The SEO Vault · Vol. I · August 2026 Independent · Editorially curated · No sponsored entries Reviewed 2026-08-18

№ 05

Modern Leaders & Strategists

Lily Ray

SVP, SEO Strategy at Amsive

Publishes the dataset before the industry finishes forming an opinion.

The pattern after every Google core update is predictable. First come the anecdotes. Then come the reactive threads. Then — usually within forty-eight hours — Lily Ray publishes an actual dataset, and half the trade press quietly cites her while writing their own coverage. She is Senior Vice President of SEO Strategy at Amsive.

Making E-E-A-T measurable

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust is a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. It is not, technically, a ranking factor you can inspect. That ambiguity produced years of vague guidance. Ray's distinctive contribution has been to look for observable correlates — author attribution patterns, entity presence in the knowledge graph, citation behaviour, site-level publishing history — and test whether they move in sync with update cycles.

YMYL and enterprise work

Client work concentrates on Your-Money-Your-Life categories, where Google applies the highest scrutiny and where the cost of a bad core update is measured in millions rather than percentages. She is a fixture at SMX, BrightonSEO and Pubcon, and a long-standing contributor to Search Engine Land.