The people behind
the algorithms.

Strip away the algorithm updates and the acronyms, and SEO turns out to be a surprisingly small, surprisingly human industry. You notice it most when you ask the people who built it a simple question: who do you look up to?

Across Search Engine Land's "20 for 20" interview series, that question got asked in a few forms. The answers were striking for how warm they were, and for how often the same names came up unprompted across three very different careers. With the recent passing of Bruce Clay, the father of SEO, it feels like the right moment to look at who this industry's leaders actually credit.

Barry Schwartz, the mensch

If there is a consensus pick, it is Barry Schwartz. Lily Ray and Rand Fishkin independently reached for the same word: a mensch. Ray's story captures why. At one of her first speaking engagements, she watched Schwartz, on the same panel, write and publish a full article about something a speaker said before they had even left the stage. Fishkin goes further, only half-joking that Schwartz deserves the "Nobel Prize of search marketing," describing someone who gives endlessly without any thought of return.

That role, the industry's tireless chronicler, is exactly why Schwartz was among the first to report Bruce Clay's passing. He has, for decades, been the person who makes sure the community knows what is happening, in good news and in grief.

Aleyda Solis, the one who showed it was possible

Two of the three interviewees credit Aleyda Solis, and in nearly the same terms: as proof that the door was open. Lily Ray remembers Solis as one of the first female speakers she ever saw, and says she was genuinely inspired by her. Duane Forrester recalls meeting Solis early, walking the streets of Berlin at night talking basic SEO, then watching her rise to become someone you simply have to know. In an industry that, by Ray's own account, was once dominated by older men on stage, Solis recurs as the figure who widened the field.

Danny Sullivan, complicated gratitude

Not every tribute is uncomplicated, and the honesty is part of what makes them real. Danny Sullivan, who founded Search Engine Land and later joined Google, draws deep gratitude and real disappointment in the same breath. Fishkin credits Sullivan with giving him some of his earliest opportunities, including a free conference ticket that led to a career-defining moment, and calls that kindness unforgettable. In the next breath he admits he wishes Sullivan had stayed an outside critic. Forrester, for his part, remembers Sullivan as foundational, the basic building block the rest of the industry was built on.

The quiet builders

The most interesting answers came when each was asked about people who do not get enough credit.

Fishkin pointed to Will Critchlow and the agency Distilled, singling out not just the work but the people it produced: look at the Distilled alumni from roughly 2005 to 2015, he says, and you find superstars scattered across the whole industry. His admiration is for the rare skill of hiring fresh talent and turning it into leaders.

Forrester's answer was the most personal. The person who changed his career, he says, was Stephan Spencer, a single lunch where Spencer helped him build the project-management system that turned around a struggling stint at Microsoft. He also credits Bill Hartzer, the Texan who told him to skip the ebook and "get yourself a book deal," advice that made him an author. Hartzer, too, published one of the heartfelt tributes when Clay passed.

One name surfaces from two directions: Cindy Krum of MobileMoxie. Forrester calls her one of the most original minds in mobile, from the early days right through to the AI era. Lily Ray credits her for seeing the shift toward entity-first and mobile-first search, and toward zero-click results, years before the rest of the industry caught up. When two pioneers independently single out the same person for foresight, it tends to mean the foresight was real.

Ray spread her recognition across both well-known names and her own team: Dan Petrovic of DEJAN, whom she calls one of the people genuinely leading the industry, and Andrea Volpini, alongside teammates like Josh Squires and Romain Damery. Her instinct, having battled imposter syndrome herself for years, is to point the spotlight at people who have not yet realised they have earned it.

The names that shaped the craft

A few figures came up for shaping how the work is done. Ray credits Marie Haynes as an early, persistent voice on E-A-T, the framework Google later expanded to E-E-A-T, long before most of the industry took it seriously, and Glenn Gabe as someone who simply "does it right," high-quality content, done the way she would recommend to clients. These are the practitioners whose approach quietly became the standard.

What it says about the industry

The throughline is not just who gets named, it is the tone. Fishkin describes the old MozCon-versus-SMX rivalry as competition with almost no animosity, which he calls one of the most beautiful things about the search world. Ray's overriding feeling is a desire to pull others up the way she was pulled up. Forrester's whole philosophy is that the support network exists and most people simply do not take advantage of it.

That generosity has a patron saint, and it is Bruce Clay, the man who built his company from a dining-room table to five continents and gave thirty years of knowledge away for free, so people he would never meet could build careers on it. When you ask SEO's pioneers who they admire, what they are really describing is that same instinct, passed person to person: teach freely, lift others, and remember the people, not just the rankings.

The algorithms will keep changing every Monday. The people are what the industry actually remembers.

Source: Search Engine Land "20 for 20" series. Reflections attributed to Lily Ray, Rand Fishkin and Duane Forrester from their respective episodes; this piece paraphrases and synthesises their remarks.