Robert Spinrad on why good SEO is good AI visibility

Most agencies are still deciding what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad of SEOM Interactive already has an answer, and it is not the one being sold. He joined the Philadelphia agency straight out of Temple in 2015, when it was fifteen people, and now runs the SEO function across a team of about forty. Key takeaways Do not optimise for the platforms. Improve the site so the platforms have a reason to trust it. Same work, completely different instruction. Be wary of anyone calling themselves an AI expert. The whole thing is new and everyone is learning, including him. Humble experts. His phrase for the honest posture: know what you know, admit what you do not. Keep AI traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits against two hundred thousand from Google organic. Report on data, focus on the money. The analytics are context. Leads and revenue are the conversation. Their PR requires a real owner quote. No AI-generated response is accepted, on principle and for the outcome. On this page Do not optimise for the platforms The fear of going backwards Humble experts Report the data, focus on the money Digital PR with an actual human in it People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Do not optimise for the platforms So don’t optimize for the platforms, but improve your site in a way that these platforms will actually trust you and use you in their results.— Robert Spinrad This is the internal argument SEOM keeps having, and it resolves a lot of the noise. The instruction to optimise for a model invites gaming, invites shortcuts, and invites a strategy that expires when the model updates. The instruction to be genuinely worth citing produces the same technical work and does not expire. The fear of going backwards I’m a little scared that we’re going to go backwards now.— Robert Spinrad The worry is reputational. SEO spent fifteen years living down its own spam era, and a flood of cheap generated content is the fastest available route back to being the thing marketers apologise for. The conversation includes Jeremy’s own confession from that era, which is the point. The people who lived through it are the ones most alert to the pattern repeating. Humble experts I think we encourage clients to be wary of people saying they are AI experts because this whole thing is brand new. We’re all learning.— Robert Spinrad I think a good term I want to use is we’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know we don’t know, and that’s OK.— Robert Spinrad It is a good phrase because it survives contact with a sales meeting. It is not false modesty, it is a claim about method, and a client can check whether you beh...