In this episode of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, hosts Bill Scully and Bill Hunt are joined by Nick LeRoy and Jason Kilgore to examine one of the most pressing challenges in digital marketing today: the belief that AI can instantly replace people and processes in SEO.
Together, they discuss the risks of chasing shortcuts, the loss of institutional knowledge, and how “easy button” thinking can erode long-term competitive advantage. The panel also highlights practical steps for leaders to use AI responsibly—positioning it as an accelerator that drives growth, innovation, and efficiency without replacing human expertise.
Key Takeaways
- AI is an accelerator, not a replacement—SEO teams that use AI will outperform those that don’t, but human expertise remains essential.
- Institutional knowledge matters—when teams are replaced by AI, organizations lose hard-earned experience that drives long-term performance.
- Shortcuts create risk—the “easy button” mindset often leads to a race to the bottom, eroding credibility and competitive edge.
- The executive conversation is critical—CEOs need to see AI as a growth multiplier, not just a budget-cutting tool.
- Cultural impact is real—framing AI as replacement damages trust and morale; positioning it as collaboration fosters resilience.
- Measure AI beyond cost savings—true ROI should include innovation, speed, and employee productivity.
- Practical leadership steps—from mid-level managers influencing upward to executives balancing adoption speed with compliance and brand integrity.
- Positive examples exist—companies that use AI to augment (not replace) their teams are achieving innovation, efficiency, and revenue growth.
Catch the Full Episode
Youtube: https://youtu.be/_bxpyNqtjxU
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5QCwh8C80JKc1rjzxklLaL?si=exw529IPRDKlQTO0On3i3w
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-easy-button-myth-shortcut-or-setback-for-seo/id1755789311?i=1000725537071
Show Note Links
Guests:
Nick LeRoy – Creator of the popular #SEOForLunch newsletter, read by thousands of marketers each week, and founder of SEOJobs.com and PPCJobs.com, two niche job boards serving the digital marketing community.
Jason Kilgore – Associate Director of SEO (Legal Division) at Internet Brands and Managing Member of Contractor Near You, LLC. With nearly 30 years of experience at companies like Dell, Apple, Thomson Reuters, and Internet Brands, Jason brings deep expertise in technology and content strategy. Recently, his team was a finalist in the 2024 Search Engine Land Awards for Best In-House SEO Initiative.
Referenced Articles & Resources:
Dear C-Suite: Stop Betting Your Future on the AI Shortcut
https://www.seoforlunch.com/p/ai-shortcut
SEO in 2025 is a Team Sport
Bill Hunt’s series on Web Effectiveness in Search (Search Engine Journal)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/author/bill-hunt/
Transcript
Bill Scully (00:00.00)
Welcome to Episode 37 of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, where Bill Hunt and I—Bill Scully—focus on the strategies and techniques that help you improve your web presence and manage global websites.
If you haven’t already, please make sure to follow the International Web Effectiveness Podcast. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. And if you’re enjoying these conversations, leaving a quick review really helps motivate us to keep creating new episodes.
In the last episode, we examined how AI is transforming the way companies approach SEO. That was Episode 36: The Age of AI—Future Proof Strategies for Smarter Search Engines.
Today, we’re going to try something a little different. We’ve invited two special guests, Nick LeRoy and Jason Kilgore, who share our observations on a major challenge rising in our industry—the big lie being sold to leadership right now: that AI is some kind of instant replacement for people and processes.
This episode actually came from an article Nick wrote, titled C-Suite: Stop Betting Your Future on the AI Shortcut. That article sparked a conversation with Bill Hunt on LinkedIn, and we’ll link to it in the show notes.
So with that—welcome, Nick LeRoy and Jason Kilgore! Why don’t you each tell our listeners a little about yourselves? Nick, let’s start with you.
Nick LeRoy (01:35.97)
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
I’ve been working in SEO for about 15 years. The first 10 were agency-side, and for the past five I’ve been out on my own. As Bill mentioned, I write the SEO for Lunch newsletter, and some people might also know me as the owner of SEOjobs.com and PPCjobs.com.
So if you’re looking for a new role—check those out.
Bill Scully (02:07.896)
Thanks, Nick. Jason, how about you?
Jason Kilgore (02:09.959)
Thanks, Bill. I’m Jason Kilgore, Associate Director of SEO in the Legal Division at Internet Brands, and also Managing Member of Contractor Near You LLC.
I’ve got about 30 years of experience across tech companies like Dell and Apple, as well as content companies like Thomson Reuters and Internet Brands.
Recently, my team was a finalist in the 2024 Search Engine Land Awards for Best In-House SEO Initiative.
If I had to sum up my career in three sentences: I went into tech because of my aptitudes, shifted to search because I found my calling, and became a leader in search to help build organizations and resilient businesses that rely on search traffic.
Bill Scully (03:06.798)
Great, thanks. All right, Bill—I think you’ve got some questions lined up.
Bill Hunt (03:11.766)
I do. Nick, let’s start with you.
