Reinventing SEO & Web Strategy: AI Transformation with Seth Humble

AI is rewriting the rules of SEO and digital marketing. In this episode, Jennifer Bagley talks with Seth Humble about how AI search is transforming how home service businesses show up, rank, and convert online.

Seth shares his journey from the oil fields of Texas to leading AI integration, SEO innovation, and Webflow adoption at one of the most forward-thinking agencies in the trades. They break down how AI-driven search, intelligent automation, and strategic platform shifts are giving contractors a real competitive edge.

Listeners will learn why visibility is changing, how to adapt fast, and what performance-focused strategies are driving growth in the AI era.

What You’ll Learn

• How AI search is changing SEO for contractors
• Why moving from WordPress to Webflow boosted performance
• The impact of AI-driven content and real-time visibility reporting
• How trades businesses can lead—not follow—as AI search evolves

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 04:12 — The AI Shift in SEO
• 09:43 — Evolving with AI
• 12:29 — Strategic Shifts at CI Web Group
• 22:05 — The Move to Webflow
• 28:35 — Content at Scale
• 32:53 — Changing Demand vs. Changing Discovery
• 36:06 — AI Search Visibility Reporting
• 40:39 — Outcomes Over Outputs
• 44:33 — Final Takeaways

Guest: Seth Humble

• Title: Director of Product & Production at CI Web Group
• Background: 20+ years of writing and over a decade in SEO. Seth has led AI-powered production innovation, platform migration to Webflow, and next-gen visibility reporting for home service and contractor businesses.

Resources & Links

• Catalyst for the Trades Podcast
• CI Web Group
• The Opus & Golds Group

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Transcript

Jennifer Bagley [00:00:01]:
Go quick. Good afternoon. Welcome to Catalyst for the Trades podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Bagley. I'm having a rough day today. I'm exhausted. Okay. I'm gonna disclose this before we get started because I feel like it's fair.

Jennifer Bagley [00:00:18]:
I took my mom out on date night last night and she was having a little bit too much fun and I'm feeling it today. Should say we was having a little too much fun. So. Right. But I'm so happy you guys. Today I have very, very special guest with me which is Seth Humble who's the director of production for CI Web Group and over our customer success, you guys, this is a real treat because he doesn't get to get out of the cave a lot. He's got quite an enormous team of people and has been very instrumental in helping our company transition over the last year with AI search and new technology, new teams, new everything else. Seth, I'm curious from.

Jennifer Bagley [00:01:09]:
Well first tell us a little bit about your background and your history in the industry. And you also have, I'm going to say it's not a secret. You're also a well published author. Author and amazing.

Seth Humble  [00:01:23]:
Thank you. Yeah. So a little bit about me. I am a, I'm a speculative fiction author, sort of. I've been doing that for 20 years. Have a series, multiple series of books published in both horror and sort of speculative fiction. So that's, that's pretty neat. But originally I come by way of deep West Texas, an oil country in a place called the Permian Basin, which is currently the largest producer of energy in via crude oil in the world.

Seth Humble  [00:01:54]:
I worked out in the oil field for a time. I'm the son of a oil field worker and I made my way out of West Texas as fast as I could. Was able to go to college where I thought I was going to be a minister in a church. And then my life sort of changed and I made my, made my way through a smattering of different technical jobs until I got to SEO about 11 years ago. Have been doing SEO up until about, I don't know, a year ago where we moved my specialization over from SEO into things like AI integration and also taking care of our company production pipeline for the many, many valuable clients who entrust us with being able to build their public facing image online, which we take with a great amount of seriousness and a depth of respect for all of the companies who provide home service industries, you know, and who need their. I mean I've like, I firmly believe that industries like the home services industries they're the type of things that keep the spine of the American economy straight. They're jobs that are essential, they'll never go away. And they require a great amount of technical acumen that requires a certain skill set that I deeply respect.

Seth Humble  [00:03:18]:
And so that's, that's sort of my journey in a nutshell. You know, from what is it? As it says in David Copperfield, what can I say? I was born, I grew up, right. So here I am.

Jennifer Bagley [00:03:29]:
I love that. So what have you noticed over the last two years? How, you know, I think that it's been interesting to watch everybody with experience, experience and without experience try and tackle some of the changes. How deep are those changes with AI and compared to the last 11 years? And I'll go a little further. What do you anticipate is going to change and how, how hard is this transition for, I mean, people like you, our technical SEO team, our development team and the businesses that we serve.

