In my own consulting work I keep hitting the same tension: AI makes execution trivial, but it quietly raises the stakes on judgment. Talking with Rob Bonham — a fractional SEO director who has lived this across agencies and startups — finally gave me language for it. Here’s what stuck.
From manual fixes to the agentic wild west
Rob has spent about two decades in SEO — local, e-commerce, SaaS, home services — and he frames this moment bluntly: it feels like the pre-Panda/Penguin wild west, reborn. The manual low-hanging fruit that used to fill an SEO’s month — fixing a hundred title tags, rewriting meta descriptions — is now automated. You can open Claude Code, connect WordPress over the REST API, and update every title and meta in minutes. The unlock is real; it also means leveraging AI at scale is now table stakes, and the place SEOs add value has moved.
Stewards of the AI — why volume backfires
Rob’s central metaphor: SEOs are now stewards of the AI. With much power comes much responsibility — just because you can publish a hundred city-specific pages for a concrete-pouring business doesn’t mean you should. AI mostly regurgitates what it finds elsewhere, so without human oversight you manufacture bot traffic and five-second bounces, and Google devalues the content the moment the user signals aren’t there.
“As SEOs, we are stewards of the AI. Because if you don’t know how to use the tools appropriately, you could get your website in a world of hurt.”
— Rob Bonham
Jeremy’s version of the same warning: clients going into a “fugue state” with ChatGPT or Claude, firing off 40-page documents and mistaking that for expertise — replacing expertise with volume. Notionally fine, but founded in nothing real: no user data, no interviews, no information gain.
Measuring SEO when the data won’t cooperate
Measurement has quietly collapsed. Google Search Console data isn’t reliable — Jeremy has a ranking post arguing exactly that, and it proves its own point: of roughly 50 clicks, GSC shows query data for only four. LLM tools are directional at best (Rand Fishkin’s ~80% variance finding), and free signals like Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity matter when you can’t afford a tool like Profound. In a post-attribution world, you win by telling the right story with the data you do have — branded-search lift, the “game of sums.”
Footprint over PageRank: link building, reborn
Which is why link building is, in Rob’s view, an easier sell than ever — reframed as footprint. Unlinked mentions and third-party visibility on Yelp, marketplaces, and review sites are more important than ever, because Google and the LLMs triangulate trust across everywhere you appear. His easiest wins came from legitimate partner and supplier links — “shooting fish in a barrel,” nothing paid or coerced.
“Whoever has the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way — that is the ultimate be-all and end-all of winning and dominating the SERPs.”
— Rob Bonham
Getting paid: contracts, pricing, and red tape
The back half gets practical for anyone going independent: set expectations to avoid scope creep, be choosy, and don’t undersell — a higher price point is itself a quality signal. Filter tire-kickers with a small paid audit (a $50 fifteen-minute Loom), and survive enterprise red tape (a drug test to edit a site; four meetings to change one H1) by watching for net-60 terms and getting paid up front where you can.
“Don’t sell yourself short. Whether it’s hourly or a monthly retainer, make sure it makes sense for you — but also make sure it makes sense for the client too.”
— Rob Bonham
Listen to the full episode
Listen to Rob Bonham on the Unscripted SEO Podcast → · Watch on YouTube →
Connect with Rob Bonham
Rob Bonham is a fractional SEO director and startup advisor with about two decades across local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home-services SEO. Find him on LinkedIn, or read his full recap of this conversation on The SEO Advisory.