In your article, you called out what you describe as the “easy button” mindset. I think in your LinkedIn post promoting it, you even said this is a conversation a lot of people aren’t going to want to see—or have.
As Bill mentioned earlier, many leaders fall for the idea that AI can instantly replace people and processes. We’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts where companies brag about making entire teams redundant because they believe AI can do it all.
So what are they missing? And why did you feel the need to write this article that really calls BS on the “easy button” mindset?
Nick LeRoy (03:59.584)
Yeah, absolutely.
The first thing I want to clarify is—I’m not trying to call out any particular company or individual leader. The reality is that executives have their feet to the fire to maximize profitability as quickly as possible. That pressure often rewards short-term decisions over longer-term strategies.
That’s why we’re seeing roles being cut. It makes the P&L look great today.
Bill Hunt (04:46.442)
But what’s the fallacy there? It sounds easy on the surface—but what are they actually missing?
Nick LeRoy (04:53.41)
Right. So the problem is—it’s not actually an easy button.
You can’t just throw a few hundred dollars at ChatGPT and expect it to replace employees with six-figure salaries. The truth is, AI tools are fantastic for augmenting the work of existing employees, but they don’t replace them. You won’t achieve the level of efficiency you think you’re buying.
And more importantly—you lose the human element: critical thinking, historical context, the ability to make judgment calls in real time. Those are things that make us as humans valuable, and they can’t be easily replicated by AI.
Bill Hunt (05:50.713)
Cool, and I want to pick up on that—what makes humans special? Jason, this one’s for you. From your perspective, with the experience you’ve had across different companies and in your current role, where do humans fit into this process?
As Nick said, it’s not as simple as replacing people. So what do humans bring to the equation that makes them irreplaceable? And looking ahead, how should businesses be thinking about this in a broader context?
Bill Scully (06:28.919)
Thank you.
Jason Kilgore (06:32.425)
Sure. When we talk about what AI can’t replace, I’d highlight two attributes: intuition and influence.
First, intuition. It’s about determining what the next right thing is for your platform to succeed in search, and then selling that idea to the people who control the approval process. SEO has always been about taking actions that allow a site to outperform its peers over the long term. That requires judgment—knowing what’s next—and then having the conversations and stakeholder buy-in to move it forward. It means advocating for the smart and judicious use of resources.
Second, influence. SEO is a team sport. Within organizations, our role is unique—and conditional. Sometimes we’re the quarterback, deciding what project to prioritize. Other times we’re the linebacker, defending and advocating for resources that belong to another team. Sometimes we’re the wide receiver. And sometimes—yeah—we’re the cheerleader.
For example, just two weeks ago, I was the loudest voice in support of a product-led initiative that meaningfully improved searcher intent satisfaction through a redesigned page template. I got up on a soapbox in a leadership meeting and made it crystal clear—especially for the executives on the call—that the improved KPIs, in this case around user engagement, were a direct result of that effort.
Jason Kilgore (08:24.425)
Exactly. Because when engagement improves, fewer searchers bounce back to Google. Over the next 13 months, that translates into sustained positive engagement signals for those URL patterns.
So yes, it’s important to celebrate wins—but equally important to give credit to the specific sources of value behind those wins. It’s on us, as SEOs, to understand Google’s ranking systems as deeply as possible. The more our business leaders align with our appreciation for how SEO investments—whether features, functionality, or capabilities—create value, the safer the organization becomes from poor or uninformed decision-making.
Bill Scully (09:26.637)
I love it. We’re big believers that SEO is a team sport. In fact, we’ve got a whole episode about that—Episode 24.
Jason Kilgore (09:27.935)
Ha! Then I owe you a quarter for using the phrase.
Bill Hunt (09:42.051)
And I think that’s key. Given your literal football background, Nick, the metaphor works perfectly.
One of my frustrations with the “AI will do it all” mindset is that people forget these tools need to be trained, guided, and operated by skilled professionals. Jason made the point well—humans are needed to frame and evaluate whether features and functions truly work for the audience.
So Nick, when you talk about this “race to the bottom,” and the fact that we still need people in the equation, can you elaborate on that a bit more? Maybe pick up Jason’s football metaphor and run with it.
Nick LeRoy (10:45.858)
Going straight for the touchdown here.
Here’s what I’d tell people in the huddle: the reality, whether we like it or not, is that AI isn’t creating new information. What it does is consume existing information, aggregate it, and then spit it back out.
Nick LeRoy (11:13.3)
The reason I harp on this is because if you literally replace everybody with AI, the best performance you can ever have is based on yesterday’s data.
In a world that rewards testing and first movers, people who are willing to try new things get rewarded. But if you take the so-called “easy button,” you’re basically saying you’ll never be the one who breaks new ground or figures out the next strategy. That sets a bad precedent for your brand.
Marketers who bring heart and creativity to the table end up being sidelined—and that creates ripple effects. If you’re a service provider, people won’t want to work with you if you’re never on the cutting edge. If you sell products, no one will want to buy from you if they’re only as good as yesterday’s products. Eventually, your brand takes a hit.