Seth Humble  [00:04:12]:
So just to start with, the sort of. The primary focus where I started was, was in SEO. One of the, the, the only historical example that I can liken to it is the difference between the moment when we were in the industrial age to the moment we went into the atomic age. That sort of quantum leap forward where the Manhattan Project changed everything about the way, about the entire shape of the world, like what people vested power and what people thought was important was all of a sudden it doesn't matter how fast your steamboat goes if we can power a nuclear sub. Right. So we have seen, I would say over the last two years, I would say since probably May of 2024. Yeah, is probably. That was probably when there was, I think it was Google rolled out into the, or you know, they rolled out AIO or AI optimization.

Seth Humble  [00:05:15]:
They rolled that out and then I think they forecasted this is going to gather a billion people by the end of the year. And of course it hit that mark. Right. And so we saw a lot of people who are working in my field in SEO, they still fought that everything was going to keep tracking the same way. They, they thought that hey, this is a thing, it's going to change some things. But pretty much we're just going to be like, you know, our industry is just going to adapt to it. And I don't think adaptation is a strong enough word for what's needed to happen over the last two years. Evolving is probably the right word for it.

Seth Humble  [00:05:58]:
AI search over at least the last year has. It's the single greatest adapt. It's the single greatest adoption of A new technology in modern history. The only thing that I can really think akin to it is how popular the printing press became in, you know, 1477, when everybody was like, wow, we don't have to have a thousand monks scribing all these things down if we can just do a set type press, right? But I would say one of the things that's really interesting to me is that SEO has turned into something that has evolved into. Because there's a lot of doomsayers out there who are like, SEO's over, like this is the death nail for it. But in truth, SEO and the ability to optimize your website and your client experience or your customer experience around a clear vision of who you are, what problem you solve and how you solve it differently than everybody else. That's effectively all SEO has ever been based upon an auction based system. Where originally for SEO with Google it was based on first it was based on backlinks of merit, right? That's how we said what was going to be authoritative, what wasn't going to be authoritative.

Seth Humble  [00:07:15]:
And then Google said, well, we can't keep doing that because people are going off page from Google and that means we stop making money, right? And so those tactics change. What became important changed. And so instead of it being an authority based system, it was a delivery based system of value, right? And that has, that has sort of been co opted into a sense of that is right now where AI search is, which is tell me exact or so the SERP has stopped being a question machine and it's become a solution merchant, right? And those are two very, very different things, right? The AI allows you to refine your own search while the algorithm used to refine your search for you based upon the searches that millions of other people had done if you were around the same intent. So what it offers for the user is an experience that is less like, it is less like a buffet and more like a butler or a chef who's saying, I'll let you tell me what you want and I'll be able to provide you the solution to your problem and not in the form of clicking and searching and reading. And I'm a huge advocate of reading and for as much as possible. But however, for most people who their most valuable commodity in their life, like anyone, is time, right? And the more time that I can save, the more valuable a product that saves my time is going to be to me. Like we talk about this all the time with our clients and that is like what are some of the differentiators between you and Bob's H vac. Right.

Seth Humble  [00:09:02]:
Well, we do 24 hour, we do 24, 7 service. You know, rain, snow, sleet or hail, we're going to be there. Right. So that's a differentiator for when we talk to those clients about those things. Well, tell me about what are you, what are your service calls like? Right. How long does it take for your customer service representative to close a deal? How fast can they identify a problem? We can take them through coaching and say the quicker you can prove to solve your client, your customer's problem, the higher likelihood you're going to turn that hot lead into a conversion. Right. And that's something that AI is helping people with and that's only because the, the more, the more personalization.

Seth Humble  [00:09:43]:
So if I have an AI named Valentine who knows the type of things that I like, he is integrated into my platforms that are important to me and I can coach Valentine to help me live the life that I want to live and help me save the time that I really want to save. Because I don't want to be on the phone with someone if I don't have to be. Right. Certainly not in the, in the current information age that we're living in. When people want to be more and more and more productive, it means the more and more time that you can save them, the higher price they're willing to pay in order to use your product. And Google knows that, you know, Chad GPT knows that. Everybody knows that. So it's sort of like I would, I would reference it in akin to about 600 years ago, all the empires of the world, they were trying to find more and more land.

