I have watched a lot of “moats” get drained over twenty years of doing SEO, but the one draining fastest right now is the one most people still think they own: the ability to make stuff. Two recent conversations on the Unscripted SEO podcast sharpened my thinking on what is actually left to defend once anybody can produce anything.
Execution Just Went to Zero
Nick Eubanks has had a front-row seat to this shift. He sold Traffic Think Tank to SEMrush, built their own-media program to eight figures a year, and now runs global marketing at Digistore24, the largest affiliate network on the planet. He is not a doomer about AI. He is the opposite. He talked about building a full mobile app in twelve hours on a Sunday, rebuilding a product over a weekend, and standing up a free agency training site in twenty minutes.
As he put it, all the silly ideas that would be too time-consuming or too risky to build, he could just build in a couple of hours now — and there is really no good reason to not be just building every day.
When the cost of making something falls to nearly nothing, the thing you made stops being the advantage. Everyone has it. That is the uncomfortable math behind Nick’s whole thesis: if execution is infinite and cheap, the scarce resource is whoever already controls the audience and the channel.
Why Distribution Wins
This is where Nick said the line I keep coming back to: distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite. If anyone can spin up content, code, or creative at near-zero cost, the edge belongs to whoever can actually get it in front of people. The pipe is worth more than the water now that the water is free.
He qualifies it, and I think the qualifier matters. Expertise still buys you short-term defensibility, but the window is closing as the models improve. The same-sized brands sitting in Google’s entity graph already had distribution; AI just made their execution advantage evaporate while leaving their audience advantage fully intact. I dug into the related version of this problem — how everything starts to look and read the same — in my conversation with Greg Merrilees about websites, conversion, and AI sameness. When the output converges, attention is the only thing that does not.
Use AI in the Right Order
Nick’s most actionable point for anyone still making content: most agencies have the workflow backwards. They automate the brief because briefs are painful, then keep humans on the writing. He argues you should flip it.
The best results I’ve seen from a content perspective is where humans are doing the brief, AI writes the draft, and humans do the editing. Most agencies have it exactly backwards.
— Nick Eubanks
The brief is strategy — audience, angle, what you actually know that nobody else does. That is the part where a human has leverage. Handing the brief to a five-minute prompt and then laboring over the draft is the worst possible trade. The draft is the cheap part now.
Be a Humble Expert, Not an AI Guru
The flip side of “execution is free” is a flood of people declaring themselves AI experts. Robert Spinrad, Associate SEO Director at SEO Interactive outside Philadelphia, gave me the cleanest counter-positioning I have heard. His agency runs about forty people and has been at this since 2008, and their stance on AI is radical honesty.
We’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know what we don’t know, and that’s OK. We’ll keep learning.
— Robert Spinrad
Robert actively tells clients to be wary of anyone claiming to be an AI expert, because the whole thing is brand new and everybody is still figuring it out. That sounds like a weak sales pitch until you realize it is the strongest one. Trust is distribution too. The agency that admits the limits of its knowledge is the one a small business owner keeps calling, and that relationship does not get commoditized by a model.
Good SEO Is Still Good AI Visibility
Robert’s blanket statement is that good SEO results in good AI visibility, and I agree there is a lot packed into that sentence. The fundamentals that make Google trust you — real expertise signals, authentic multi-platform reviews, digital PR with an actual quote from a real owner instead of an AI-generated filler answer — are the same signals an LLM leans on when it decides whether to cite you. I unpacked more of the mechanics in my piece on AI search and generative engine optimization. The tactics rhyme; the audience changed.
He is also blunt about what owners should measure. Clicks and rankings make for pretty charts, but they are not the point.
As he frames it, it is not about clicks, it is about results, because what people actually care about is how much money am I making.
That revenue-first honesty is its own moat. An LLM can cite experience; it cannot have lived through a client’s seasonality, their bad year, their specific market. Robert’s agency knows those families and small businesses because they have been in the room with them. That situational knowledge is exactly the kind of thing that does not show up in training data.
Where That Leaves the Rest of Us
The advice I am giving small business owners and agencies right now is the same advice I am taking myself. Stop treating output as your differentiator, because it is about to be free. Build the audience, the email list, the local reputation, the community presence that no model can replicate. I see this play out in the local Digital Christian Collaborative entrepreneur community here in Cookeville, and I talk through the operator-level version of it on Unscripted Small Business. If you want the tooling side, that is what I keep building over at SEO Arcade.
Here is my takeaway after both of these conversations: stop trying to win at the thing AI is about to do for free, and start owning the thing it can’t — the trust, the relationship, and the channel that puts your work in front of a real human. Make the work cheap, make the distribution yours, and be honest enough about what you don’t know that people keep coming back. That is the last moat standing, and I plan to keep digging it.