A founder reached out the other day. She’d been running a Webflow site for years. Good clients, the kind of corporate names that make you nod when she says them. But that site had never once brought her a lead.
So she came to me looking for an SEO expert.
Right before our call, she pasted me a plan. She’d been going back and forth with ChatGPT, and it had written her a full SEO strategy. Keywords, site structure, all of it. She figured that was the answer. She just needed someone to build it.
I get this a lot now.
It’s like diagnosing yourself with ChatGPT before you go see the doctor, then walking in and telling the doctor the treatment. You can do that. It’s just that you might be fixing the wrong thing.
The plan wasn’t wrong. It was average.
Here’s the thing about what ChatGPT handed her. It wasn’t bad advice. It was average advice.
She told it “I want more leads from my website,” and it reached for the most common answer to that sentence. SEO. More traffic. That’s what it’s trained on, the standard playbook for the standard business.
But she isn’t standard.
She already has great clients. She doesn’t need a thousand strangers a month finding her. She told me herself: one good new client every few months would basically double her business.
So a traffic machine is the wrong tool. You don’t build a firehose when what you really need is to get in front of ten specific people and be impossible to forget.
What she actually needed
Something compelling. One thing she could put in front of those ten people and say, “I made this, I think you’ll want it. Can I send it over?”
A site that sounds like her, not like every other freelancer in her field.
And a video. I told her to put her face on the site, a quick intro of who she is and how she thinks. Nobody in her space does that. Her competitors are all hiding behind stock photos and polished decks. She could just show up as a person.
She got it right away. I think she already knew the SEO thing felt off, she just needed someone to say it out loud. The whole conversation changed after that.
The part I love
She found me through ChatGPT.
She typed something in, and I came up. So when I explained how that actually happens, it really landed.
Getting recommended by AI isn’t magic. It’s close to old-school SEO in spirit. The more real places you show up and get mentioned, the more weight you carry. When she posts a video of herself, that becomes a little node out on the web. It tells the AI tools this person exists, and this is exactly who she helps.
The same video that makes her memorable to a human is what makes her specific enough for a machine to quote.
So being a real, visible person isn’t the soft option. It’s the actual strategy, the thing SEO was always trying to fake in the first place.
So do you need SEO?
Maybe. SEO is a great tool when the problem is “nobody can find me.”
It’s the wrong tool when the problem is “people find me and feel nothing.”
Most people who come to me asking for SEO are in that second group. They don’t need more traffic. They need to be clear, and they need to be memorable to a few right people instead of invisible to a crowd.
So before you hire anyone to build you a machine, ask a smaller question. Who are the ten people who should know you exist? And what would make them impossible to lose?
Answer that, and half the website writes itself.
Go be memorable.
Keep reading
- How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI tools
- How to test whether ChatGPT recommends you
- Why specific positioning wins in ChatGPT
Rather hand this off? Here’s how I do AI visibility for clients.