About Sarah Berry

Sarah Berry is a Lead SEO Consultant at WebFX, one of the largest SEO agencies in the USA. With more than 10,000 hours of SEO experience, she has contributed to hundreds of guides with practical strategies you can use to grow your visibility, traffic, and revenue from search.

Since 2018, Sarah has contributed to original research that answers questions like:

• What content earns traffic from AI platforms?
• How does AI referral traffic perform compared to other channels?
• What "ranking" factors influence AI citations?
• How has search market share evolved over time?

Her work has been cited by Michigan State University, Business Insider, and Ars Technica.

Sarah holds a B.A. in Professional Writing, a background that shows up in how clearly she writes about a subject that can get technical fast. She has built on that foundation with certifications across Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Ads Display Advertising, HubSpot Inbound Marketing, HubSpot Email Marketing, HubSpot SEO II, HubSpot Content Marketing, OmniSEO, and Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator, giving her working fluency in the tools that sit on both the marketing and sales sides of a business. Much of her hands-on experience comes from B2B accounts, where sales cycles are longer, buying committees are bigger, and SEO has to prove its worth over months rather than weeks.

Sarah’s core focus is still SEO done right, and she spends a lot of her writing helping businesses get past the reasons they hesitate to invest in it. In Why Are People Afraid of SEO?, she walks through common concerns, from doubts about effectiveness to the time and resources SEO requires, and how to work through each one without falling for shortcuts or black hat tactics. She also covers how the fundamentals of measuring SEO are changing: her piece on zero click searches breaks down why almost 60% of searches now end without a single click, and what that means for how businesses should track success when a strong ranking doesn’t always translate into a site visit anymore.

As search has expanded well past Google into AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more, Sarah has become one of SEO.com’s go to voices on what that shift actually requires from businesses. Her Search Everywhere Optimization guide lays out how brand visibility now spans dozens of search experiences at once, from generative engines to social platforms to voice assistants, and walks through how to build a strategy, set a realistic budget, and measure results across all of them. In AI Overviews Ranking Factors, written alongside fellow WebFX experts Trevin Shirey and Lace Llanora, she breaks down the seven systems, from Google’s core ranking systems to structured data, that influence whether a page gets pulled into an AI Overview response.

She’s also part of the team behind I’m Not Being Cited in AI Answers, Why?, contributing the section on what makes content stand out enough to earn a citation instead of getting lost in a sea of AI-generated summaries. Her example: an original AI Readiness Score she built for a WebFX piece on top SEO companies, scoring each one on factors like AI Overview visibility and on-site optimization, giving readers (and AI engines) something genuinely useful that didn’t exist anywhere else. Sarah has also written on how AI is fundamentally reshaping search and discovery, covering the shift from short keyword searches to longer conversational ones, from clicking links to receiving answers directly, and what all of that means for how businesses get discovered in the first place. She keeps a close eye on how quickly this space moves, from Google’s shifting AI Overview ranking systems to newer developments like Perplexity’s Merchant Program for ecommerce brands, and writes about each as it becomes relevant to how businesses show up in AI-powered search.

Beyond AI search, Sarah’s writing covers the fundamentals that still anchor it: technical SEO, content management systems, page speed, and how SEO ties back to measurable business growth and revenue. That range gives her a full view of how a site’s technical health, its content, and its visibility in AI search all depend on each other rather than operating as separate problems to solve.

Outside of client work, Sarah keeps a flock of ducks, a detail she’ll happily bring up before mentioning her Time Magazine Person of the Year Award, which she says she’s still finding time to properly display.