It’s a trickle effect. Leaders then have only one lever left to pull: competing on price. And I think the four of us here would agree—if your business comes down to competing solely on price, you’ve already lost.
Bill Hunt (12:52.129)
I totally agree. Let’s take that a step further.
Jason, you’re part of an in-house team managing not just SEO, but all kinds of performance initiatives. You’ve mentioned before the importance of making the business case for things. So I’ve got a two-part question:
First, where do you see AI specifically impacting internal teams, both good and bad? And second, thinking about Nick’s point—how can we use AI to build stronger justifications for the value of SEO and show the impact people bring to the table?
Jason Kilgore (13:50.559)
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Let me start here: AI is, by design, an “easy button.” And humans are naturally drawn to the easy button. We have biases, and the easier the button is, the more we latch onto it. That’s something we’ve got to guard against.
For the second part of your question—where AI takes in-house or agency teams over the next three to five years—I go back to two axioms I use to frame my perspective: specialization is differentiation, and context is king.
Before generative AI, we used to say “content is king.” But now, the game has shifted—context is king. I don’t believe AI will replace SEO. But I do believe an SEO who uses AI effectively and efficiently will replace an SEO who doesn’t.
Generative AI is great at working with a large corpus of content to create consensus. That content might be text, usage data, or other information. But the challenge is—consensus is often wrong.
So, how do SEO teams adapt? For in-house teams, the challenge is deciding where to specialize—whether that’s developing topical expertise or advancing technology capabilities like applied coding to move your website forward sustainably. You have to evaluate opportunities, then influence internal teams to act on them.
My advice for in-house teams: lean into specialization. No one knows the nuance of your CMS like you do. That’s an advantage.
Agencies, on the other hand, need to focus on two things. First, going after the soup du jour—whatever buzzword sells. Whether it’s AEO, GEO, EIEIO, or the one I just heard recently, “GasEO”—our industry never runs out of acronyms. Agencies will always chase what gets contracts signed.
But second—and more importantly—they need to unlock real value by understanding the searcher journey. Identify pain points, then create the content that reduces friction. And that journey may not be limited to Google anymore—it could involve ChatGPT or other tools.
Now, generally speaking, in-house SEO teams don’t fully own the user experience—that’s usually product, maybe editorial. But agencies can create value by specializing in unpacking that searcher journey and reducing friction.
Let me get on one more soapbox about specialization. In a business context, specialization is a superpower. Why? Because it’s easier to scale within a narrower focus. The smaller the targeted market and the fixed costs to serve it, the higher your breakeven market share—and the less competition you face.
Specialization could be geographic, but what’s most compelling is product-market specialization.
Here’s an example close to home: Google dominates search in the U.S., but Amazon actually holds the majority of product searches. Product search is a small part of the overall search market, but because of its proximity to the bottom of the funnel, it’s one of the most valuable slices of the pie.
So the lesson is—get specialized and play to your strengths.
Bill Scully (19:08.225)
Good answer.
Bill Hunt (19:09.433)
I have to say, it’s very hard for me not to just be ecstatic with everything you just said—especially the latter part. Because this is the kind of stuff I’ve been trying to write about recently. There’s one piece I’ve been holding on to that I floated past a couple of people, and they were like, “Dude, that went over my head.”
The one thing you mentioned about product—did you hear when Walmart recently did a product launch? I forget their code name for it, but they literally said in their announcement, “This will be a Google killer.” And they believed it, because of exactly what you just said about Amazon and product search.
People just automatically assume Amazon will have it, so they go straight to Amazon to look for it. Why would I go to Google first, when I know Amazon probably has it? Walmart’s doing the same thing—bringing in all these partners to backfill what they don’t have in their catalog.
And as somebody who’s worked with companies for probably 20 years to get into Walmart, I can tell you it’s a fascinating process. If Walmart gets people to think of them as a destination for any product, their real competition isn’t Google—it’s Amazon.
Now, if you follow the money—and this is where the MBA mindset sometimes takes over—it all comes back to shareholder value and capital efficiency. Everything you just said, Jason, ties into that: how do we solve the problem with the least amount of wasted capital?
And that’s what this is all about. I’m going to try not to go too far down a tangent, because I know Bill has a question queued up.
Jason Kilgore (20:37.52)
Mm-hmm.
Bill Hunt (21:05.433)
But this is why all of this has to change. In an article I wrote recently, I said there are four groups of people right now.
First, there are the SEO purists who say all of this is just new features in SEO—so think “SEO,” and none of the acronyms.
Second, there are the folks who focus on the acronyms because they believe it’s about the functionality of the new features, like answer engines. And I’m guilty of this. I wrote nine articles about how companies need a VP of Answers—someone whose only job is to focus on answering the customer’s questions.
Third, you’ve got the forward-thinking people saying, “Hey, search has been damaged irreversibly.” And a lot of that is thanks to the hucksters who promote this alphabet soup of acronyms.
Bill Scully (21:40.919)
Thank you.
Bill Hunt (22:00.981)
So my take is: let’s elevate it to a strategic level. Because for the first time in my 30 years in search, we actually have C-level attention. And the only reason we have it is because they’re losing traffic—zero-click searches, Google answering questions directly, and so on.
