Brock Murray

Co-Founder @seoplus | Contributor @sejournal

The + Principle available on Amazon:

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

The + Principle: Building Community, Clients, and Culture That Lasts: How values-based leadership turns agencies into legacies. https://t.co/9LPnIsVG4y

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

The ChatGPT ads leads are starting to roll in…

Interested in getting your business setup with a campaign?

Send me a dm to find out more info.

#chatgptads

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

With the boom of AI tools, building is now the easy part.

Distribution is the challenge.

This is very reminiscent of the early days of @seoplus when businesses had a website that wasn’t driving any traffic at all.

Creating demand via ads, SEO/GEO, and social media will be more important than ever with all the noise out there.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@Shiitekarlsson That was such a crazy game

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

How it started…

This pic was taken at our first event back in 2012 at TechLinks.

I met some of our first clients and partners there. It was mostly attended by high potential product-focused companies looking for investment. Here I was a service company looking to bootstrap. I felt a bit out of place.

Yet, I still talk to many of the people I met at that event today. You never know what you will get out of an event. But the power of community is real.

My advice…get out there and network!

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

The character limits are tight. 50 characters for the headline, 100 for the description. You have roughly one sentence to make the case.

What's not ready yet: Conversions as a campaign objective is labeled "coming soon." iOS and Android data sources aren't live. Country targeting is locked to the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. No A/B testing tooling, no CTA button selection, no audience exclusion controls.

The default CPC placeholder is $3.00, which is higher than typical Google Search averages. Make of that what you will.

This beta opened May 5th. CPCs are low, competition is thin, and nobody has performance data yet. That's exactly when testing costs the least and learning compounds the most.

If you're running paid media for a brand with a web-based conversion funnel and you're in one of those four countries, this is worth evaluating now. Not next quarter when CPCs have climbed and best practices are already documented.

Full walkthrough with screenshots is in the r/PPC thread if you want to go deeper.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

ChatGPT is now an ad platform. No $50K minimum. Here's what early access looks like.

Someone in the r/PPC community just posted a full walkthrough of the OpenAI Ads Manager beta, and it's worth reading if you manage paid media for any brand right now.

A few things that stand out from their breakdown.

The structure will feel familiar. It runs on the same Campaign, Ad group, Ad hierarchy as Google Ads, so the conceptual onboarding is minimal for anyone already running search campaigns. Billing and pixel infrastructure are also more built out than you'd expect from a two-week-old self-serve product.

But the targeting model is completely different. Instead of keywords, you write "context hints." OpenAI's own description: hints that guide matching but aren't exact-match targeting rules. The model uses them to understand what conversations your ad belongs in, not to match strings. No keyword tool, no volume estimates, no autocomplete. Just a text box and the model.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@noahkagan Great advice from a stressful situation. Good problem solving, many might have given up.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Sometimes a networking event can leave you feeling drained…

This was not one of those nights. Kenny Crandlemire, organized one of the best networking events of the year so far.

The mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and genuinely good people in the room was special.

It was great hearing from Mitch Robinson, Fahim Sheikh and Susan Richards, on when to build and when to acquire to grow. Very transparent and valuable conversation which was awesome.

Congrats to Kenny on an amazing event!

Next up, MASHUP with Capital Angel Network today, Suzanne Grant.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Is it just me or are these terrible? @Google

#visualdesign

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Join me for Business Day at the Ballpark with the @ottawa_titans on Wednesday, June 10.

I'll be speaking alongside Jonathan Gilman, Jenah Thompson and Martin Boyce on the Pre-Game Panel for Marketing Your Business: High Impact, Low Budget for small to medium-sized businesses, hosted by Michael Curran from @obj_news.

Come for the panel and the networking event, stay for the baseball.

https://t.co/fFKSouYlha

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

If you are curious about how AI is impacting marketing and how businesses are adapting, take the time to watch this episode.

I sat down with David DiNardo to talk about what's happening inside @seoplus and where I think things are going.

We cover:

- Why GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the new SEO — and why right now is the easiest it'll ever be to rank in AI tools
- The agent-to-agent future and why websites as we know them may not exist in 5 years
- How we're building AI knowledge bases and preparing to deploy agents across every department
- The real threat facing agencies that don't adapt

https://t.co/R2GJOOiEgY

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Presence.

It's one of those things most of us think we're doing, but rarely are.

Yesterday, the https://t.co/wxOwE0faY4 group had an honest conversation about it.

How present are we, really?

In a meeting, is your attention fully there, or split three ways between your phone, your inbox, and what you need to prep for later?

With your family, are you in the moment, or mentally already somewhere else?

We're living in the most distracted era in human history.

Phones, browser tabs, back-to-back calendar blocks, the constant low hum of stress about what's next.

Presence takes work now. It doesn't just happen.

Some ways to get there: meditation. Locking into a single task. Putting the phone face-down and actually meaning it.

Personally, I know this is something I struggle with. I can be on a walk with my wife and my brain is still at the office. That's not great. It's something I'm working on.

The https://t.co/wxOwE0faY4 conversations have a way of surfacing stuff like this, the things you know you need to address but haven't slowed down enough to look at.

Presence is a practice. Not a setting you flip on.

How present are you, really?

Would love to hear where others land on this.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@Bachusky Gotta try that!

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Anybody else ever feel this way?

[Adobe @Adobe]

Adobe for creativity + Claude 🤝

Now, Claude users can power their content with more than 50 Creative Cloud tools. Simply describe the outcome you want and let the assistant orchestrate workflows behind the scenes: https://t.co/G70cSsca8P

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

Centre Ice Leadership with @cyleeder at the Canadian Tire Centre. Hosted by @EOOttawa.

He shared 3 important ingredients to build a successful organization:

- Competitiveness
- Joy
- Enjoyment from seeing others win

As someone scaling a company, all three hit home, especially the balance between competitive intensity and creating a place people love working at.

Thanks to EO Ottawa for putting this event together, and to Cyril for the candour and personal stories from his journey.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@QuietFSoftware I agree! But overall I try to keep a holistic approach to content. Always write for humans! All the listicles for GEO are getting slammed on Google so I don’t think the risk is worth the reward.

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

The evolution of #SEO:

2005: "Write for the bots"
2012: "No no, write for people"
2025: "Actually... write for AI agents talking to other AI agents"

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) web isn't coming. It's here.

Is your strategy built for it?

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@dumoulin_nick Damn that’s unreal

[Brock Murray @SEOBrock]

@pxue All great points, although I believe the lifetime capital gains exemption is $1.25m