Walt Disney Company, Melissa & Doug, Bark Technologies, and multiple public and private schools.

Managed a team of go-getter marketers, using marketing automation, inbound marketing, and demand gen campaigns to drive results for small and mid-sized businesses.

Led planning and execution of a virtual online conference (virtual summit), using Account-Based Marketing to land 40 world-class thought-leaders, (40% conversion on outbound multi-channel campaigns), and half a dozen high-level corporate sponsors. 

The conference attracted 3,000 qualified leads and converted 5% to customers.

Built a training business teaching aspiring authors to write, publish, and market fiction successfully.  Created over two dozen courses, and sold to over 7,000 customers (10% average conversion rate from online sales letters.)

Built a high-ticket services business that helped dozens of small businesses leverage authority marketing as a thought leadership strategy, in the form of publishing bestselling nonfiction books.

Built dozens of profitable marketing funnels, using lead magnets, landing pages, drip campaigns, sales copywriting, and marketing automation.

Head of Content at Hello, Audience.

As a demand gen marketer turned community and content strategist, Bolaji builds high-impact owned media channels that drive real business outcomes—through community, video podcasting, and first-party content.

With hands-on expertise in tools like Common Room, Descript, Riverside, MidJourney and Opus Clip, Bolaji has launched and scaled content ecosystems that not only grow brand affinity but directly influence pipeline and product adoption.

Bolaji thrives at the intersection of community-led growth, media brand building, and strategic storytelling—especially in B2B SaaS environments where trust, education, and differentiation matter more than ever.

He's passionate about helping brands move beyond transactional marketing, to create audience-first experiences that turn users into champions.


---

💬 Media projects include:

- Data Career Transformations: The most unlikely success stories in Data.

- The View on Data: 5 dynamic women share unfiltered insights from inside the data industry.

- The Data Analyst Show: Pull back the curtain on the lives of data analysts.

- Demand Wars: B2B Marketing meets Survivor + Hunger Games.

- Bingeworthy Emails: A mini-course on building addictive email nurture sequences.

- Before The Funnel: How to create content for the 95% of ideal buyers not yet in a buying cycle.

In his spare time, Bolaji coaches youth soccer, writes children's books, and reads too much science fiction.

taplio

The Battle

Rand Fishkin

Bolaji Oyejide 🔥🎙

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreRand Fishkin's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Rand Fishkin

Bolaji Oyejide 🔥🎙

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Rand Fishkin's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreRand Fishkin's LinkedIn Performance