Seth Humble  [00:10:42]:
Right. Everybody was trying to find where all the resources. In the information age there is only one resource that's people's time. Right. And all of these agentic, or I should say LLMs, they're trying to expand their reach to see how many people can we have adopt our LLM to solve their problems so that they will remain customers on this platform for as long as possible. Right. Because that's how eventually they will start generating revenue. I know that's a really long winded way to answer a single question.

Jennifer Bagley [00:11:19]:
Multiple questions in there. So you did a good job. It's. So what do you think? Is, what do you think? Well, let me back up one of the. We've obviously had to change our entire approach. Everything. If you were to list out from your historical process of building a website and generating the content and doing SEO compared now, what's the sequence of major initiatives and changes we've had to make. And what's the value of those changes or the performance on traditional search as well as AI search? Because we've been kind of tackling this like a big, giant ice block.

Seth Humble  [00:12:09]:
Right? Chipping and chipping.

Jennifer Bagley [00:12:12]:
Right, Chipping and chipping. And sometimes we're taking multiple people and chipping at the same time, cross departmentally and whatnot. But what are the. What are the biggest shifts that we've made in the last 18 months compared to even your prior history with other agencies? And what's the impact? What have we learned?

Seth Humble  [00:12:29]:
Ain't no man, to use your metaphor. Michelangelo said whenever he would look at a block of stone, he would see the figure trapped inside of it. Right. So whenever he was working on the Pieta or the Michelangelo or the Moses, he would be able to look at that block of stone and see the vision of the thing living inside of it. And I think that's what we, as a company have been desperately working toward over the last 18 months. We have integrated AI platforms that not only allow us. They. What really what they do is they take the human aspect of all the expertise that exists inside of their many, many wonderful people who work for the company, and it allows them to not only work faster, it allows them to work more effectively.

Seth Humble  [00:13:19]:
So the areas where their expertise can really help a client's account shine, they're able to do that thing more and they're able to do it better, and they're able to do it faster. Right. One of the big aspects, and one is. Has always been a big challenge in SEO, is how much research can you do in order to see where your competitors are, what keyword phrases are important at any given moment because they can change. And that used to be based around a. Well, you know, we'll have to set it and see where we're at in three months and see, like, then we'll alter our keyword phrases and see if we can win for those, and we'll build content around that. And right now, with the initiatives that we put into the company, those things no longer. It's the difference between the wheel and the rocket ship.

Seth Humble  [00:14:10]:
Right. And one of those things like. And there's nothing wrong with the wheel. The wheel still gets us around from time to time. And I know we've talked about this a little bit.

Jennifer Bagley [00:14:19]:
How the wheels fall off.

Seth Humble  [00:14:21]:
Right? How the wheels can. Right. And I. I know that there's a lot of trepidation that exists around LLMs, and I think that that's. That's a natural human response to go back to, you know, my example about the difference between the industrial age and the atomic age, when they developed the rocket system, the V2 rocket system, there were two responses to that, and that was some people decided to build bomb shelters because they wanted to try and survive this event, right? That they were afraid of. And then other people saw that same thing and they built rocket ships that went up. They didn't go down into the earth. And that for us has been our primary goal as a company, is that not only do I want everyone, all of our clients to be on this ship to go to the moon, right, to have a moonshot, but as a company, we're trying to develop a system that when we get to the moon, I already want to have built the fuel that's going to take us to Mars, right? And AI has allowed us to.

Seth Humble  [00:15:34]:
Fundamentally, when we change the speed at which we can adapt as a company, it not only makes us better SEO experts, right? With the amount of research that LLMs can help us with, especially with deep agent research that we're able to train ourselves, put the expertise of all of the years from every single one of our human experts, we can train these things to do that research for us makes us highly adaptable. It makes us capable of moving at a great speed. And we can be more certain, right? Because the more research that we're able to achieve in a shorter amount of time, it allows us to make a more informed decision. And so much of previous SEO, so much previously in SEO, especially when things were a bit nip and tuck before the refinement of Google Search console, and then we went through, well, there's Google Analytics and there's Google Analytics too. Now there's GA4 and there's all these things you're like. And every time Google changed the way that we could see the data, there was always having to be a moment where, like, how do I piece together all of my old like reports? How do I see what does an impression mean to me now where impressions two years ago were like, don't worry so much about impressions. That's not such a big deal. We want to be looking at like, sessions.

