Transcription
This is the true story of Lane Hook, the founder of Signal Genesis SEO Software. Everything that you're going to see here is factual and true, and you will see what happens when someone like me makes a mistake and trusts someone with SEO software and see exactly what happens. See the warning signs along the way where we knew things weren't working when he started to just disappear, started to be defensive, started to accuse and then just eventually started accusing me and started to defame me. So I want to show you what happened and even someone like me as a former search engine engineer can be fooled and if I can be fooled then certainly you can as well.
It started back in July 2022. I was speaking at Josh Nelson's seven-figure agency event and Lane was there and he was promoting his Signal Genesis software which sounds good. In fact, if you look at what he's claimed and the funny thing is I'm using AI to do all of this cuz he's an AI expert. So, he can validate that all of this is true as well. Went through all my emails. All of this stuff is written up. You can even see here that, you know, all of the stuff here, the evidence packet, it's all here through hundreds of emails. So everything here is not it's not an opinion. It's all factually true.
So if you look at what Lane is claiming it on the surface it makes sense. The idea of Signal Genesis is that if you write a good article then you can turn that into different kinds of press releases. You can create a media room on your website that kind of triangulates all the things that you're saying. You could link your other articles together. And what his Signal Genesis platform purported to do was that it would take that article that you wrote and distribute it to hundreds of different press release sites because somehow that would create this massive corroborating loop which is the idea of Signal Genesis. And a lot of people think of that as like an extension of citations. And if you look at Darren Shaw's annual local search marketing factors report, you'll see citations are worth less and less every year. I think it's now worth like 7% something like that. But it's still important. It's still it doesn't replace actually doing EAT. It doesn't replace getting reviews or taking care of customers, but it seemed to make sense. It's like, you know, if you're a plumber in Eastern Pennsylvania and you write some articles about how you're doing plumbing and replacing water heaters and whatnot and then you distribute that across lots of sites, then if the other plumbers aren't very competitive, it's not like you have to do a very good job. So, it seemed plausible. And Lane was very confident, as you can see here, on how some of these other guys supposedly were getting just miraculous kinds of results. And I thought, okay, I mean, and plus he had a money-back guarantee and he stood proudly and firmly behind all of this. Look at these claims. You can look it up unless he eventually as of today, November 20th, 2025, it's still here. He might take a lot of this stuff down, but it it is here. I mean, you can go to Wayback Machine and you can see these are the claims that he's made about what the software does.
And, you know, in hindsight, you could say, Dennis, you know that press release distribution software doesn't carry SEO signals. It's no follow if it's a plumber in Denver, for example, and it's not Denver directories and it's not from Denver websites and not Denver this and that, but it's just like random stuff. Dennis, you know better. I'm like, yeah, I know, but I thought, but if you're a plumber or if you're an HVAC guy or a landscaper, it's not like you need very much. And I've been able to use press releases and using boosting to actually get real traffic. And then Google sees that through Chrome cuz they look at clickstream behavior. Like I've seen it work through legitimate directories with legitimate traffic like legitimate YouTube videos like this. This is not AI generated. So I thought well I mean he says it works so why not? So, I paid him the money and we had an onboarding call, which took a while to get. And that was sort of, well, you know, give him the benefit of the doubt cuz he's traveling and he's busy and he's doing lots of things. And I should have thought about this, but if you look at his email signature, every one of these says this, it takes 20 years to build a reputation in 5 minutes to ruin it. And he's done a lot of webinars on like reputation management, which after this video comes out, he's going to have to have a he's going to have to spin this thing like crazy to try to defame me or say I'm like not valid. But everything here I'm saying is factually true. And I've given him multiple opportunities to fix this stuff as you're about to see. Multiple opportunities to cuz I get it. Like I'm a software founder, too. Like our software breaks and sometimes it goes down and sometimes there's features that we talk about that aren't really there yet. Like if you're a software founder, you know what I'm talking about. You you really wish certain features were there and you know your team you're maybe you know you you you can blame your engineer because he said oh it'll be ready by Friday this feature. So you go out and tell everyone in a webinar that this feature is going to be here but it's not right.
