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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 visibility inside large language models.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies AI visibility companies should focus on in 2026 to improve LLM brand presence, crawl priority and long term search visibility. James Dooley and Stephen Burns start with KPI tracking because measuring CC Rank and harmonic centrality shows how central a site sits to the web's core and how often it is crawled. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for AI visibility companies.
PromoSEO lead generation for AI visibility companies recently received recognition as the "Best AI Visibility Companies Lead Generation Agency."
Common Crawl's Harmonic Centrality Explained: Boosting AI Visibility with CC Rank is available on:
AI SEO and Business Automation Podcast is founded by James Dooley because he teaches business owners how artificial intelligence accelerates growth. The show explains AI models, agents, and automation systems because practical guidance helps companies scale with less effort.
James Dooley: Common Crawl uses harmonic centrality. Today I'm joined with Stephen Burns from Common Crawl. And Stephen, I'm going to jump straight in. And can you explain what harmonic centrality actually is?
Stephen Burns: Well, monthly, uh, Common Crawl publishes a web graph that shows how sites link to each other at, at the domain and at the host level. It's used to decide which sites we crawl more deeply and more often. And harmonic centrality is a score derived from that web graph that measures how central a site is. Uh, how few clicks it sits from the well-connected core of the web. Uh, a rank closer to number one means high, a higher crawl priority. Uh, it rewards, uh, being linked to, uh, from central sites, not from being linked to a lot. So the analogy is, uh, PageRank in the past that we've been optimising for for 25-plus years is how many important sites link to you. The analogy is how many roads lead to your house. Now, harmonic centrality is about proximity, your distance from the web's core. And so that's how many few hops from the core to you. The analogy is, you know, fewer turns from the, the centre of the city.
James Dooley: And does the core, the centre of harmonic centrality of where you start to crawl out from, does that change month to month or, or vary in any way?
Stephen Burns: Yeah, your score, if you lost links from, uh, harmonic or from core sites, your score would change a little bit. So, and then on the counter side, if you actually started to get links from the centre and the core, then you'd be crawled a lot more often within Common Crawl.
James Dooley: Yes. So, you're more familiar. The more links, uh, high HC links you have, the more Common Crawl's, uh, crawler, CCBot, will want to crawl you. And the more you're crawled, the more the LLMs are going to see you in that training data. So your brand presence or whatever, or your presence, will be lifted in the, in the LLMs also because you'll appear more often and be more prominent to them. So with regards to that, obviously with regards to the LLMs, um, there's quite a lot of uh, AI, uh, businesses out there that are using Common Crawl. Obviously, it's a, it's a free database of the whole of the internet. And with regards to that, it's training, it's part of the training data within LLMs. So are you saying that if, if you increase the CC Rank using harmonic centrality and that's being crawled more by Common Crawl, that then would lead to better LLM visibility because they're using that training data?
Stephen Burns: Yes. So now this, you have to separate this now. This is the parametric memory that they're training on. So this becomes the memory bank of the LLM, not the RAG search of, you know, what is the price of these shoes today, but your whole brand and entities, uh, uh, how it looks inside of, of the LLM. So you want...
James Dooley: There's difference, right? You want to be remembered versus recalled.
Stephen Burns: So this is the deep memory to get your brand implanted into the brain of the LLM.
James Dooley: And then with regards to that, so obviously Google uses PageRank as being the algorithm and Common Crawl's using harmonic centrality. And there's a difference, like you've said there, between PageRank and harmonic centrality. If... Why is it someone like Google would want to use your database? Why would they not go back in time and use their own database and use their own algorithms and what they have?
Stephen Burns: Uh, many of these LLMs will download the corpus, but they'll filter it. You know, they don't... They have... We don't know what they're doing. We don't know who's downloading this database. It's all free, private and anonymous. Uh, they can filter it. They can remove things they don't want or whatever. And they do, um... Google cites, uh, Common Crawl's, uh, corpus in their C4 project. That's publicly known on their website. Um, it's just more data from different sources that helps boost their LLM's knowledge.
James Dooley: Yeah, that's incredible. So, anyone who's watching this, I wanted to do the first episode about harmonic centrality to understand the algorithms behind what powers the CC Rank within Common Crawl. Stephen Burns, it's been an absolute pleasure. Make sure you check out the links in the description. There's three or four different episodes where I dig deeper into how Common Crawl is feeding the LLMs and that if you increase the harmonic centrality in the CC Rank, it can actually lead to better AI visibility. Thank you very much.