I get why people are trying to rebrand this space. But at the end of the day, it’s caused so much confusion and so much friction that many companies are dead in the water.
I mean, the number of companies that have paused budgets because they don’t know what to do next is staggering. I’ve had five people tell me half their budget was cut to invest in one of these new AI search solutions—all of which got multimillion-dollar investments.
Think about that. Half the budget, from companies that couldn’t even afford a SEMrush subscription before! Now they’re pouring money into these magical tools that basically regurgitate citations into content, just to get you mentioned in the same places.
And that’s the real damage—it’s created paralysis.
So Bill, I think you’ve got the other question for the group. I’ll tee it up briefly: you’re sitting in front of a CEO who’s on the fence—wondering, “What do I do?”
Bill, I’ll let you ask the actual question. But here’s the scenario: you’ve got an executive who says, “I want to pivot to AI. Maybe it’s this flashy VC-backed tool, maybe it’s a complete AI re-orchestration of our business. Either way, I see it as the easy button.”
Bill Scully (23:38.721)
No, finish it. Finish it.
Bill Hunt (23:58.27)
Okay. So the CEO says: “I want to go all in on AI. Double down. Triple down. What should I do?”
How would you get them to think critically about what they’re asking—and guide them toward a smarter, more efficient use of both human and financial capital?
How would you approach that conversation?
Bill Scully (24:31.437)
But also—in the context of slashing budgets. Right? We’re talking about replacing people, replacing processes. So, you’re sitting in front of a CEO who sees AI as a way to slash budgets.
How do you approach the conversation so they see AI as a growth multiplier instead of just a cost-cutting tool?
Nick LeRoy (25:13.846)
Well, the first thing I’d say—and I think this builds on what Jason and Bill were saying—is to focus on the unique components that humans bring versus AI.
Those are the skills that will help you, quote-unquote, “win” this conversation. And, being the data dork that I am, I’d want to bring both data and storytelling into the conversation.
Here’s the thing: a bunch of sites are losing 30, 40—even 50% of their organic traffic. And the instinct is to panic, jump ship, and chase shiny objects. But the first thing I’d ask a CEO is: Do you realize how large that remaining 50% still is?
Because we’re spending gazillions of dollars on AI tools and other “solutions,” chasing a 1–3% traffic bump, while ignoring the 50% of value that’s still sitting right there. That’s where I’d start—grounding the conversation in what’s real and what still works.
Now, forward thinking is essential. AI absolutely has a role—but it should be adopted to make our proven processes more efficient, not to abandon them.
And here’s the bigger risk: leaders are going to cut people, replace them with AI, and in five or ten years, when that generation of workers retires, who’s left to actually run these companies? Are we expecting ChatGPT to do that?
That’s the long-term problem nobody’s talking about.
So I’d combine the data—what’s still working, where the actual numbers are—with the passion: if you ignore the human element, you may save costs in the short term, but you’re eroding the foundation of your future workforce.
And if the opportunity side isn’t enough to convince them, then there’s always the FOMO angle—fear of missing out on what competitors will take if you leave it on the table.
Bill Scully (27:49.528)
Yeah. This feels a lot like the outsourcing craze—“cheaper, faster”—until quality dropped and customer experience tanked.
I think we’ll see the same thing if companies over-invest in AI while cutting people out of the process.
Jason Kilgore (27:50.239)
Yeah.
Jason Kilgore (28:08.711)
I guess the heart of the problem is: what will actually make your business more resilient?
The hard reality is that process and culture don’t have the resilience of true structural advantages. Think of things like a natural monopoly, a patented technology, or a long-term government contract. No matter how good your competitor is operationally, if they don’t have that structural advantage, they can’t compete.
That’s one point I’d make.
Now, when it comes to using AI as a cost-cutting tool—this ties directly into the structural advantage conversation. And the honest answer is: it depends.
Bill Scully (28:56.237)
Good answer. Good answer.
Jason Kilgore (28:56.777)
The SEOs listening probably all just cringed when I said that. But it really does depend—on the supply and demand dynamics for a given business.
If you believe SEO—or as some industry leaders now call it, web effectiveness—is strategically valuable, whether on the supply-cost side or the demand-revenue side, then…
Bill Hunt (28:58.702)
Hmm.
Jason Kilgore (29:23.667)
Then my advice would be: invest in developing your SEO talent. Put them in positions where they can learn the dynamics—the “secret sauce” of your business—and gain cross-functional influence. Help them learn how to be judicious, build business cases, or at the very least, involve them in the conversations so they understand the key considerations of your business.
As a practical matter, I’d advise keeping an inventory of the fixed cost-driven economies of scale you enjoy on the supply side. Ask: what features of your business allow you to deliver a largely identical product at a lower cost than competitors? Where does that live?
On the demand side, keep an inventory of what prevents various customer cohorts from getting your product or service elsewhere. What are their costs of switching? How hard is it to find a comparable replacement? How do you encourage habit? How do you get people to use your product more?
