SME Interviews: How to Find, Brief and Interview Subject Matter Experts for Content

An SME interview is a structured conversation with a subject matter expert that gives a content team the first-hand knowledge, opinions and examples no one else can publish. For B2B content marketers it is the method Flying Cat trusts to produce pages that rank in Google and get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The case for it gets stronger every quarter. Graphite's analysis of 55,400 English-language articles found that primarily AI-generated articles have made up roughly half of new articles since early 2025 (Graphite, May 2026). A page built on the same top ten results as everyone else now competes with thousands of near-copies. A page built on an expert's experience has something those copies lack.

Flying Cat is a founder-led SEO and AI search consultancy for B2B SaaS. Expert input is part of every content program the team runs, from product marketers at D2L to a veterinary software client whose medical team signs off every topic. This guide covers how Flying Cat finds experts at scale, briefs them, interviews them, turns the transcript into content and credits them so search engines and readers can see who stands behind the page.

Why SME interviews earn rankings and AI citations

Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a page shows first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge. The same guidance asks publishers to make it clear who created the content. Google also strongly encourages accurate bylines where readers expect them (Google Search Central). Google describes trust as the most important part of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness). An interviewed expert supplies the experience and expertise. A named byline and reviewer supply the trust signal.

AI assistants reward the same material. In the research paper that introduced generative engine optimization, researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi found that adding relevant quotations, statistics and source citations could raise a page's visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40% (Search Engine Land summary, paper on arXiv). Expert interviews are where those quotations and specific numbers come from.

Rankings still come first, though. In a study of 488 product-type pages by Maeva Cifuentes, Flying Cat's founder, 76% of pages with five or more top-10 keywords reached 10 or more AI citations, against 10% of pages below that threshold (The Search Spot, October 2026). The same study found that pages earning more citations than their rankings predicted carried examples or templates far more often than under-performers. Expert input helps on both fronts. It gives Google a reason to rank the page. It also gives assistants specific, quotable facts to cite.

Flying Cat's own client data points the same way. For a veterinary software client, Flying Cat-produced pages accounted for 81% of the client's content cited by AI in August 2026. The client's medical team signs off on the team's topics before any writing starts.

Where to find subject matter experts at scale

Sourcing breaks down when a team treats every article as a new search for an expert. A scalable SME program draws on several pools of experts. Each pool plays a different role in the content plan.

Client and internal teams

Product marketers, product managers, solutions engineers, customer success leads and support staff hold the positioning and product detail that competitive and bottom-funnel pages need. At D2L, product marketers supplied approved positioning. Flying Cat then reworked every competitive page, including best-LMS roundups by use case, alternatives pages and head-to-head comparisons, to show Brightspace at its best (D2L case study). D2L's demo requests from organic search and LLMs grew 73% in its first year with Flying Cat.

Sales teams belong in this pool too. Bizzabo used sales-call insights to map its buyers' questions and evaluation triggers, then built new content around buyer need and intent strength over raw search volume (Bizzabo case study).

Customers

Customers are experts in their own problem. Customer interviews surface the vocabulary buyers use, which keyword tools often miss. Softr found terms like "client portal" through customer interviews rather than keyword tools. Those terms then shaped its bottom-funnel pages (Softr case study). If you want to go deeper on this pool, Flying Cat's guide to voice of customer research covers how to find and use the exact words customers say.

Freelance specialists with vertical experience

This is the pool Flying Cat is built on. Maeva Cifuentes, Flying Cat's founder, leads strategy on every account. The writing comes from freelance specialists who already know the client's vertical. A writer with a veterinary, tax or procurement background asks better follow-up questions, catches wrong terminology and needs less of the expert's time. For the veterinary software client, that background showed up in market-level details. Burnout messaging lands differently in France than in North America. The term "SOAP notes" is also less universal than it looks, since vets in the UK and Europe more often say "medical records". Flying Cat's vertical SaaS SEO work depends on writers who notice those differences.