So May 12th, Warren, who's my business partner on the free ebooks, which is the one we we started testing. The idea is we're going to do a bunch of these press releases using Signal Genesis software from our ebook site. Did it for some personal injury attorneys, for some dentists, for some landscapers, right? A range of different sorts of businesses. And Warren's always on top of these details. I love Warren Whitlock. He and I have been friends for 20-odd years. So, I like to work with Warren to test out new things. We test out lots of stuff. We don't always expect everything's going to work out. So, I'm not one of those kinds of guys, right? And Warren says, "We really need the platform to work, you know, payments and new agencies and the other stuff." Cuz we agreed with Lane. Lane's a great salesperson. So, he understands that if he can get someone like me to say, "This is great. It's working for our agencies, all the other agencies will say, "This is safe. Dennis checked it out. This is legit." Right? And Lane is a salesperson. He's smart. He knows that. He's not exactly an implementation guy. So, he was never involved except when it was to close the deal, which I totally understand. That's what a good salesperson does. And then when there were problems, we complained. Then he would start to gaslight me and all that. Like, but the rest of the time when we had issues or whatnot, he wasn't there as you'll see here. And you know, Warren says, "Hey, we need these things. I've got questions." And he has this one guy, Matt, who's I don't really blame Matt for this because I think Matt's just like a support guy. So, he shouldn't suffer for the promises that Lane is making. And then I reply 7 days later. So, I'm not not like right away you got to reply, right? I'm not one of those people. I'll wait a whole week. Any luck? No reply. And then another, you know, another week and no change. I think Matt has given up on us. This is going to take more than reminders. We need to start figuring out how we do the content factory process without a working PR distribution platform.
So at this point, if you're a founder of a company, I don't care if you're a garage door guy or a roofer, if you have a client who paid you all this money upfront and they're wondering like, gee, I wonder, you know, this is a lot of money. We're we're a small company. I wonder if they're going to come through. And then I replied, you know, we spent a lot of money and time here. Lane's been crowing about how crowing about how amazing this is. We have to declare a total loss. I'm not going to be happy. This is more than three years ago. So, there's been plenty of time for Lane to do something about this. And then, uh, Warren says, "Well, the existing account does distribute press releases, but they just haven't been able to set up the platform in the way they agreed. They've wasted my time on what they sold me was a business. They've made the content factory, which is our process, a painful process by us waiting so long. I don't know if they're capable of providing the platform promised. This is that's where they've let us down. And so consistently, you'll see through tons of emails and Basecamp. I'm not going to make you go through the whole thing, but if you want to see like I've got the threads that are open here anyway, it's it's here. I'll just go through a couple of these threads and you'll see we had ChatGPT go through all of it and document every single thing that happened and you know where Lane was involved or where he wasn't. He was only involved in the sales part, but where the platform didn't do what it was advertised to do, right? And, uh, you know, no communication.
Finally, Matt, who is I guess the only guy that was working at the company, you got to it's pretty impressive that Lane was able to sell so many of these with just like one support guy. But he says like, "Okay, you know, her emails were buried. Um, you know, text me. I understand the frustration." So that's nice. So, at least he's showing he cares. Cuz when I would ask Lane, he would just get super defensive and try to blame me and claim everything's great and claim I'm being a bad customer, as you'll see, like like if if someone is earnestly in good faith trying to use your software, should you at least ignore one of my team members didn't a good job, I could blame that team member, but instead of trying to like sweep it under the rug, just own up, right? We're humans and you know there's these problems and there's you know we were trying to do some stuff where you know we wasn't ready. We didn't realize all the difficulties we'd encounter along the way and you know I I did underestimate how difficult getting it operational would be. So before they were saying all these features are in place now they're saying well actually we needed a few months to put some of this or maybe it was working or it wasn't working or it wasn't fully tested. I however you want to spin it, Lane, you know, it just wasn't working because our team, we had five people on this. I spent hundreds, maybe 600, 700 hours, man hours, woman hours doing this, right? But at least this Matt guy was trying, right? He's trying. June, we're trying, right? Let's let's try to do this thing, right? We'll connect tomorrow. And then, you know, now into June, you gents ever connect? And then Matt's like, "Oh, well, I think I was on vacation or let's whatever happened here goes on."