And in the SEO context, the big question is: how do you get people to Google your brand name alongside those evergreen search terms relevant to your product or service?
The clearer a CEO’s perspective is on the portfolio of supply and demand advantages, the better their decisions will be—and the more you’ll reinforce them.
One word of caution: avoid over-anchoring to just one side of the equation. Supply-side and demand-side advantages are not durable on their own, and they don’t operate in a vacuum. They are mutually reinforcing. It doesn’t matter how in-demand your product is if you can’t produce enough, and it doesn’t matter how much you produce if no one buys it.
The magic happens when scale on the supply side meets scale on the demand side.
Jason Kilgore (31:43.571)
That’s when a business is poised to truly own the market they play in.
Bill Scully (31:49.186)
Yeah, I like that. For me, to answer that question, I’d reframe AI not as a replacement tool but as a force multiplier. Use it to accelerate creativity, testing, and iteration—the things that drive growth, not just savings.
Jason Kilgore (32:00.571)
Mm-hmm.
Nick LeRoy (32:11.628)
Here’s one thing to think about real quick—sorry, Bill, for jumping in. We always talk about easy buttons, right? What people don’t realize is that in SEO, AI may not be an easy button, but it can definitely be a fast forward button.
Think about how the four of us cut our teeth in SEO. We manually wrote title tags, internal links, image alt tags—until our noses bled. That’s the kind of stuff AI can now do incredibly well, and much faster. It’s basically like having an unpaid intern.
So we’ve got two options:
- Don’t hire junior resources anymore because AI is more efficient and cost-effective.
- Or—use AI as a fast forward button.
What used to take us two, three, even four years—grinding through that foundational work—can now be compressed. Junior resources can start day one learning critical thinking, effective communication, analyzing and presenting data, assigning business value, and talking in dollars and cents.
They don’t need to know every SEO nuance right away—they can learn business first. And I’ll die on this hill: building a business and a strong brand is SEO.
The days of building a site “for SEO” and then turning it into a brand are over.
And let’s not even get into affiliate sites—that’s another conversation entirely.
Jason Kilgore (34:04.575)
Did I mention I just launched “Contractor Near You” earlier this year, Nick? Kidding. I’ll be the exception that proves the rule.
But I do want to riff on what you said, because productivity gains from AI have to be tied to measurable business outcomes.
As it pertains to this conversation: productivity should be measured in problems solved and the outcomes from those solutions.
For SEO, there are three main KPIs: crawlability, indexation, and rankings. And the observable key result of improving that chain is engagement—how people consume your content.
That’s your OKR: how searchers are engaging with the content you’ve put out.
Bill Hunt (35:13.783)
I want to throw this in. You talk about KPIs. I said this, I think it was at my PubCon keynote. The interesting thing about SEOs is that we often have KPIs we have no real control over. We can’t affect how a website is built, for the most part. We’re not in there turning wrenches. Instead, we’re at the mercy of cajoling and convincing other people to change their processes in order for us to hit our KPIs.
And Jason, I think you’re spot on with the math. An interesting point you brought up earlier—and Nick, this ties back to you too—is that I’ve not had anyone I’ve talked to, and I’m not an active SEO practitioner anymore, who could clearly tell me how much and where their traffic was impacted. What I do hear is, “We’ve lost 30, 40%.”
I had a guy say to me—he had access to the Search Console—I looked at his numbers and he’s like, “I’ve lost 45% of my traffic.” And Bill Scully actually built a really neat tool where we could extract data from the Search Console. In one case, we pulled 53,000 rows from period one, then 54,000 from period two, and compared them to see what changed.
We showed him the words where he lost traffic. One was “holidays in Turkmenistan.” And I asked, “Have you ever booked a tour for a holiday? Not a holiday as in vacation, but literally the holidays?” He said, “Never.” I told him, “Well, that was one of the words you lost the most traffic for.”
When we dug deeper, a lot of the lost traffic came from informational queries where there was no clear path to monetization. He started thinking, “Maybe I can write content about the biggest holidays—like Diwali, with all its colors and festivities—and make it a great time to visit.” He admitted, “I never thought of that. I only did it because my SEO told me people were searching for it.”
So, we asked: has anyone ever actually come to your site for that, remembered the answer, and booked a tour to Turkmenistan? He said, “I don’t think so.” And I said, “Okay, maybe let’s stop chasing those queries. Let’s move past the KPI of raw traffic and focus on doubling or tripling down on what actually moves the needle.”
One last point—I really admire what Neil Vogel, CEO of Dotdash Meredith, is doing right now in this zero-click environment. I referenced Glenn Alsup in my PubCon keynote, who showed that eight or ten big groups own something like 87% of all traffic. Nick, you mentioned affiliates earlier—those groups, at the top of the funnel, got hit hard.
And in every investor call, that’s the question: “How are you going to recover from losing 45–65% of your Google traffic?” Neil’s answer was simple: focus on quality of experience.