Seth Humble  [00:16:53]:
That's what we're about. How much time did they spend on page, Right? And now that is complete. It hasn't flipped. But impressions are now deeply important to show how many of these LLMs are crawling your website, finding you and putting you on an AI search.

Jennifer Bagley [00:17:11]:
Right?

Seth Humble  [00:17:11]:
And that's. And those things are only possible when you, when you change your Agency from being revolving around marketing and you start, you focus. Six. Well, it's not. And it's not just technology, but when we ask ourselves what does success look like? In the 1950s and 60s, a marketing agency was all about catchy slogan, guys with cigarettes in back rooms saying, you know, it's a great idea. Skip this one. Right, right. And, and, and they would all be guessing.

Seth Humble  [00:17:45]:
Yeah, right. They would, they would all be guessing. Right. And sometimes those guess. Some people, some of those people were very good at guessing. Right. But as marketing has shifted towards technology based and being able to refine, refine what people actually find valuable AI has presented us the ability to not. It's like being able to throw a dart not across a room and hit a bullseye.

Seth Humble  [00:18:12]:
It's like being able to throw a dot across the solar system and hit a mountain on top of Neptune. It's that pinpoint accurate. And the development of those technologies and the embracing of those technologies, it's what I mean, it's the, I mean it's, it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning bolt, as Mark Twain would say. Right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:18:37]:
Yeah. 100. 100. It's. We're not even the same company. I feel like we just, we're a startup, right. And we're operating more the tech company with business intelligence at scale, quantum computing, which is so interesting. But it does feel like we just started over.

Seth Humble  [00:18:59]:
Right? And it doesn't. But that, and that is the thing, the great thing about us starting over means that the companies that we service, they don't have to do the starting over. We, we've already done it for you. Right. We've piled together months and months and months of research, of trial and error, trying things, every single possibility. What could work better, right? What can work faster for us? And that's only comes about when you have the bravery. One of the things we talk about in agile development, we talk about transparency. Bravery.

Seth Humble  [00:19:29]:
Courage to be able to say it's okay to fail. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. We'll find something that will work.

Jennifer Bagley [00:19:36]:
Right.

Seth Humble  [00:19:37]:
And I love working at a company. Yeah, you get a lot of cuts at the plate. And I love working at a company that's willing to take risks. Right. I think it's boring and I think, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're operating in an old SEO structure and an old research structure where you have, you have 20 people all trying to do the research that an AI or that an LLM, a trained LLM can do in 30 seconds what it takes your 20 person team a week and a half to do. Right. Just simply not what success looks like for the future. And that's not to disparage other agencies from doing what they think is best.

Seth Humble  [00:20:26]:
It is only that if you don't see the future, it will fly right past you, leaving you in the past. Right. And your agency model won't work. You have to be a platform. Right. You have to be. Right.

Jennifer Bagley [00:20:39]:
Yeah.

Seth Humble  [00:20:42]:
You have to be willing to. And that means, and this is a big thing for, I think certainly for our Senior Director of growth, Jasmine, for being willing to get on calls with clients and being willing to say everything's about to change. But that's okay because we're here to help it. We're here to help you change with it. And it's going to be scary because all change is scary. Right. But the main thing is it's like, hey, but don't pull a rip cord.

Jennifer Bagley [00:21:10]:
Right.

Seth Humble  [00:21:10]:
We're in a little. It's going to feel like we're in a free fall. But don't worry, this isn't a free fall. This is a controlled dive.

Jennifer Bagley [00:21:16]:
Yeah.

Seth Humble  [00:21:16]:
Right. So I'm, I'm sure as a, as a CEO, and you know that we're deeply proud of the, the work that the account managers do in order to tell clients we understand where everything is headed. Right. Take my hand. It's going to be dark for a minute. But don't. That's okay. I'm a lantern lighter.

Jennifer Bagley [00:21:37]:
We got you. Right, Yeah, I agree with that. What, what is your thoughts on the technology infrastructure? So just web. We made a, an enormous move to move from WordPress to Webflow. We've been a WordPress agency for 20 years. I know I got a lot of flack for it. Pretty sure everyone thought you're freaking crazy. What have you noticed? It's.

Jennifer Bagley [00:22:05]:
It's obviously requires significantly more skill to be able to build an AI enabled low code environment. You can't buy a 45 theme off a forest or off of theme forest and then go download 30 plugins from the Internet and like, you know, put the site together like Legos. It's more complicated.

Seth Humble  [00:22:30]:
Right.

