Stephen Burns
Stephen Burns is a technical SEO and generative engine optimisation specialist with 25 years of experience in search. As Web Intelligence Lead at the Common Crawl Foundation and Principal Technical SEO and GEO at Intuit, he works across search infrastructure, web-scale data and artificial intelligence. His expertise matters because AI platforms cannot discover, understand or cite content that their crawlers cannot access. Stephen has worked across enterprise SEO, ecommerce, local search and web development. His career includes roles at Intuit, U.S. Bank, Charles Schwab, Blekko and Netscape/America Online. He helps organisations improve site architecture, indexation, structured data and crawler accessibility because these technical foundations determine visibility across traditional and generative search. Stephen Burns is a strong guest for the **AI SEO and Automation Podcast** because he understands how online content moves from crawling and processing to training datasets and AI-generated answers. His knowledge of Common Crawl, machine-readable content and generative search would help listeners understand why conventional SEO alone cannot guarantee AI visibility. An episode featuring Stephen could explore GEO strategy, AI crawler access, Common Crawl coverage and the technical barriers that prevent brands from appearing in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The discussion could also examine how automated monitoring helps teams identify crawler restrictions, rendering failures and gaps in structured data. Stephen complements the AI SEO and Automation audience because he converts complex search infrastructure into practical actions. His evidence-led approach would show businesses how to diagnose technical issues, improve content accessibility and build measurable visibility across search engines and AI platforms.
Appears in 4 Episodes
AI Visibility Audits: Is Your Website Available for LLMs to Crawl? (James Dooley Interviews Stephen Burns)
James Dooley and Stephen Burns explain how website owners can audit AI visibility across permissions, edge filters and rendering to ensure large language model crawler...
The Two Types of AI Memory Explained: Parametric Memory and RAG for SEOs (James Dooley Interviews Stephen Burns)
James Dooley and Stephen Burns from Common Crawl explain the two types of AI memory — parametric memory baked into training data and live RAG search — and how SEOs can...
Common Crawl's Harmonic Centrality Explained: Boosting AI Visibility with CC Rank (James Dooley interviews Stephen Burns)
James Dooley interviews Stephen Burns from Common Crawl to explain how harmonic centrality powers CC Rank and why improving it can strengthen brand presence and visibi...
How Common Crawl Impacts AI Visibility with Stephen Burns
James Dooley interviews Common Crawl's Stephen Burns on how the Common Crawl corpus feeds LLM training data and what businesses must do to improve their AI visibility.