They admitted they had been chasing one-click traffic worth maybe 22 cents in ad revenue, stuffing pages with ads until the user experience was ruined. Now, they’re shifting. Building up their email lists. Creating content people actually want to engage with. Not one-click ponies, but multiple, deeper experiences.
Bill Hunt (39:31.934)
And Bill, I know you’ve got a question about this. How do we adapt to the reality of zero-click? Ziff Davis said at a recent event, “We’ve already assumed zero-click.” Their CEO, Vivek, basically said, “We’re running our business as if we’ll never get another click from Google again.”
And I think that’s the right mindset. If a company that once relied heavily on Google can pivot like that, the question becomes: what do we do now?
Bill Scully (40:23.985)
Yeah, not specific to that, but I’ve got a couple of thoughts. Nick nailed it with brands. I think people are going to start prioritizing brands more than they ever did, instead of thinking “Google first.”
If you can create experiences on your site that get people to come back, that’s one powerful way to cut out Google from the equation.
Another point—especially for my bigger B2B clients: yes, traffic is down. But their commercial KPIs haven’t suffered. Did it hurt to lose traffic? No. In fact, the traffic we do have is more valuable. That tells me we should double down on making the site a great experience for those highly qualified visitors.
Bill Hunt (41:18.489)
So, what you’re saying is: people should focus on web effectiveness.
Jason Kilgore (41:18.548)
Exactly.
Bill Scully (41:21.207)
There you go.
Jason Kilgore (41:22.271)
Thanks.
Nick LeRoy (41:22.742)
Well, and Bill, I think one—or maybe both—of you said this earlier. As SEOs, we’re finally at a moment where we’re starting to be viewed as respected contributors to the business. For the longest time, we were relegated to the kids’ table.
And what I mean is: mom and dad made the big business decisions, and then they’d say, “Oh, little Nick and Jason, go sprinkle your SEO dust on it and get us in Google.” It was never part of a real strategy for building a brand. The investment was in manipulating Google, or an algorithm, or people, just to create awareness.
But now, like Bill was saying—take something like “holidays in random countries.” Those were clicks we probably never deserved in the first place. The shift we’re seeing now is forcing SEOs to sit at the grown-up table. To say, “Yes, visibility is down. But I’m not going to count impressions, because impressions don’t pay my bills.”
That’s what drives me nuts—SEOs pivoting to impressions as the only KPI they know, just because AI tools surface them. The truth is, we need to take all of our marketing knowledge and apply it toward solving real business problems. Helping lift the brand and the business.
Because that’s how we get back to what you guys mentioned earlier: brand-first thinking. And that’s what Amazon and Walmart excel at. We may not beat them head-on, but each of us has a corner of our niche where we can be the Walmart of that space.
Bill Scully (43:22.935)
Good point.
Bill Hunt (43:22.969)
Exactly. And actually, Bill, one of your questions was about actionable takeaways. Jason and Nick, since you’re saying SEOs need to reposition themselves at the grown-up table—what skills or actions do they need to take to earn that seat?
Jason, you dropped some really fun economic terms earlier, which got me excited—I’m kind of the economist of this group.
Bill Scully (43:49.259)
I noticed that.
Bill Hunt (43:52.148)
But seriously, what should people focus on? Should they go get an MBA so they can talk about capital efficiency, supply-side and demand-side economics? Or, to Nick’s point, is it more about knowing how to build better business cases? Learning to speak executive language?
Bill and I have talked a few times about tying web effectiveness to shareholder value—that’s another MBA-type phrase. But what do you think? What are the two or three things that either a junior SEO, or a seasoned SEO who’s not ready to retire, should focus on to upskill, reskill, or pivot?
And maybe another angle: what are you guys actually seeing in job descriptions right now? Are companies looking for skills that most SEOs don’t have yet?
Nick LeRoy (44:57.248)
Yeah, I’ll jump in here. The two biggest skills I’d highlight are, first, effective communication.
I know I’ve said this a lot, but it bears repeating. There are tons of SEOs who can run laps around us in log analysis, canonical tags, robots.txt—you name it. But if you walk into a C-suite meeting and start throwing those words around, you’ve already lost. Period. End of story.
The key is not dumbing things down, but speaking their language. These are incredibly busy people.
Bill Scully (45:30.987)
Yeah, their eyes glaze over.
Jason Kilgore (45:35.198)
Mm-hmm.
Nick LeRoy (45:45.150)
Exactly. You’ve got maybe 14.2 seconds of their attention for SEO. So you’d better be talking about money and returns. That’s the critical skill SEOs need.
The second thing—and this ties back to jobs—is that I expected to see a wave of geo-specific or “AIO” (AI-optimization) job titles. But I’m not seeing them. Maybe one or two, usually because a company wants to look like a first mover.
What I do see consistently, though, is AI showing up in almost every job description I review. It’s framed as another tactic under the umbrella of organic search or visibility, not a new standalone discipline.
Bill Hunt (46:48.281)
Right. It’s like that ChatGPT posting—something like a $300,000 or $400,000 job. People thought it was ironic that their job description for a content/SEO person didn’t include a bunch of “geo” requirements.