Jennifer Bagley [00:22:30]:
But is it worth it? What have you noticed?

Seth Humble  [00:22:33]:
It's absolutely worth it for a couple of reasons. Number one, when you put together a website like Legos, right. That means the stability of the thing can get kicked over in the middle of the night. Now all the pieces are everywhere. Now what do I mean by that? I mean, and again, WordPress has had its issues. Those have been public, right? But the security vulnerability right now for WordPress websites, because of all of the plugins required in order to make your site technically excellent. And adding all those things on affects your performance. So now you have to ask yourself what's more important to me, security or speed? But with a, with a platform like webflow, you don't have to ask yourself that question.

Seth Humble  [00:23:18]:
Right? The refinement, who is it? I think it was, I think it's Archimedes who said. No, it's Aristotle who says that the beauty or the genius of the thing is found not in its complexity, but in its simplicity. And low code websites that allow things to perform at a high rate of speed but also have high security protection. And that means that their performance is greater, which means Google will see the value of that higher grade performance. Does that mean a WordPress website can't rank? Absolutely not. Right? If you're, if your content and your user experience is excellent, you can rank, but why try to rank with one hand, handcuff behind your back, right? There's no reason to do that. And I would encourage folks, when you're talking, you know, if you're not a CI web group client, I would hope you have a really good relationship with your web developer and say, hey, talk to me about what it would mean for us to move to webflow. Talk to me about what are our security vulnerabilities? What does success look for us? What does success look like for us moving forward with these low code websites? How important is it? And I would hope that they would be able to have a transparent conversation with those developers and the developers would be able to say, you're going to have to move eventually.

Seth Humble  [00:24:41]:
It's just about when you want to pull the trigger. Because blocky websites that have that many security vulnerabilities, that have that amount of technical debt when they're trying to be crawled and then indexed, like those things matter. They absolutely matter. And that's why, like, did we make a bold statement about moving to webflow? We sure did. Were we a little bit ahead of the curve? Maybe a lot ahead of the curve, but. But I'd rather, I would rather be the first person and on a, on the way to the gold rush to California and have to find all the gold rather than be the person who's in the middle of the gold rush and then has to fight everybody else to, to get the gold. Like, I'd rather be there first. I'd rather settle an undiscovered country for me that's more exciting, right? Does it mean that, you know, they're going to be challenges? Sure, hardships are part of the game, but I mean, if, if it wasn't hard, like the hard is what makes it great.

Jennifer Bagley [00:25:41]:
Yeah, I agree with that. So migrating to webflow, we made another bold move and we decided to take test what would happen if we built like over rethought the way that we generate content and structure the site and we challenged the team. I remember having the conversation with you and I was like, so what if, you know, I don't know for how long, but we need to test what would happen. We have them in webflow. We were already rewriting the content that they were bringing over and expanding it and making it better so we'd meet the EAT requirements. But what if we were to expand the content we were writing for them and just include every single service, every single city and every combination there? And I remember sitting with you and I saw your, I saw your room calculator turn on and you're like, hang on a minute. So that would be like if they were plumbing and H vac and electrical, and you had seven services for every single service within that and you had them in 30 or 40 or 50 cities and you're saying you want to do all of those and all of those and then times each other. And I look in your face like you want to do what you.

Seth Humble  [00:27:07]:
I beg your pardon. Right, I'm sorry, one more time, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:27:12]:
I saw your mask going on.

Seth Humble  [00:27:14]:
Like, I know, I know. And when we start talking about exponential amounts of content, that's a scary thing. Like, just to be, you know, perfectly honest, like, that's a scary thing to be like, yeah, but what if we just did everything right? And I think that is a big swing and I think that taking big swings matters. And I think that, that the willingness to be able to take risks to. I mean, the most important question that for me, that a product manager, or there are two of them that a product manager asks are, what problem are we trying to solve? That's number one, right? And then. But the other one is what if, right? What if we lived in a world where the content that we wrote was so vast and it was. So what if it lived inside of an environment that when Google saw it, it was like, this website covers everything. This is valuable for every single person in all of these cities who are going to need these, these services, right? And then there was the other part of that conversation was, hey, what about keyword clustering, right? What about that strategy.

Seth Humble  [00:28:29]:
Right. But we took it in another direction in a way that going to get it done.

Jennifer Bagley [00:28:34]:
That was another.

Seth Humble  [00:28:35]:
And then how, and then how are we going to get all this content?

