About Trevin Shirey

Trevin Shirey joined WebpageFX in 2010, at 21, when the company was seven or eight people working out of a small office in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Nobody had just one job back then. Trevin handled sales, account management, corporate marketing, and customer support, and he helped pitch and win the company’s early clients. Some of the clients he worked with in 2010 are still working with us today. More than 15 years later, the company is WebFX, and Trevin is its Senior Vice President of Sales.

He got there by working both sides of the business. Along the way, he held titles including VP of Marketing and VP of Business Development before moving into his current sales leadership role. That mix shows in how he talks about growth. In a survey of more than 500 business leaders, his budgeting advice started with the company rather than the channel: work backward from overall company goals and let those decide where most of the marketing budget goes. He also recommends putting 10 to 15 percent of a marketing budget into new channels, so a business is always testing what might work next.

His path into marketing started with a blog. At Anderson University, where he studied journalism and business and earned a B.A. in Communication, Trevin started a blog about the Pittsburgh Steelers. It grew enough to land him on ESPN Radio and in Pittsburgh Magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has said that a lot of his most valuable lessons came from outside the classroom, and that persistence matters in blogging as much as anywhere. Asked to sum up his career, he skips the job title: he drives traffic to websites.

Much of his recent writing is original research on how search is changing. In July 2025, he published a study of more than 2.3 million keywords showing that AI Overviews appear in about one in four U.S. searches, and in more than half of searches seven words or longer. The same study found informational queries were more than twice as likely as transactional ones to trigger an AI Overview, at 39.4 percent versus 16.5 percent. A few weeks later, he tracked 55 command-style query starters, phrases like "rewrite the sentence," across three years. Their monthly search volume grew from 124.8 million to 160.9 million, a 28.9 percent jump. He paired that with an analysis of 13,252 ChatGPT conversations, where nearly one in five were commands rather than questions. Searchers, he argues, have moved from "show me how" to "do it for me," and SEO strategy has to account for both.

Trevin has been watching Google keep searchers on its own pages for more than a decade. In a September 2013 post on the Hummingbird update, he wrote that Google wanted to pull more data from other websites "so users never have to leave Google." He pointed to knowledge panels and oversized snippets that answered questions about flight prices, sports scores, and movies right on the results page, years before AI Overviews made that the norm. In 2016, he took on another piece of conventional wisdom, the advice to just create great content. Small business owners, he argued, need concrete tactics like link building, keyword targeting, content optimization, and email marketing, and a slogan doesn’t give them any of that. His recent studies on AI Overviews and command-style queries pick up the same thread. They measure how much of search Google and AI tools now answer on their own, and what that means for the businesses that depend on the traffic.

Looking back on his years at WebFX, he credits brilliant colleagues who pushed him to grow, and client relationships built for the long term rather than the next transaction. He defines culture plainly: "Company culture is creating an environment where people do their best work." He holds agencies to a similar standard. The ones he admires most, he has said, are the ones "actually pushing results for clients."

Outside work, Trevin is a lifelong Pittsburgh sports fan, makes pizza, and spends time with his family. He has a background in track and cross country, and his other interests run from golf course architecture to Antarctica. He is also on the record preferring Sheetz over Wawa.