And so many people online were shocked: “How could the epicenter of AI not make it mandatory?” But really, that proves your point, Nick.
So Jason—what do you think?
Jason Kilgore (47:19.523)
Thank you.
Jason Kilgore (47:25.779)
Yeah, I’d say for my fellow SEOs—brothers and sisters in arms—one of the things I undervalued earlier in my career was developing influence among leaders.
I used to get overly focused on “this cool tactic that will boost rankings if we deploy it at scale.” And sure, that has value. But the real differentiator is your ability to manage up—to influence leaders, especially when you see them heading in the wrong direction.
Here’s the catch: leaders hate criticism. The higher up they are, the more they hate it. Handle it poorly, and it can be a career-crippling move. The trick I’ve learned is framing. Don’t make it about their bad judgment. Instead, make it about circumstances.
Say: “It was the right decision at the time, based on what we knew. But now we have new information, new market learnings, and circumstances have changed. So now we need to course correct.” Use the market or their favorite AI platform as the scapegoat. That way, it feels like evolution, not blame.
My second recommendation? Be curious. That’s irreplaceable. A thousand reasoned opinions don’t beat one real case of rolling up your sleeves and figuring it out. I’ve always had side websites to experiment with, and that’s where a lot of my insights have come from—insights I later applied to my day job.
Jason Kilgore (49:37.887)
In an AI context, generative AI is especially good at coding. And I think that’s because programming languages are so structured. This year alone, I’ve used it to build more than a dozen custom WordPress plugins with very specific use cases.
My advice? Learn how to break big problems into smaller functions. The bigger and vaguer your prompt, the less useful the AI’s output will be. And if you leave gaps in your instructions, it will happily fill them in with bad logic—creating more problems than it solves.
Bill Scully (50:40.693)
Yeah, exactly. I’ve noticed the same. The more complex the question, the more confidently wrong the answer. If it doesn’t know, it just makes stuff up. You’ve really got to be aware of that.
Nick LeRoy (51:17.670)
Jason, I want to echo something you said—because I realized I only gave one recommendation earlier when I meant to give two. The second one is exactly what you just said: curiosity. Getting the reps.
Nobody steps up to the plate and immediately starts hitting home runs. You need at-bats. You need practice.
I was talking recently to someone who was struggling to get a new job. She had years of experience in SEO, but so do a lot of people. For the first time ever, SEO talent is greater than the demand for SEO services. So I asked her, “What makes you stand out?”
Her answer was, “Well, I’ve been doing this a long time.” But again—so has everyone else.
When I used to interview candidates, I didn’t care too much about their technical SEO knowledge. That can be taught. What I wanted to see was initiative and passion. Do you have a guitar website? A cooking blog? Are you active on Reddit communities?
Show me curiosity, show me you’re building something, and I’ll hire that person 9.9 times out of 10.
Bill Hunt (52:56.203)
I’ll echo that. At my agency, we almost never hired “experienced SEOs.” Maybe one exception. We certainly stopped hiring “celebrity SEOs” a long time ago.
Working with Jason’s company years back, we shifted to hiring exactly the kind of people you’re describing—passionate, curious, willing to learn. And it made all the difference.
Bill Scully (52:56.375)
That’s a great point.
Bill Hunt (53:26.239)
At my agency, we used to hire athletes—people with strong critical reasoning skills. Why? Because when you work with clients, you’re often bound by their CMS, their industry regulations, even the rules of the bar association. You need people who can adapt, who aren’t stuck in rigid old habits.
That’s the real question: what can you bring to the table that’s complementary or specialized, something other people don’t have? That’s valuable.
And one last thing, tying back to curiosity: AI can be really powerful if you challenge it. Today I tested this report that aggregated 29 different studies. The site crashed from demand because everyone wanted to see it. But when I dug in, it was basically just AI slop—consensus of consensus of consensus.
So I asked AI, “Tell me how this is wrong.” And right at the top, with the highest percentage weight, was “schema.” But when I read their methodology, they conflated structured content with schema. Those are not the same thing. Yet, because 19 different reports repeated the same flawed assumption, it became the #1 recommended tactic.
That’s dangerous. So I tell people: don’t just accept the output. Challenge it. Ask, “Why does this make sense? Give me a contrarian view.” Do the sniff test. That’s how you get real value out of it.
Bill Scully (56:08.789)
That’s a great point. Let’s zero in on this for everyone. If you had to give one or two bullet points: What AI skills should an SEO or digital marketer have today?
Jason Kilgore (56:26.495)
Coding. Learn how to create functions. If the tool you need doesn’t exist—build it.
Nick LeRoy (56:39.584)
Yeah, I’ll echo that. My advice is: don’t rely on anyone else to make your dream happen. AI has given us the ability to create MVPs—minimum viable products—without six-figure budgets. That’s huge. So stop taking “no” as the final answer. Use AI to figure out a way forward.
Bill Hunt (57:12.960)
For me, it’s critical reasoning.
Bill Scully (57:13.868)
Exactly. Critical reasoning, like you said earlier—challenge the AI and its outputs. That’s how you get meaningful results.
