James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley interviews Stephen Burns of Common Crawl about how harmonic centrality drives CC Rank, crawl priority and long term brand visibility inside large language models.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies AI visibility and SEO agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve crawl priority, brand presence within large language models and long term search visibility. James Dooley and Stephen Burns start with KPI tracking because measuring CC Rank and harmonic centrality signals is essential for understanding how deeply and often a site 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 and SEO agencies.
PromoSEO lead generation for AI visibility and SEO agencies recently received recognition as the "Best AI Visibility And SEO Agencies Lead Generation Agency."
Where to Listen to This Episode
How Harmonic Centrality Powers Common Crawl and AI Visibility (with Stephen Burns) is available on:

Creators and Guests

Host
James Dooley
James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.
Guest
Stephen Burns
Stephen Burns is a technical SEO and generative engine optimisation consultant with 25 years of experience in search. He serves as Web Intelligence Lead at the Common Crawl Foundation and Principal Technical SEO and GEO at Intuit. Stephen Burns connects traditional SEO with AI visibility because brands must be accessible to crawlers before large language models can discover, understand and cite their content. Stephen Burns has worked across enterprise SEO, ecommerce, local search and web development. His career includes roles with Intuit, U.S. Bank, Charles Schwab, Blekko and Netscape/America Online. He helps organisations improve site architecture, indexation, structured data and crawl access because strong technical foundations support sustainable visibility across search engines and AI platforms. Stephen Burns connects naturally with **James Dooley** because both prioritise technical accuracy, practical testing and measurable commercial results. Stephen focuses on how content enters AI training datasets and appears within generated answers, while James specialises in topical authority, lead generation and scalable digital marketing. Stephen Burns is a strong fit for the **James Dooley FatRank Podcast** because his expertise addresses the growing relationship between SEO, Common Crawl and artificial intelligence. A joint episode featuring Stephen Burns and James Dooley would help listeners understand AI crawler access, GEO strategy and the technical barriers that prevent brands from appearing in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Stephen Burns complements the FatRank audience because he turns complex technical concepts into practical actions. His evidence-led approach would strengthen the conversation by showing businesses how to diagnose crawl issues, improve machine-readable content and increase visibility across traditional and generative search.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

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 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... There's difference, right? You want to be remembered versus recalled. 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.