Then, uh, I'm flying around, but I'm I'm not the implement. Warren and these other guys are implementing. I'm just watching over it to see like does this SEO stuff work? Are we following the process and distributing press releases as they say? And we are, right? We're submitting articles, setting up the media room, you know, that whole thing, right? And then I ask again June 18th, you guys connect. Don't keep it a secret, right? And finally, you know, we talked. Okay. Training on the platform. They had no documentation. They claimed they did, but they didn't. Um, the one documentation, I guess you could call it was Lane doing a Zoom call with me where he was demonstrating. He says, "Oh, so easy. What you do is you just set up an article." And his demonstration was to try to rank on white label SEO software, which is not very difficult. And he wrote the article, distributed it, set it the media room, all that kind of stuff. And funny thing is, I looked at Signal Genesis and it literally ranked on zero keywords, the entire site, not just for the demonstration they gave me, but for the entire life of the of that company, of the software product. I mean, if you're an SEO company, you should probably rank on a few keywords at least. I know a lot of folks get super defensive and they say, "Oh, yeah, but we're so busy working on our clients that we uh, you know, we never worked on our own." Like, yeah, but if your tool's so easy and you demonstrated in your training with me and whatnot, I have all the Zooms that it's so easy, you can rank on this and rank on that and all these guys are ranking on all this stuff. But if you're ranking on zero keywords, and this is what I told Lane, isn't that probably a sign of a Google penalty? I mean, if you only rank on a few keywords, okay, fine. Maybe they're really difficult keywords, like trying to rank on SEO. Okay, good luck on that, right? But white label SEO software, that's not very difficult. So, you're not even showing up in the first 100 results. In fact, you're not even showing up for any keywords anyway, right? How is that? And then you're you're spinning up all this stuff using your platform, demoing it, which should if it works, and now it's been months later, should rank on at least a couple keywords. And then his response was, "Oh, well, you know, you got SEO takes time and you you like, yeah, but 3 months later and you don't even rank on ter you're not." In fact, no pages are even indexed. That was the damning thing. It wasn't that he didn't rank. I mean, that's pretty bad. But none of the pages were even indexed. Like, how is that that Google doesn't even know those pages exist? I mean, oh, it's an SEO penalty cuz or, you know, they don't like SEO people. Like, I mean, I can understand that. Me as a search engineer, I knew that SEO people were always trying to manipulate me. I mean that's the nature of the people who sell SEO services they advertising that they manipulate they can trick Google.
So then I say in December 19th, 2023, 2 years ago, well another 6 months has gone by. It's been quite an investment in Lane's platform and all of the documentation as you'll see here it's I mean there's it's all documented. There's there's hundreds of these threads. I think we have it here. Where is it? These Basecamp threads. Is it uh not this one where I have so many of these tabs that are open tons of these threads here, right? Let's come back over to where we were. Oh, this one. Right. And any chance we can see some ROI or at least some of the things that were promised? And December 20th, Lane stopped responding to me very early this year, which is kind of his pattern, right? He just deny, deny, then he hides and then eventually we keep messaging him and then he has to reply and then he claims that oh I reply to everything as you'll see right. So then I reply, you know, in SEO on social media we don't use just one platform because you don't want to risk everything eggs in one basket we test out many of them good news is we saw results with other platforms and they've had great service you probably use a lot of services I mean we pay for like 10 or 15 different services and they all do different things, right? And they were significantly cheaper, which wasn't a concern. There there are a lot of press release distribution platforms. Nixon Lee, who's an investor in our company, he runs a press release distribution platform, but I think he charges $50 per press release, something like that. Not not like $10,000 to start or whatever, cuz it's like I thought like, well, why would Lane charge so much money to start? Is it a money grab? I mean, in hindsight, you would say it is, but at first I'm like, well, okay, fine. I mean, he's a founder. He needs money to build his tools. So, he's trying to find a way to collect money up front. That in itself isn't necessarily bad. But I said, I guess I see why now. There's a big upfront payment. You see what's happened here? So, I'm always concerned about people who want a ton of money upfront cuz you're like, well, why can't we pay over time or why can't we pay based on performance or, you know, whatever.