External experts

Industry practitioners, analysts and consultants add an outside perspective and a reason to share the piece. For Mixmax, Flying Cat added quotes and contributions from Mixmax's own team and from industry experts on LinkedIn. The contributors then shared the pieces with their audiences, and blog-assisted demo requests grew 500% in ten months (Mixmax case study).

LinkedIn search by job title, industry Slack communities and expert-sourcing platforms such as Qwoted all work for finding external experts. Request a short recorded call over a written answer. Written answers from open requests increasingly come back generated by AI. A call lets you ask the follow-up that turns a generic answer into a useful one.

Keep an expert roster

Log every expert you speak with in a shared roster with their name, role, topics, best contact channel, approval requirements and the pieces they contributed to. Over a year, the roster becomes the fastest sourcing tool you have.

How to brief an SME before the interview

Experts give better answers when they know what the piece needs. Send the brief two to three days ahead and keep it to one page.

• Working title and target query. Say which search the page should win and who reads it.
• Angle. State the point of view the piece will take and what it adds beyond the current top results.
• Outline. Share the approved headings so the expert sees where their input lands.
• Questions. Send six to ten questions, flagged by which section they feed.
• What you need from them. Ask for stories, numbers, screenshots, templates or mistakes they have seen.
• Time and format. Confirm 30 minutes on video, with recording, and explain how the recording will be used.
• Review and credit. Explain who approves the draft, how many review rounds they get and how they will be credited.

The brief also protects the expert's time. In the Flying Cat workflow the client approves the outline before drafting starts, so the expert is interviewed against a structure that will not change underneath them.

SME interview questions for content marketers

Good subject matter expert interview questions ask for experience, specifics and judgment. Questions a search engine can answer waste the call. Phrases like "in your experience", "walk me through the last time" and "what would you tell a new hire" pull out material an AI model cannot produce.

Questions about experience and process

• Walk me through the last time you handled [task] from start to finish.
• What does your team do differently from the standard advice on [topic]?
• Which step do people skip, and what happens when they skip it?
• What tools do you use for [task], and what did you stop using?
• How long does [process] take your team, and what slows it down?

Questions that surface numbers and proof

• What metric do you watch to know [approach] is working?
• What changed in that metric after you made the switch?
• Can you share a before and after, even as a percentage?
• Which result surprised you?

Questions about judgment and opinion

• Where do you disagree with what ranks for [topic] today?
• What advice on [topic] is outdated?
• When would you not recommend [approach]?
• What would you tell a buyer comparing [option A] and [option B]?

Questions for product and positioning experts

• Which customer problem does this feature solve that competitors handle badly?
• What do buyers ask on sales calls right before they choose us?
• Which competitor claims do you hear that we should answer on the page?
• What positioning is approved, and what wording should we avoid?

Questions for clinical, legal or regulated experts

• Which statements on this topic need a source or a disclaimer?
• Which terms differ by country or by specialty?
• What would make a practitioner distrust this page?
• Who else needs to review claims in this area?

Close every interview with an open question such as "What did I not ask that I should have?" Experts often save their best point for that moment.

How to run the SME interview

Treat the call as a conversation that follows the brief. Keep it to 30 minutes. Use the first two minutes to confirm the recording and the angle.

Ask one question at a time and let silence work. When an answer stays general, ask for an example. When an expert mentions a number, ask where it comes from and whether you can publish it. When they mention a customer, ask whether the customer can be named or should be anonymized.

Listen for disagreements with common advice. An expert who says the standard approach fails for their buyers has handed you the angle that sets the piece apart from the current results.

Group topics when you can. If the next few pieces share a theme, interview the expert once for the whole topic cluster and tag each answer by the article it feeds. One 45-minute call can supply three or four articles and saves the expert repeat requests.

Recording and transcription with AI, plus human review

Record every interview with the expert's permission. AI notetakers and transcription tools turn a call into a searchable transcript within minutes. A language model can then draft a first pass of themes, quotes and claims.

A human reviewer still checks the transcript, the quotes and the claims before anything reaches a draft.

