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What a 10-Year SEO Freelancer Taught Me About AI Search, Scaling, and Saying What You Actually Do

I recently sat down with Benas Leonavicius, a Lithuanian SEO freelancer who’s spent a decade navigating e-commerce, SaaS, and personal branding clients — and is now pivoting to build a full agency focused on keynote speakers and coaches. You can listen to the full episode on the Unscripted SEO Podcast or read the full interview recap here.

What I want to share here are the parts of the conversation that stuck with me — the moments where I heard my own experience reflected back, or where Benas said something that reframed how I’m thinking about SEO strategy right now.

The SaaS Trap Is Real — And I’ve Lived It

When Benas started describing his frustrations with SaaS clients, I felt it in my bones. I spent a significant chunk of my career at Raven Tools — a major SEO SaaS platform — and later worked with other SaaS companies as a freelancer. Benas nailed the core problem:

“Although I can provide a lot of value to SaaS companies, at the end of the day, I might only have one or two clients like that per month, and then I cannot scale.”

The throughline isn’t the strategy. The strategy is usually solid. The problem is the organizational machinery you have to fight through just to make the most basic implementation happen. I’ve personally been in a position where I was submitting JIRA tickets just to edit a meta description. You write the ticket. You wait in the development queue. You hope the lead developer doesn’t de-prioritize your 20 title tag updates in favor of a product feature. And you’re sitting there with an expensive monthly retainer, writing ten times more optimization tasks than the development team will ever get to.

That’s not SEO. That’s documentation for work that never happens.

It’s why I genuinely respect that Benas made the deliberate call to stop taking SaaS clients. For freelancers trying to build a sustainable practice, the real question isn’t “how much does this client pay?” It’s “how much of my actual capacity does this client consume?” Those are very different math problems.

Why Speakers and Coaches Are Low-Hanging Fruit

I’ve noticed a pattern across the last several podcast guests who are keynote speakers or business coaches: their websites are a mess from an SEO standpoint. Not because they’re bad at their jobs — most of them are genuinely great at what they do — but because their entire world runs on networking, word of mouth, and LinkedIn. The website is an afterthought.

Benas put it plainly: “They don’t really care about that stuff. They don’t really understand that stuff. The website is usually an afterthought.”

This is the cobbler’s shoes problem. These are people who get paid to communicate persuasively in front of rooms of hundreds of people. They close deals, command stages, and influence organizations. And then their website says something like “Transform Your Leadership Mindset for 2026” without a single mention of the actual service someone would search for.

Imagine targeting “leadership keynote speaker” and not having the word “leadership” on your own homepage. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s most of them.

For anyone doing freelance SEO consulting, this niche is worth paying attention to. The baseline is so low that fundamentals produce immediate results. And as Benas pointed out, the keywords they’re targeting aren’t usually that competitive either.

My Take on the AI Search Consistency Problem

This is the one that’s been living in my head since we recorded.

I brought up a study showing that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI overviews give the same answer to the same query only about 25% of the time — depending on the user, their location, and their search history. Benas’s clients hear that and say “I don’t care, I still want to be there 25% of the time.” And fair enough. But the deeper problem for our industry is this: how do you build a repeatable service offering around an outcome that’s fundamentally probabilistic?

Traditional SEO ROI math works because rankings are relatively stable. You rank number three, you estimate click-through rate, you project traffic and conversions. That model breaks down entirely when the same query returns wildly different answers to different people. The Anchorman line fits here — “60% of the time, it works every time.” That’s not a track record. That’s a coin flip with extra steps.

Tracking makes it even harder. There’s no Search Console equivalent for ChatGPT yet. Benas thinks that’s inevitable — I agree — but right now you’re optimizing blind. Most of the third-party tracking tools claiming to measure AI search performance are, in his words, not really providing any real tangible results based on the way AI works.

That said, this isn’t a reason to ignore AI search. It’s a reason to be honest with clients about what you’re actually measuring and why.

The Tiered LLM Sourcing Model You Should Know

This is probably the most practically actionable thing from the entire conversation, and it came out of a discussion I’d had previously with Alejandro Mejia from Get Me Links.

Here’s how LLMs actually retrieve information when answering a query:

They check their training data first
If that’s insufficient, they run a Google search
They pull from first-tier high-authority sites in the results
If those don’t answer the query fully, they dig into second-tier sources

The implication is significant: getting content ranked matters even when it’s not on your own website. If a trusted third-party publishes a listicle featuring your business and that article ranks well, it becomes a viable citation source for AI-generated answers. You don’t need the click. You need the mention, on a trusted page, that ranks.

Benas confirmed this from his own experience in the keynote speaker niche: “For you to be on ChatGPT, you basically need to be on either the speaker bureau’s websites or you need to be on those listicles because that seems to be one of the primary sources.”

This is what I mean when I talk about digital visibility being more about the entity than the website. Your brand’s presence across trusted third-party sources directly feeds how AI models learn to associate you with a topic. Direct traffic increases because people find your brand in AI answers, speaker bureau pages, and listicles — and then search for you by name later.

Ask ChatGPT What It Referenced. Seriously.

One thing I mentioned in the conversation that I want to expand on here: one of the most underused competitive research moves in AI search is simply asking the AI what it cited.

If you query ChatGPT in your niche and ask it to surface its sources, it will tell you. Try getting that out of Google. You can’t. But with AI search, you have a direct map to the pages and sources that the model trusts in your industry. That’s your link building target list. That’s your PR outreach list. That’s where you need to get mentioned.

It’s early days. The accuracy isn’t perfect. But as Benas said, “I think what we’re playing with is probably the worst version AI will ever be.” The sourcing transparency will only get better from here, which means the practitioners who figure out how to use it now are going to have a real head start.

Should New People Get Into SEO Freelancing?

I asked Benas this directly, and he gave an honest answer: probably be cautious. He acknowledged that for those of us who’ve been in this industry for decades, the uncertainty is manageable because we have established clients, proven case studies, and a foundation to adapt from. For someone starting from zero, you’re learning a skill during a transition period where the destination is genuinely unclear.

That said, I’d add a counterpoint: the practitioners who will win over the next five to seven years are probably the ones who stop waiting for AI search to “mature” and start building expertise now, when the frameworks are still forming. The question isn’t whether AI search becomes optimizable the way Google is — it will. The question is whether you’ll have built up enough reps to be credible when clients start demanding those results at scale.

Fundamentals Are Not a Fallback

To close the conversation, I made the comparison to martial arts training — if you’re learning karate or boxing, you spend most of your time on footwork. Not flashy techniques. Not advanced sparring. Footwork. Because without that foundation, nothing else works.

In SEO it’s the same. Headers, title tags, and actually stating what you do — that’s the footwork. Benas has built a whole service niche around walking into keynote speaker websites that have been online for ten years and just making sure the words on the page match what someone would search for. And it works. Immediately.

The age-old battle with designers and salespeople over homepage copy hasn’t changed. They want emotional. They want differentiated. They want “re-envisioning your mind space.” What they need is for someone searching “leadership keynote speaker for corporate event” to actually find them.

If you’re saying the same vague catchphrase as a trash removal company and a Fortune 500 enterprise software brand, you’re not differentiating yourself. You’re disappearing.

Go listen to the full episode here, or dig into the full interview recap on Unscripted SEO if you want the complete conversation with Benas. And if you’re a speaker or coach who just recognized your own website in this post, let’s talk.