And then I February 2024. Again, you have Lane and Matt and and some of our other team members on this thread. Is Signal Genesis dead? We put in a lot of money and time and clearly tried our best. March 9th. So, I'm It's not like I'm waiting 24 hours and then saying, "Oh, you didn't reply right away. I texted you on Friday evening and you didn't reply by Saturday morning." No, this this is now into fe into March of the next year. I guess we have our answer. Crickets. Finally. You know, this guy replies, "Tech assets." Matt, I guess he's a contractor. Hey, I totally get it. You're a software founder. You're scrappy. You hire other contractors and you try to do the best that you can, right? Because you got to collect as much money as you can up front to pay your developers. I know how that game works, right? Sorry, I haven't seen this thread. The platform's working. We made improvements, right? And so this has been the pattern that we've seen over and over. And you know, I told I told Lane like, "Why don't you just own up? Why don't you just refund us? Why don't you just I is your pride so big that you just can't face these facts?" He says, "You have made up your own delusional reality? My words and actions have done no such thing." Okay, we have all your words and actions here. In fact, we turned it into we I had ChatGPT go through all of these things here about what you have said, your actual words, right? And I and I said, turn it into a canvas document. Here's a legal evidence packet on Lane Hook. Everything he's actually said or not said, things I've said to him, gone through a lot of emails and I think we've published this so you can go through it as well. You'll see this is not hallucinated. I've gone through this myself and this is not a surprise. I mean, you might be saying, "Well, Dennis, you already know the majority of people that sell SEO software are selling snake oil. It's just like the people that sell weight loss pills. Like, what do you expect?" I know, but this guy in particular is super proud. So, he's he's then trying to attack me. So, he's going to get a taste of his own medicine because we're using AI. He's an AI expert. He's a reputation management expert. He should be able to show that these things that his can he say that these things that we're showing here are not true, that he didn't say these words, that this wasn't what happened, that we didn't pay him all this money, that these weren't the results. Like, we have the screenshots, we have the receipts, right?
Evidence demonstrates that we repeatedly attempted good faith implementation. We went so far as to even write documents, not this one. Somebody said we wrote documents how to actually implement Signal Genesis. And so they did a white label. So we called it Cloud Signals, right? How to create an entity on Cloud Signals. You know, you set up set up the press release that goes to the all these different places. Fill out the information tied to the Google Business Profile, right? Like here it is. We document how to do the platform step by step. So we're not only using it, we're not only saying like, hey, what's the onboarding so our VAs and whatnot can do it. We are documenting how we do it. And there that should be a good thing. Like if your tool drives good results and we document how we use your tool and we're getting better rankings, you should like that, right? But if we use your tool and it doesn't work and it for many reasons and the ROI isn't good. Here it is. I did a search in Basecamp. Everything that m matches Signal Genesis, which is the company that was a software we but he went under many names, which I always wonder people who operate under multiple names. But, he then he sold this company to this guy Manic Ban, who also has an SEO company that does black hat and it's called Search Atlas. Look up what it does. They do, for example, like CTR manipulation. Find out what if you don't know what that is, look that up. If you think that's okay to do, it's not illegal. It's just against Google's guidelines. It'll get you banned. But he claims you won't get caught. And so, um, a lot of the stuff here, like fake press releases and whatever, not the same as earned media, but I made a video explaining what is fake SEO and what is fake AI optimization, which they call AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, and Lane didn't like that. So, no wonder because he was guilty of every one of those points, right? And it wasn't personal. It's it's just, you know, it's like an obese person on the scale getting mad. Like, don't get mad at the scale. Fix your body, right? Don't get mad at. Oh, the the weight the the thing is off and the scale manufacturer is a scammer. Come on. Right.