1. Transcript check. The writer corrects names, product terms, acronyms and numbers. Transcription tools regularly mishear industry vocabulary. A wrong drug name or tax code becomes a published error.
2. Quote selection. The writer picks quotes that carry experience or judgment. An AI summary tends to keep the generic parts of an answer and smooth out the specific ones.
3. Claim verification. Every statistic the expert cites gets checked against its source before it goes into the draft.

Store the cleaned transcript, the recording and the tagged quotes in an information bank organized by topic. The next writer on the account can pull an approved quote from the bank without booking another call.

Turning one interview into expert content

A single interview should feed more than one page. The table shows how Flying Cat maps one call across a content plan.

Write expert input into the page as attributed quotes, as paraphrased steps credited to the expert and as examples. Keep each quote short and specific. A two-sentence quote with a number is easier for an AI assistant to lift and cite than a paragraph of general advice.

Getting SME approvals without stalling the calendar

Approvals are where SME content slows down. A clear sequence keeps it moving.

• Approve topics first. For the veterinary software client, the medical team has first sign-off on every topic before any brief is written. Clinical accuracy problems get caught at the cheapest stage.
• Approve the outline next. Once the outline is approved, the structure is locked. Later feedback goes into edits within that structure.
• Send quotes for review in context. Share the paragraph around each quote so the expert sees how it reads.
• Set one edit round with a deadline. The Flying Cat workflow gives the client one round of edits on the final draft. The same rule applies to experts.
• Name the approver. Agree up front who has final say when the expert, product marketing and legal disagree.

At D2L, product marketing supplied approved positioning before drafting started. Writers worked from that positioning, so final reviews focused on accuracy rather than rewrites.

Crediting experts with author and reviewer bylines

Credit is part of the deal with an expert. It also tells Google and AI assistants who stands behind the page.

• Author byline. Use it when the expert wrote or substantially shaped the piece. Link the byline to an author page with their role, experience and profiles.
• Reviewer byline. Use "Reviewed by [Name], [Role]" when an expert checked the content for accuracy. This works well for clinical, legal, tax and financial topics.
• Attributed quotes. Name the person, role and company beside each quote, and link to their profile when they agree.
• Structured data. Mark up the author and reviewer as Person entities in your article schema so the relationship is machine-readable.

Keep every credit accurate. Google's guidance warns against fabricated author profiles and false credentials (Google Search Central).

Send each expert the live link on publication day. Experts who share the piece add distribution, as the Mixmax contributors did. They are also more likely to say yes to the next interview.

How Flying Cat runs SME content

Flying Cat's content creation programs build expert input into a fixed workflow.

1. Topics are approved in a deliverables tracker, with the client's expert or medical team signing off where the subject requires it.
2. Maeva Cifuentes, Flying Cat's founder, sets the strategy and the angle for each piece. The brief names the target keywords, the headings and the expert questions.
3. The client approves the outline. A freelance specialist with experience in the client's vertical interviews the expert.
4. The writer drafts from the cleaned transcript and verifies every claim.
5. The client approves the final draft with one round of edits. The expert is credited by byline or quote.
6. The piece is published, linked from existing posts and tracked for rankings and AI citations through Flying Cat's GEO and AEO reporting.

If you are building this process inside your own team, Flying Cat's guide to a content strategy workflow with SOPs shows how to document each step.

SME interview FAQ

How long should an SME interview take?

Thirty minutes covers one article with six to ten questions. Allow 45 minutes when one interview feeds several articles in a topic cluster.

How many questions should I ask a subject matter expert?

Prepare six to ten questions and expect to get through five or six with follow-ups. Prioritize the questions that feed the sections where the article needs experience or numbers.

Should I send SME interview questions in advance?

Yes. Sending questions with the brief two to three days ahead lets the expert pull numbers, examples and screenshots. Answers get more specific as a result.

How do I compensate subject matter experts?

Internal and client experts usually contribute as part of their role. External experts often contribute in exchange for a credited quote, a byline and a link to their profile. Some charge for their time. Agree on compensation before the interview.

Can AI replace SME interviews?

AI can transcribe, summarize and draft from an interview. It cannot supply the first-hand experience, proprietary numbers or professional judgment an expert brings. Those qualities make a page worth ranking and citing.