Jennifer Bagley [00:28:38]:
There was a budget and how many resources do I get? Discussion and.

Seth Humble  [00:28:41]:
Right.

Jennifer Bagley [00:28:42]:
And what time, what's it going to cause in delays and it's going to take us longer to get sites done. These are all fair, fair, fair questions. And is it worth.

Seth Humble  [00:28:54]:
Is it worth it? Is that the question?

Jennifer Bagley [00:28:56]:
That was one of them when we.

Seth Humble  [00:28:58]:
Were going through what right was the risk. It worth the biscuit, as they say. And, and I think the answer, I mean, bearing out and looking at the performance of the websites that have used that, that content environment, I would say absolutely, I would. Is it, is it a bigger lift at the front end of or at the middle portion of production? It absolutely is.

Jennifer Bagley [00:29:20]:
But I remember at some point asking you guys how many pages you had in your production queue and it was over a million.

Seth Humble  [00:29:28]:
Yes, that is correct. There's. There were. There are a million pages, right, which is a big number, right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:29:36]:
That's a lot of work.

Seth Humble  [00:29:37]:
It's a big. It's a lot of work. But those stressors, when they show up, allow a team to adapt, right? They make, they force us, you know, big problems force us to think outside of the box, right? And it requires us to adapt. And so we said, what would it mean, you know, if we hired 10,000 people to write a page a day, right? We could get through all this content. And I don't know how long that would take, right? But that's a big, that's a big chunk into payroll, right? And so you, you have to think, how do we do this? How do we work smarter, not harder, right? How do we become more efficient? How do we refine ourselves? And not, not just, not just the company, but every single person who's working within that company. How do I refine myself? How do I reach, right? How do I find what you could call sort of the Icarus point, right? That, that point where you sail all the way to the sun and you've built the wings that are strong enough to be able to reach out and scoop out a portion of sunlight? That's where you want to be, right? And that's. That for me is like, it's. Is the biggest driving target for what we're doing because there's a lot of strategies that they're waxing wings, they're gonna melt and you're gonna fall.

Seth Humble  [00:31:01]:
But if you refine and you dare to Fly high and dare to strive. You can get to that place where, you know the space between you and your goal. It shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until you reach that point. And that for me is, that's professional nirvana. Like, I just love that to pieces.

Jennifer Bagley [00:31:28]:
I, I've had five strategy sessions this morning talking to new companies. These were all roofing companies and 100% of them, well, from the last three weeks, 100 of the strategy sessions that I've had. Every company is dealing with a declining, what they think is declining demand or performance, and they think it's due to economy and interest rates. Whereas if you compare our clients that are growing and their impressions are up hundreds of thousands, their views, their sessions, their calls and so forth, there's obviously, you know, I've tried to explain it like you. There's a whole group of human beings that used to eat at this restaurant, and over the last couple months they stopped eating there and they're now eating at this other restaurant you don't even know exists. So it doesn't mean there's less people eating, it just means they moved and you're not positioning yourself in front of them. And it's been, it's been interesting because literally companies, I'm watching them convince themselves that this is an impossible economy, that the business isn't there. People don't want to spend.

Jennifer Bagley [00:32:53]:
Their roof is leaking and they don't want to fix it or their H Vac system's not running and they're not going to spend the money because of interest rates are. Because they're fearful of spending money. Right now, from your vantage point, because you get to see both, is that the case, is demand actually down or has it shifted?

Seth Humble  [00:33:11]:
No, I think it's shifted. I think now I, I should be very clear. I'm not an expert in economy. Right. But I do as a team, as a company, we keep our finger pretty close on the pulse about where things are at in terms of the, of the economic factors that really matter. Right. Is, is family spending actually down in your area? This can depend vastly on where you are located in the country. Right.

Seth Humble  [00:33:43]:
I think we are seeing a shift in the way that people find their solutions. And if you're not in that space where people find their solutions, then you are effectively a gas station on a road to nowhere. Right. We've got a, we need to at least get to a point where your ability to show up in these population centers that are moving way faster. Like, if you think about it, it was only 20 years ago that social media came and took over everything and, and all of a sudden people started getting recommendations on social media like have you and every, like everyone's flying and giving referrals. So now all of a sudden metas are at the time Facebook. What if we did advertisements? Because now everybody's talking about these things. What if you generate.