So, look, all of these thing there's proof. This goes on and on and on and on for miles of us implementing Signal Genesis. Why? Because we have a team of five that are implementing this that are following that. There weren't any SOPs. We asked Lane. He didn't have any. Oh, they're coming. They're coming. Okay. Well, then well, I can do a Zoom call with you guys and show you how. Okay. We got it recorded. Returning that to an SOP. We're following the SOP. We're documenting these in guides. We're publishing this because we always publish everything even like this. We're publishing this stuff here. This goes on for miles on what we've done with Signal Genesis. So, it wasn't like, oh, we tried one time or you know, we released one article or or and Lane would say like, oh, but you weren't following our guidelines. Like, really? I think our articles are better than your standard because we include video, we include real examples, we have real stories. It's not AI generated. We didn't go off to the Philippines. We're like we we have if you look at our articles, they are the gold standard in demonstrating EAT, right? I mean this here you can see this all the stuff is here on here. We're setting up a media room, right? Here it is. We've updated the the documentation on how we create the media room. So everything we document right still up how to create an entity what is a cloud what is cloud signals how do we document things in the task library right all this stuff is every single task we have here look is documented and then so you can't claim and we do this because a it's the most ethical thing to do and it also is part of the idea of apprenticeship where if you haven't demonstrated how to do something then how can anyone follow in your footsteps if it's not a repeatable process process then how can anyone also you know they have another plumber site okay we've done it for a bunch of plumbers okay well then we another plumber comes in we should have an SOP to be able to follow so our whole thing has been about implementation that's the most important thing because implementation drives rep reputation implementation driving results drives referrals causes people to want to work with you not because you're a good salesperson right not because you're good at talking but because you can literally see like, "Yep, here's what it is. Here's how we did it." And so this goes on and on and on. All of these go on and on and on and on right here. And then we improve this thing. How to set up a new client using Signal Genesis, right? Every step of the way. Here it is. Let's make it better. Okay, I made it better. Okay, cool. I like it, but we still got to make it better. Made it better. Made it better. Made it better. Right? Isn't that what we all It sounds boring to have SOPs, but isn't that important? So, it's key because it shows that we're ethical. It shows everyone in the community that we publish exactly how we do stuff. And it also helps us improve because if we see that there's a better way to do stuff, there's a better way to do press distributions. And since then, we found there actually is a legitimate way. Our buddy Nixon Lee of Spine PR, who's an investor in our company, he does it for real. He doesn't toot his own horn. You don't see him out there. He's not out there promising promising. He's just quietly delivering results. Maybe that's like an Asian thing, but you know, he's doing it and and that's what we want. And you don't have to you don't have to sell your your results and your clients, they speak for themselves.
Okay. So then, uh, let's see here. That's not the one. Oh, I accidentally shut down. I accidentally closed the close that tab. Here it is. Oh, we turned it into a blog post on lanehookreviews.com. So, it'll it'll rank on his name. Imagine that. Isn't that fitting? There's something called the Procrustean bed and it was this guy who would go to rich people's homes and then he he would like find these criminals and he would put them he would make them fit their bed. So, if they were longer than their bed, he would cut off their feet. And if he was shorter, if they were shorter in the bed, then he'd stretch them out. And that that was like the fitting punishment. You you learned that back in like medieval history. Okay. So, let's go back and look at this. I had ChatGPT. You can see here I said go through all the emails with Lane Hook, anything with Signal Genesis, and document exactly what happened here. Look at this. You can see what I said. Put that into the evidence packet. Um, find everything that he said and didn't say. Let's be completely fair so it's not some one-sided, you know, ad hominem attack. Let's make it fair. So, if someone who doesn't know any of us, but just wants to understand, hey, I'm going to be buying some software that does SEO. How do I determine if it's legit? How do I project manage it? How do I keep track of things? How do I, you know? So, it here it is. It says like, hey, you know, I found found these things operating under different names. Like, all of this stuff is here, right? It shows that we've tried. It went through Basecamp. It went through email. Like, how do you like Lane, if you're watching this, you're probably super pissed off and you're thinking about like how to attack me personally instead of addressing the facts here. But, I mean, we have the number of follow-ups, we have the non-responses by you, and then you come in and claim, well, you know, I've I've he claimed I can pull it up right here on Facebook. He's claiming like I ghosted him. Really? Name anyone that knows me. I'm super like the last you can call me anything you want, but the last thing you're going to be able to call me is ghosting because I'm on top of this. So, here there's the proof of all these contradictions. You know, email deliveries on their side. We've tried repeatedly to get this thing to work cuz we're putting in the money. We want it to work. Like, why would you go through all Think about the cost. It wasn't just the $10,500. It was the cost of all of our people, the cost of reputation. We talked this up with a bunch of people in the world of local saying, "Hey, you know what? We're so happy we we you know, we're working with this Lane Hook guy and we're going to these going to create all these local citations and we're going to rank so much better cuz he's promised this thing does all these things." Even if it did like 5% of what it said, I would be very happy. Obviously, you don't want to work with these like nightmare clients that say, "Oh, I paid you for SEO. Now I should rank number one on everything by tomorrow." Like obviously that's unreasonable, right? So we just we wanted to see a little bit, right?
