“It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You” (A Hamsterdam History Lesson)

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam History!

This is a series of posts where we look at “vintage” SEO articles to celebrate their contributors, gain historical knowledge, and discuss how things have changed (or haven’t) since.

In this edition, we’ll be looking at an excerpt from the book Inbound Marketing, compliments of Rand Fishkin for the SEOMoz blog in an October 2009 article titled “The New Era of Inbound Marketing.”

The article talks about how people have been moving away from their susceptibility to traditional sales methods, hence inbound marketing.

Rand includes a quote from the book, which I’d like to include here in full:

“Megaphone vs. Hub
If your website is like most others, it is a one‐to‐many broadcast tool – think megaphone. The web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners‐Lee in the 1980’s. It has taken a couple of decades to get there, but the web is now truly collaborative. If you look at the top ranked websites on the web, they are not broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, they are creating communities where like‐minded people can connect with each other. We need to rethink our websites to take full advantage of the collaborative power of the web – think hub.

If your website is like most others, people visit it once, click around and never return because they heard your sales message and moved on. What we want to do is change the mode of your website from a one way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub on the internet for your marketplace.

It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You
If your company is like most others, you put all your web energy on your site. In fact 75% of your focus should be on what is happening off your website about your brand, about your industry, about your competitors, creating communities off your site for people to connect with you and your products, and ultimately driving people back on your site.”

The first portion about making your website part of a community for your brand is brilliant, but it’s the second portion that got my attention, thinking about AI search in particular — “It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You.”

I’ve written before about entity clarity and how much third-party visibility plays a role in that. I’ve talked about AI visibility and about how third-party sources, like editorial sources, digital PR efforts, and Reddit, can contribute to mentions and citations.

What strikes me is that the authors of Inbound Marketing were discussing third-party visibility in 2009, more than a decade before ChatGPT and the concept of GEO were on the scene. That means their motivations were more focused on community building, but their advice still holds up 17 years later.

Let’s look at some practical actions we can take toward third-party visibility and community building:

1. Find out where AI is already getting information about your category

Start by identifying the prompts your actual customers would use along their buyer’s journey.

Run them through the AI assistants they’re likely to use, such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT, AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

Record information like:

• Which brands are mentioned?
• Which websites get citations?
• Which third-party domains appear repeatedly?
• What attributes are being associated with my competitors?

Your goal is to identify which sources are already helping shape the AI answer for each topic you care about.

2. Build a third-party source gap analysis

Once you know which external sources appear in the AI-generated answers your audience is likely to see, compare those sources against your own brand, for example:

Source	Competitor mentioned?	You mentioned?	Opportunity
Industry publication	Yes	No	PR/editorial outreach
Reddit thread	Yes	No	Participate genuinely
YouTube channel	Yes	No	Collaboration/video
Trade association	Yes	No	Membership/profile/contribution
“Best X” article	Yes	No	Pitch inclusion
Review platform	Yes	Weakly	Improve profile/reviews

Remember, your goal isn’t to appear everywhere. It’s to appear in the relevant places that are already influential for your target audience given the information ecosystem surrounding a particular topic.

3. Optimize for mentions

Your goal is to get knowledgeable third parties talking about your brand in the right context.

That might mean digital PR, expert quotes, podcast appearances, original research, partnerships, industry articles, reviews, interviews, YouTube appearances, or inclusion in relevant roundups.

Think about who’s talking about you, what they’re saying, and in what context. Is it all favorable to your visibility goals?

4. Participate where your audience already has conversations

The Inbound Marketing excerpt mentions “creating communities off your site.” In today’s online environment, that could mean participating on Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, industry forums, Slack or Discord communities, professional associations, podcasts, or niche communities.

A common mistake brands make is they identify a community of interest to their target audience and they start to spam it with brand-focused messaging.

Instead, find the communities your customers genuinely use, identify questions you have expertise in, then contribute information that’s useful enough that your brand becomes naturally associated with that subject.

5. Give the web a consistent story about your entity

Compare how your brand is described across every relevant surface imaginable, such as:

• your website
• LinkedIn and other social media
• Crunchbase or relevant databases
• Google Business Profile
• industry directories
• publisher profiles
• review sites
• YouTube
• association pages
• interviews
• author bios

You’re looking for semantic consensus about fundamental facts and associations — rather than saying the same words everywhere, the meaning of them is similar.

6. Create things other people have a reason to cite

While you can’t force independent sources to talk about you, you can make yourself more worth talking about.

Focus on producing citation-worthy assets, like original research, proprietary data, surveys, benchmarks, useful tools, calculators, experiments, expert opinions backed by evidence, case studies, unique datasets, or genuinely useful resources.

It’s the same link-bait content we’ve been creating for decades, only now the motivation is credible third-party mentions for AI visibility.

7. Pay attention to what third parties are saying about you

Getting mentioned is great, potentially, but sentiment and associations matter, as well.

Look not just who’s mentioning you but what they’re actually saying. This is a form of reputation management.

8. Correct wrong or outdated information off-site

When an AI assistant gets something wrong about your brand repeatedly, don’t assume the solution is another blog post — trace the claim.

Identify the source of the wrong or outdated information and update it.

9. Measure the ecosystem, not just your website

If we’re going to be focusing on third-party visibility, we also need to be measuring it.

Alongside rankings and traffic, also analyze:

• AI mentions
• citations
• AI share of voice
• third-party source coverage
• sentiment/entity associations
• branded search
• referral traffic
• conversions

Remember to keep mentions and citations separate — a brand can be mentioned without a citation; a document can also be retrieved without being cited.

Takeaways

The Inbound Marketing philosophy in 2009 said “It’s not what you say—it’s what others say about you.”

That’s remarkable advice given today’s GEO strategies, where your website tells AI systems what you say about yourself, while the rest of the web helps tell those systems whether anyone else agrees.

If SEO taught us to optimize our website, and social media taught us to participate beyond our website, then AI search may force us to think about the entire information environment surrounding our brand.

All that’s to say, inbound marketing is still a focal point of our strategies, even if the landscape for visibility has evolved given the advent of AI assistants.

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Hamsterdam History!

Stay tuned for another edition soon, or check out related history articles below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!

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