Seth Humble  [00:34:34]:
And that was still revolving around authority. Right. Social media is no longer that space. Then it was the serp. You can find whatever you want in this. In this space. Right. And now it's shifting to AI search and if you're not in an LLM's ability to show up and I don't know if the word is rank and I think that's going to become more and more of an outdated term.

Jennifer Bagley [00:35:00]:
Yep.

Seth Humble  [00:35:01]:
But if you are discoverable by both your reputation, the reputation of your service, which for practical purposes means your GBP has to be updated, responded to reviews need to be coming in with high velocity, high quality. That is a factor. We know that your website, does it tell clearly the LLM. This is who I am. This is the problem I solve. This is what you should expect when you get me to solve your problem. And here is typically what I cost those factors. If your website becomes a content, a repository of who you are and you take into account some other things like having a low coded website and having a partnership with a company that cares enough to be able to move you in that direction, to help guide you along that way, then that's how, that's how you're going to find yourself in those spaces in the coming future.

Seth Humble  [00:35:58]:
Especially with things like when A. When LLMs become AI assistants. Because that's where it's headed.

Jennifer Bagley [00:36:06]:
Yeah, 100% last thing I know. We're getting close to time. Krista is doing a good job reminding us. Yesterday we launched our. Have you seen our AI search visibility reports yet? You have seen it?

Seth Humble  [00:36:20]:
I have seen it, yes.

Jennifer Bagley [00:36:21]:
Okay so I saw it. Yesterday we launched which essentially is tracking the most common queries conversations on Right now we're, we're set up on three so I think we're monitoring Claude, Gemini and gp. Yes ma'. Am. So we're monitoring those platforms to understand the conversations that are being had from consumers with AI and then we're monitoring based on those conversations where our clients brand is mentioned as a solution to the query or conversation and where they're competitors and that's now becoming the feeding ground that's training our content writing agentic network to develop additional content to try and get our clients brands to be mentioned. What, what do you think the power is of having that kind of visibility at the tip of your fingers day by day? And what do you think the impact will be? Because we just would. This rolled out yesterday, so not all of our clients. If you guys are looking at your content yet, it's coming.

Jennifer Bagley [00:37:41]:
Give minutes.

Seth Humble  [00:37:43]:
Right?

Jennifer Bagley [00:37:44]:
What, what is your thoughts of the. The power of that? It's almost like being able to see search volume and CPC and so forth by keyword. Right, right.

Seth Humble  [00:37:54]:
In real time. In real time.

Jennifer Bagley [00:37:57]:
In real time.

Seth Humble  [00:37:59]:
And I think I want, I want us to all to imagine a world. What if you'd been able to go through your entire schooling experience that while you were taking the test, you were able to say, is it A, B, C or D? And you put your finger on B and it goes, it's not that one. And you go, see? And he goes, it's that one. And it's literally giving you the answers while you are taking the test. That's the type of world we can live in. What if we could live in a world where we knew immediately how effective we were being across the major LLMs? And that's the world we live in. Right. Right now with that tool, we're able to course correct, not wait for someone to be like, well, I have a meeting with a client and we don't love the numbers that we're seeing.

Jennifer Bagley [00:38:49]:
We.

Seth Humble  [00:38:49]:
What we'll be able to say is, hey, you know, hey, Jen, we saw on your. Your H Vac website that you weren't trending in the right direction for chat GPT. We saw it the day that it started happening. We followed it for 24 hours and then we changed our strategy based upon that. That is. That is adaptability. So fast it feels like foresight. Right.

Seth Humble  [00:39:14]:
And that's what we want to be. We want to be the company that's able to tell you it's more important, or at least it's more exciting to me to be a company who doesn't have to always say here's where you were for last month, but we're a company that's able to say, here's where we are and here is where we're going. That's more exciting for entrepreneurs. It's more, and it's honestly a better conversation than focusing on the past because we're an agency that is living for the future while doing the work today.

Jennifer Bagley [00:39:47]:
I would say, yeah, I would agree with that. Okay, I have one more question.

Seth Humble  [00:39:52]:
Sure.

Jennifer Bagley [00:39:54]:
As. As someone who managed SEO teams for a very, very long Time. One of the, one of the struggles I've always had running an agency has been wanting to know a. What needs to get done, how do we prioritize it, what got done versus I feel like, I feel like as an agency owner, I've always had to. When I'm trying to understand how we're progressing or what we've done or what worked on, I feel like I could go into Asana and get, you know, a project list of kind of these bold topics like researched metadata or evaluated, blah, blah, blah, or did a technical analysis. And it was these really broad kind of like assess or, or evaluate or.