So then this is what ChatGPT said by looking at all the evidence here. Lane falsely accused Dennis of not communicating while he was unresponsive and defensive. Matt repeatedly disappeared, blamed spam, promised future fixes and failed to deliver. Platform never produced the SEO results. We took the screenshots out of Ahrefs. We use Semrush. Oh, I don't like Ahref's data. Semrush data is more complete. Okay, fine. You can use whatever you want, right? Lane publicly mocked Dennis after Dennis attempted to resolve matters, which happened multiple times. I get it. Sometimes you have a bad day or your son, you know, lost the baseball game. You know, we're all humans, but repeatedly this is his pattern. Lane agreed in writing to issue a refund, then stopped responding. Never happened, right? I mean, at this point, how do you argue with this, Lane? If you're someone who's friends with Lane, tell him Lane, instead of trying to gaslight Dennis, in instead of trying to say, you know, here, this is what Lane is is so panic or whatever the word is, such a bad word that he, you know, he's making fun of me. I made this post about I made a post about how AEO is a joke because really it's just an extension of SEO. Damon Burton and all the other people, they all agree, right? The people who do it for real. We all agree, right? But all the people that want to sell the latest version of whatever because they were selling crypto before or influencer marketing, they've jumped on the latest thing. So Lane's selling the latest thing, right? He's trying to mock me. I mean, granted, that's not a not a bad prompt because I was fat a couple years ago. He's trying to get this fat Asian that says, you know, a he's a joke. Then he says, yeah, you're a has-been and if you were successful, you would have blah blah blah. Right? And so instead of owning up, he's decided to make it a public scene. I told him, I paid a lot of money for this, right? And then he's just saying all this my my recollection of the facts are highly distorted. I have a lot of emails and messages. I don't care what you think. You're an SEO expert. Use the software like one. Okay, here's the proof. Got hundreds of emails. Got Basecamp. Ball's in your court, Mr. Lane. What do you want to do? He goes even further, you know, like some people, they just can't help themselves. So, if you look even further, this is what he's done, right? He's he's saying he's trying to attack me. I've told him refund the money that we paid you, right? Is your your reputation. You said the reputation, look at this. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. Lane, I think you are ruining your reputation by your own hand. People already know that selling snake oil SEO stuff, AEO, whatever you want to call it, is already kind of sketch, right? It's like used car kind of stuff. And if you think about that, you'll do things differently. I agree with you, Lane. I guess you're quoting Warren Buffett, but I agree with you. I know you're a great salesperson. I know you're really smart, but at some point this stuff's going to catch up to you and you can't gaslight other people. You can't belittle and berate and attack other people, try to change the subject. The trouble is that AI, if you understand it, you think you well, you're an expert, so you're not going to listen to me. But we understand that AI is an amplifier of your reputation. If you got a great reputation, AI is going to make things great for you because it's going to help repurpose it. It's going to help spread the good word. It's going to be a good recommendation engine. But if you don't take care of your customers, I don't care how clever you are with these SEO tools. I don't care how smart you think you are in making these sorts of posts, mocking me. Let's say you are smarter than me. Let's say maybe you know more about SEO. You said multiple times, I don't know anything about SEO. You know what? You're right. I'm a search engine engineer, right? But you're going to see that when you come in and you mock me, as you said in somewhere, I can't even see how many posts you've made, but you you've said a lot of things that are public, you should know better than that. You know, someone like uh my mom doesn't know cuz she's not on the internet or whatever it is, but you should know if you're an expert and you're teaching reputation management and you screw up and you dig your hole deeper, well, now you have slit your own throat. It is what you have said, Lane Hook. And if this video is still up and you're watching it, anyone's watching it, this is proof that Lane has not addressed this. This is all I have to say because these are Lane's own words. If you're a friend of his, convince him, do the right thing, right? Refund the money. Take care of your customers. There's a lot of money that can be made in the world without having to cheat other people. Lane, ball's in your court.