Shai Aharony is cofounder and CEO of Reboot Online, the London, England search agency he started with Naomi Aharony in 2012. He has worked in SEO for almost 25 years and is known for the agency's published SEO experiments, which test how Google treats tactics such as hidden text.
Experiments at Reboot
Reboot started running experiments when the agency was just the two founders. In a LinkedIn post, Aharony wrote that they spent hours setting them up out of curiosity: "I did it because I genuinely wanted to figure out how Google works." One experiment was featured on a Whiteboard Friday video, and he says a hidden text question the agency tested in 2017 was later confirmed when Google's John Mueller discussed it at the end of 2022.
His advice to young SEOs in the same post: "Mess about, reduce noise and outside influence to a minimum and always use control variables and observe."
From Link Building to Digital PR
In an interview with SelectedFirms, Aharony said Reboot began as an SEO company after large UK brands noticed its own sites outranking them. Testing every form of link building led the agency to digital PR built on data-driven stories for journalists, and it later added traditional PR and paid media.
He applied the same approach to the company itself. After a six-month trial of a four-day working week, the agency found productivity and staff well-being improved and made the change permanent. Reboot now sells generative engine optimization alongside SEO and digital PR.