Seth Humble  [00:40:39]:
Refine all these big verbs.

Jennifer Bagley [00:40:42]:
Big verbs. Right, right. Compared to where we are now and being able to see exactly what needs to be able, what needs to be done. Not because it's in an SOP and it's a checkbox in Asana.

Seth Humble  [00:41:03]:
Right.

Jennifer Bagley [00:41:03]:
Project management system, but because the AI has went out and evaluated what you're competing with the SERPs, the AI engines, and evaluated what you have. And then it's continually making, making recommendations to be able to compete with. Not check off a list of SEO tasks, but the modifications that are necessary in order to compete based on the, the competitors and the SERPs and the algorithm changes and the AI engines. Today, from your vantage point in managing a team of SEOs, what's the difference from accountability standpoint and the difference from for clients wanting to know, don't just politics and show me where we are.

Seth Humble  [00:41:52]:
Right, right. And here's, here's the difference in the former version of that, you are basing your success based on outputs. Right? How many, how many check marks did Tony get in the SEO column today? Right. And excuse me, what I want to be focused on is not outputs, but outcomes. And when we're able to have an agentic network that helps us understand these outputs need to be done, bang, they're done. So now all of the expertise of all of your humans, they can look at the effect, they can look at the outcome, which then tells us, here's how we were successful for you. Right? Here are all of the pieces of data that we funneled together and then use our human experience and discernment to be able to say this is the best way forward. Right.

Seth Humble  [00:42:51]:
AI can do a lot of things. It's really great at accomplishing goal based tasks, but you still need someone piloting the ship. Right? There's not an autopilot, at least not yet. And that level of human discernment that can only be refined by way of things like experience and a willingness to remain deep inside of the current happenings of an industry like SEO or the H Vac industry, or the economy revolving around people spending money on H Vac systems. Right. That's when you. Your AI makes your wonderful humans a force multiplier, and it makes them not less valuable, but exceedingly more valuable, I would say.

Jennifer Bagley [00:43:41]:
I agree. I love being able to log in and know not just the results, but I do love being able to see what exactly got done.

Seth Humble  [00:43:51]:
Yeah.

Jennifer Bagley [00:43:53]:
And then I can ask questions like, what made you prioritize those things first? What made the first things we tackled this month? Because it's no longer a vague verb. It is practical actions, step by step, day by day, knowing what was deployed, what was not deployed, void. New world we're living in. So with this, what would you. What would you leave for our audience? What would you encourage them to kind of summing everything up, you know, today, tomorrow, what would you recommend?

Seth Humble  [00:44:33]:
I would say that Isaac Asimov, in one of his great works of science fiction, one of the things that he says is, one day you will wake up and realize you are living in the future. And you are every person who woke up today. You are living in a future that in the 1990s and the early aughts, these were things that people were dreaming about. Right. And the great thing about living in that world is that you're living in a world that is rife with change. Absolutely. But that change represents an opportunity. And I would advise, whether you're one of our clients or you're someone else's client, I would simply wake up every day and say, how can I shape my dream and the future that I'm living in? Right.

Seth Humble  [00:45:23]:
And be bold and be willing to say, like, whatever you are living in a world where whatever you dream, you can truly build. And all it takes sometimes is finding the right people to build that dream with. So I would advise people, what can I do today? Right. That's what I would ask myself. Yeah.

Jennifer Bagley [00:45:44]:
I love that. I love that. Seth, it's been amazing having you on. Thank you for stepping away from all your and your 280 projects. Thank you so much. I always enjoy talking with you. And thank you for leading and being willing to pivot and change and drag the troops with you kicking and screaming.

Seth Humble  [00:46:06]:
Right. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Jennifer Bagley [00:46:10]:
Thank you. And for everybody that's watching you guys, thank you for taking an hour, 45 minutes out of your time today. I know your schedules are busy, so we appreciate you being with us. Of course. Subscribe to the channel. Drop us a comment. Feel free to throw out questions you guys can find us on. Just start AI IO, Join the community.

Jennifer Bagley [00:46:33]:
Safe space to ask lots of questions. Thank you. Krista and I would throw out get comfortable being uncomfortable because that's where greatness happens. We're out of here. Thank you.

Seth Humble  [00:46:47]:
Thank you.