Brian Dean

Brian Dean is a globally recognized SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko, one of the most established SEO and digital marketing resources online. His first hand experience building search driven businesses dates back to 2012, when a personal finance website became his first major SEO success. He later built Backlinko to more than 500,000 monthly visitors and an email audience exceeding 170,000 subscribers. Its growth was driven by practical, in-depth content created to solve specific marketing problems and earn sustained organic visibility. Dean also built a substantial educational audience, with his YouTube content generating 18 million views. His expertise has received recognition beyond the SEO industry, with his work featured in Forbes and Bloomberg, as well as Fast Company and The New York Times.

Dean demonstrated that his approach could extend beyond Backlinko by building Exploding Topics, which reached 725,000 monthly visitors through search and content discovery. Both Backlinko and Exploding Topics were acquired, providing commercial validation for the businesses and audiences he developed. His experience covers changing approaches to search visibility and content strategy, with an emphasis on information that answers specific user needs. That background also provides a relevant foundation for newer search disciplines such as answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. His experience building authoritative content properties is similarly applicable to LLM SEO, particularly how brands and their information can become easier for AI systems to discover and reference.