Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin's reputation rests on two things that rarely go together: he built a genuinely large SEO software business, and he talked publicly about how badly parts of it went. Moz grew to roughly $50 million in revenue under his leadership. Lost and Founder, the memoir he wrote afterwards, is the closest thing the industry has to an anti-pitch-deck.

Domain Authority and the metric problem

Fishkin created Domain Authority — a 0-to-100 link-based score meant as a directional proxy for ranking strength. It was never a Google metric and he said so repeatedly, but it filled a vacuum so completely that two decades later agencies still quote it in proposals.

That gap between what a metric was designed to do and what the market turned it into is one of the more useful case studies in the industry, and Fishkin has been unusually willing to discuss it.

Whiteboard Friday

For over a decade he presented Moz's Whiteboard Friday — a weekly video explainer filmed against an actual whiteboard. The format has been copied endlessly. What made the original work was that he taught concepts rather than checklists, which is why episodes from 2013 are still watchable.

SparkToro and the second company

SparkToro answers a different question: not what do people search for but where do they already spend attention. The tool surfaces the podcasts, publications, and social accounts a given audience engages with.

He funded it through a hybrid of equity and revenue-based financing, deliberately avoiding the venture path, and documented the whole structure publicly. SparkToro also publishes original zero-click search research that gets cited well outside the SEO industry.