Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue that most AI SEO tools automate only traditional SEO work and will become irrelevant unless they 'skate to where the puck is going.' They discuss agentic workflows, productizing SEO tasks, and why agencies need A-players to leverage AI effectively.
AI will replace you if you're mediocre. But, you know, I can actually pivot over into this one over here. I saw this guy that's making those jets. You know what I'm talking about? The, the Boom Jets, like these new supersonic jets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But Boom, the company that has, I think, potential orders from like United Airlines and a few others.
So founder, CEO, Boom Aero. So he tweeted this today. He says, most surprising thing to me about AI, As of yet, there's no discussion about equivalent of SEO for AI. So all these people start responding with all their products. Oh, we're working on this right now. We're doing this right now. I just started to look at everyone's products this morning. And so I, I respond here. I'm like, as I read through the comments, it seems people are building AI tools that serve today's version of SEO. And that's fair because today's AI SEO, quote unquote, is still very much traditional SEO. But the problem is these tools will become irrelevant because they aren't skating to where the puck is going. So all this baloney everyone's talking about in the comments over here is just people trying to optimize, right? Yeah. Even the, the 25,000 words I just told you or the internal linking stuff, that's just today's SEO. Like, I don't think it's anything particularly innovative. I think it makes things a little easier. I just think this stuff is going to completely change. So all the crap you guys are talking about in these comments over here, it's not AI SEO. You're just, you're just a little bit, you're making it traditional SEO a little easier, but it's all irrelevant in a couple of years.
So someone pitched us the other day on automated AI, I mean automated SEO through AI. We took the call, we knew the person and, you know, they're reputable.
Mutual friend?
No, you don't know. They worked at iProspect in the past. They have a new job somewhere else and they ended up coming to us and they're just like, look at all this tech that we have that can do SEO through AI and you don't need as many humans. And we're like, Okay, so it finds content gaps, it helps you find keywords, it tells you what to write on, helps you write that kind of stuff, gives you ideas on what to fix for duplicate titles and meta descriptions. And I was just like, this is nothing novel. A lot of companies, including ours, have this. I wouldn't say this is proprietary tech. I would say this is just table stakes and this is nothing revolutionary.
This is just what it is right now. And like, you better, if you're going to do this stuff, both of us, We should be passing the efficiencies over to our customers and they expect that. That's all it is. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com. And we'll see you on the other side. That, that really all it is.
And I was talking to Sujan last night. I was talking to her randomly about SaaS companies and valuations, and we hopped on over to switching topics to SEO. And we were both talking about how everyone's saying that AI is going to replace services, and we're just like scratching our head and we're like, yes, there's a lot of table stakes when it comes to AI and SEO or even pay-per-click. But that's just standard. Everyone's doing that. What's unique that you can do that AI can't easily do? What's unique that you have in your head for different creative strategies or, you know, campaigns that no one else has ever tried that you want to end up running? That's the stuff that's actually giving companies leverage and those are the wins, but you got to find them. And what I think marketing shifting to, and I know you agree with this, It's not about AI replacing everything. It's that AI will do the basic mundane stuff that you can get C and D players to do all day long, maybe even some B player stuff. But you still need the A players. And eventually there'll be— you'll have agencies with just mainly A players. They'll get paid more and you'll have less B players and you may have some C players. You probably will have no D and F players.
Yeah. I, I, I, this is something I continue to repeat to my team over and over. And I actually showed them that graph. I made this ChatGPT images graph, right? Where it shows like your face at the top and then it shows like these happy AI bots. And then under that there's like 4 AI bots per each one. And then one person on the team, she was like, but I don't want to just be managing all these robots. I was like, that's not the point. The point is make a list of all the things you hate doing right now. You will not be doing those things anymore. Like the thing you, you like doing, you like doing creative strategy, you can do that all day. And then you can, all the other stuff, you can eliminate it. And so everyone has different things that they hate. That's how I look at this. And then if you're an A player, great, you get to stay here. Right. And I repeat this over and over. So now people are down, they understand when we, when, when we let someone go, they're like, they understand. Yeah. That person's not going into where we're trying to go. And so I, I, I think it's on you as a leader to just keep repeating this because, you know, as a leader, one of your jobs is to be the chief reminder officer. It's like being a parent. You have to just stop, stop jumping off that thing. Stop jumping off that thing.
Yeah.
And they won't do it. Right.
So. Yes. And on top of this, not only will you not have to do the, you know, the stuff that's mundane, boring, that can easily be automated, like the simple processes, but the stuff you enjoy doing, like let's say creative strategy, like Eric was talking about, you should be able to do it more efficiently and better with the help of AI. Doesn't mean AI will replace you. It should help you do your job better.
AI will replace you if you're mediocre. But anyway, guys, hope you guys enjoyed that session. That is it for today. We're gonna be recording in Miami using my DJI Osmo next week. Neil and I will be, and, uh, we'll see you in Miami. See you in Miami.
