What AI SEO Still Cannot Do For You
Can AI SEO replace an agency, or does it just do whatever you ask it faster, right or wrong?
In this episode of SEO On-Air, host Koa Kauwe sits down with Kyle Roof (PageOptimizer Pro) and Jake Soffer (Firm Pilot) to be honest about where doing it yourself genuinely works and where it falls apart.
The conversation examines data rather than opinion. Kyle ran a study across first time users of his on-page software and found every piece of content missed the same seven things, starting with the target keyword in the title tag and the H1, which are the two most basic placements in SEO. Worse, 99 percent of pieces came in light on contextual terms, often two standard deviations below the range Google needs to understand a page at all. His sharpest finding came from eighteen months of testing the same prompt: asking an LLM to make content SEO optimized measurably makes it worse, lowering term counts, word counts and optimization scores across the board.
They also get into Jake's moonshine analogy for what raw LLM output actually is, why AI is a force multiplier in both directions, why a model's goal is the next probable token rather than anything SEO wants, the myth that the chat sidebar is memory, why shoveling content over the fence gets expensive later, and why an agency should be judged on being more right than your competitors rather than right every time.
🎯 What You'll Learn:
• Why asking an LLM to optimize for SEO makes the output worse
• The seven things nearly every AI written page misses
• Why 99 percent of pages come in light on contextual terms
• Why execution, not strategy, is the real DIY bottleneck
• Why an LLM's goal is fundamentally different from yours
• Why AI multiplies bad SEO just as fast as good SEO
• Why the chat sidebar is not the memory people think it is
• Why scaled content becomes a cleanup bill later
• Why nobody is right 100 percent of the time in search
• Why agencies are moving further down the client journey
Whether you run an agency, brought marketing in-house, are weighing whether to keep paying one, or just want to know what AI genuinely cannot do here, this episode gives you tested numbers instead of hot takes.
🎧 Tune in to hear why prompting for better SEO is one of the fastest ways to get worse SEO.