I’ve been experimenting a lot with prompt writing, and it’s not just saving me time—it’s helping me find more creative solutions. That’s a real edge.
All right, let’s squeeze in one last question: What are some examples of companies successfully using AI to augment their teams?
Nick LeRoy (58:08.064)
I touched on this earlier. One example is how companies are using AI to elevate junior talent. They no longer need to spend hours manually mapping redirects, so they can focus instead on things like data analysis, strategy, or even public speaking prep. That makes them better business professionals and better SEOs.
Jason Kilgore (58:37.503)
I can give two examples.
At my current job, back in late 2023 when the ChatGPT hype was cooling off, we used it for keyword clustering and topic mapping. That’s a natural fit for a language model, and it saved us a lot of time. What we didn’t do—and won’t do—is use it to write our content. That’s a hill I’ll die on. Differentiation still matters.
The second example is from a side project with a contractor site. We had a database issue: MySQL queries were slowing down page rendering. So I spent a weekend building a plugin that would crawl the site while staying inside Cloudflare’s edge, which solved the problem.
The result? Our response times in Google Search Console dropped from 3,000 milliseconds to about 500. That’s a clear case of using AI-assisted coding to create technology that directly moves a KPI.
Bill Scully (01:01:01.869)
That’s great. Bill, you got something?
Bill Hunt (01:01:09.625)
Yeah, similar to what Jason mentioned—mining data. My son was working with someone using Claude to run scenarios on code compression and routing. They had a lookup table, I think in Nutch, and he asked Claude to generate different scenarios for reducing call times.
It ended up being almost identical to what you were describing, Jason—sequencing calls and building joins to optimize extracts. Coming from a SQL background at TripAdvisor, he wrote the logic and now that company has baked it into their workflow. Anytime they make a change to their data structure, they run scenario planning first.
So whether it’s crawl speed, frequency, or data assembly, that’s another creative way to use AI: let it process scenarios exponentially faster than we could on our own.
Bill Scully (01:02:24.087)
That’s cool. I’ve used it myself for product feeds. One manufacturer I worked with had 100 distributors, and their feed to those distributors was weak. Using AI, we were able to expand their metadata and product descriptions significantly.
I’ve also been experimenting with N8n. Haven’t rolled it out for clients yet, but from an analysis perspective, if you hand it a spreadsheet and prompt it correctly, you can do all kinds of useful things.
All right—final thoughts?
Jason Kilgore (01:03:16.061)
Sure, I’ll start. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. AI is going to reshape the economics of the internet in the same way the internet reshaped newspapers. Newspapers didn’t vanish; they morphed into media and information companies. Demand for content didn’t go away.
But AI cannot replicate human intuition and influence. It can help you build things, but it can’t tell you what to build.
So my closing advice to SEOs: never stop learning. Once you’ve mastered crawling, indexing, and ranking, develop your intuition for what to do next. Then expand into business strategy. Michael Porter’s Five Forces is a great starting framework. It’s tough to apply directly to digital environments, but that’s where your specialization in search makes you uniquely valuable.
Nick LeRoy (01:04:58.11)
Mine’s simple. For years we’ve said: don’t rely completely on Google. This is the reminder. Own your audience. Own your property. That’s the key. It’s not content, it’s not links—it’s ownership. Use Google, Reddit, and other platforms to amplify your message, but don’t build your entire business on someone else’s ecosystem.
Bill Scully (01:05:33.965)
Amen to that.
Bill Hunt (01:05:35.641)
Perfect.
Bill Scully (01:05:37.869)
All right, why don’t you guys share where people can find you?
Nick LeRoy (01:05:46.358)
You can find me at nickleroy.com. I’m on X (Twitter) @nickleroy, but I’m most active on LinkedIn—just search my name and you’ll find me.
Jason Kilgore (01:06:00.755)
I’m also most active on LinkedIn—my handle is Jason A. Kilgore. I’m on BlueSky as well. And thank you to both Bills and Nick—this has been a rich, thoughtful conversation about a so-called “easy button” that isn’t so easy.
Bill Scully (01:06:24.205)
Thanks, Jason. And thanks, Nick. This has been great. I really like this format—we’ll definitely do it again and invite you both back.
A couple of closing notes: Bill Hunt has been writing a biweekly series on web effectiveness in search and on getting executive support, which you can find at Search Engine Journal. Bill also has a Substack, which I highly recommend subscribing to. Honestly, those Substack posts are what usually prompt me to read his full articles—so keep posting there, Bill.
Bill Hunt (01:07:03.427)
Substack, yep.
Bill Scully (01:07:17.293)
Also, Bill and I will be judges at the US Search Engine Awards in New York City on September 17th.
And to our listeners—we hope you’re finding value in these conversations. If you enjoyed the show, we’d love it if you’d take a moment to rate and review the podcast. Your feedback keeps us motivated and helps us keep producing these episodes.
You can follow International Webmastery on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.
Thanks, everyone.
Bill Hunt (01:08:07.53)
Thanks. Have a good one.