Field notes / Expert witness work

I Testified as an SEO Expert Witness in Federal Court. Here Is What It Was Like.

By Kyle Eggleston / Published November 10, 2026 / 8 minute read

In February 2026 I testified as an SEO expert witness in a federal lawsuit over toxic backlinks. I had nine days from the first email to the witness stand, one day to write my first expert report, and two nights in a hotel near the courthouse to get ready. This is the story of that week, and what it taught me about my own work.

I have been doing SEO since June 2004. I have explained it to executives, marketing teams and business owners for 22 years. I had never explained it under oath.

What an SEO expert witness does

An SEO expert witness is an independent search specialist that a party's attorneys bring into a lawsuit. The job has three parts: analyze the search evidence, put the findings in a written report, and explain them to a judge or jury in plain English. The expert does not argue the case. The attorneys do that. The expert says what the data shows and where it stops.

Cases that call for one usually involve a search question the court cannot answer on its own. Was a website the target of negative SEO? Did rankings and traffic really fall, and when? What do backlink records, anchor text and domain registrations show? This case was about negative SEO, which I define as any SEO done with malicious intent toward another site.

An email on a Tuesday

Nine days before I took the stand, an attorney at a Chicago law firm emailed me. His firm represented Montway Auto Transport in a federal lawsuit against a competitor, Nexus Auto Transport. The dispute was over what the complaint calls a toxic backlink campaign: large numbers of spam links, from the worst corners of the internet, pointed at a company's website. Nexus denies being behind it. The firm wanted to know if I could look at the link data as an independent SEO expert.

We got on a call two days later. I asked the obvious question. Does this mean I physically go to court and testify?

Yes.

I said, "Cool. Fascinating." That is what comes out of my mouth when I am interested and nervous at the same moment.

Then they told me the schedule. The hearing was the following week. My written report was due the next day.

9 days from the first email to the witness stand.

Doing my own backlink analysis

I decided one thing early. I was not going to take anybody's word for anything.

The attorneys had their view of what happened. The other side had theirs. Neither one was my job. My job was to look at the backlink profiles myself and say what was there.

So I pulled the data. I went through the links pointing at the websites involved, the anchor text those links used, the dates they first appeared, and how fast they arrived. I checked one tool against another, because every SEO tool is an estimate and I did not want to stand behind a number only one of them could see. I looked up who had registered the linking domains. I read the filings from both sides so I understood what was being claimed and, just as important, what was not.

Writing the report was harder than the analysis. In my normal work, if I say something a little loosely in a client deck, nobody cross-examines me on it. An expert report is different. It also has required parts I had never written before, like a list of every document I considered.

I sent the first version at 5:29 on a Friday evening. The revisions went until about eleven that night. I signed the final version the next morning. Every opinion in it is one I was prepared to defend out loud, to a stranger whose job was to take it apart.

Two nights in a hotel

I booked a hotel near the courthouse for two nights so I could stay close and keep studying.

The week was not tidy. I found out I did not have a Real ID to get into the building and had to ask whether a passport would work. It did.

I was nervous. Not about the data. I knew the data. I was nervous because in my world, people mostly take my word for it. In a courtroom nobody does, and they are not supposed to.

So I studied. I reread my report. I went back through the link data. When the other side's expert report arrived, I read it that night, and then a couple more times.

The advice I got on being a witness was simple. No jargon. Answer the question that was asked, and only that question. If it is a yes or no question, say yes or no. Stay calm. Do not argue.

That last one is harder than it sounds for someone who argues about SEO for a living.

The day I did not testify

On the first morning I went through security at the Dirksen Federal Building and walked into a federal courtroom as part of a case for the first time.

Then I sat there. All day.

Witness after witness went up. I watched people answer questions for hours about things I think about every day: backlinks, rankings, Google updates.

At one point after a break I had to email one of the attorneys to ask which floor we were on. Twenty-one. They were already back in the courtroom.

I was not called. Court ended for the day and I went back to the hotel for a second night. A little after nine, an outline of the questions I would be asked in the morning landed in my inbox. I read it. Then I read my own report again. Then I read the outline again.

The stand

The next morning they called my name.

You raise your hand. You spell your name for the record. The first questions are the ones you know cold. How long have you been doing this? Since June 2004. Where have you worked? What did you look at in this case?

A few minutes in, I used a piece of industry shorthand without thinking. I said that companies in this industry were "bidding" on each other's brand names. The judge stopped me. He asked me to back up and explain what that meant, as if he knew nothing about it.

That was the moment the whole week had been about. Could I take what I have done for 22 years and make it clear to one very smart person who has never done it?

I took a breath and explained it the way I would to a client sitting across a table.

Then the other side got its turn to question me. I will leave that part in the transcript, where it belongs.

What I took from it

I am not going to argue the case here. What I had to say about it, I said under oath, and the court will decide the rest. In June 2026 the judge allowed most of the claims to move forward, which Search Engine Land covered. That ruling did not decide who is right. Nobody has been found liable for anything.

What I can share is what I took away from the week.

• Write every audit as if you will have to defend it

  Line by line, out loud, to someone whose job is to find the weak sentence.

• Plain words are the test

  If I cannot explain something without jargon, I do not understand it well enough yet.

• SEO is evidence

  Underneath the tools and the acronyms, something happened and it left a trail. Somebody has to read that trail honestly, including the parts that do not prove anything.

SEO expert witness questions