Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: AI will replace SEOs. Today I am joined with Mike Martin and, if I am being honest with you, I completely disagree with this. Mike Martin and I are going to have a rant about it. We have spoken quite a lot over the last week about this. He has gone all in on Google Business Profiles because he believes that AI will not be able to touch Google Maps listings, but he does believe that you can scale websites like there is no tomorrow and that it would be easy for business owners to do it. So, Mike Martin, first and foremost, let us get straight into it. Why do you believe that AI is going to replace traditional SEO?

Mike Martin: Right. First thing I will say is I think there are three areas that are safe. Before we start getting all mad and kicking off, there are three areas that are safe. The three areas that are safe, I think, are rank and rent because it is results-based. There is lead generation because it is results-based. And there is Google Business Maps because you cannot automate that with AI. Everything else, all the other services that are being offered by SEOs, is becoming commoditised. And when that happens, the value is almost worthless. When you look at building a website now, do not get me wrong, if you are building for Coca-Cola or somebody like that, yes, I get it. But if you are building for a local business, a plumber, and he is like, wait a minute, so I can just chat to my computer for 10 minutes and it can build me a website that you are going to charge me three grand for, and it is going to take you two weeks or three weeks or four weeks, why is he going to go with us?

James Dooley: I will tell you why. Because I think vibe coding and understanding what needs to be built matters. I do not think he will understand what he needs building. Him saying, okay, I want you to build me a plumbing website. How does he know what pages are needed, what topics to cover, what services, what keyword research has been done, what pages need opening, what search intent needs to be targeted? I just do not see a plumber wanting to vibe code to have this website built. I think you are potentially giving too much credit to a business owner who knows nothing about SEO and what needs to be done. So why do you think a plumber would be able to vibe code a website?

Mike Martin: Right. So, you buy a domain name. And instead of buying a domain name, I would go over and buy it from Cloudflare. That is where I would buy it from because that integrates straight away with most of the vibe coding tools. Now, three months ago, I could not build a decent SEO-optimised website with vibe coding. I tried it. I had been trying it for ages. I kept thinking this has got to get there. And I think to say that it is not going to happen is completely naive. These business owners are on the ball, mate. And, in a lot of cases, they want every single penny they can get their hands on. So, there are two real options for them. Option number one is the business knows their business better than you do. That is why we ask them a load of questions before we start building stuff. And they do not need to say to it, create it so it is SEO optimised. What they can say to vibe coding is, build me a website that is going to rank in Google. I am a plumber. I do all the different types of domestic services and I cover Greater Manchester, for example. Go. And then it just does it. He does not have to say optimise it for SEO. He can say, okay, make it rank in Google. Then he can say, right, okay, now make it better. Then if he says again, make it perfect, and if he asks the question to the vibe coder, have you done everything that needs to be done so this is perfect for what I am doing, not even SEO perfect, but so it is going to rank against all my competitors, then it is going to work. But it is not just that. That is not the only area we are looking at. Forget about the business doing it himself. Picture a 15-year-old kid leaves school, wants to be an SEO, loves all the stuff that we do. He will spend a day or two days studying everything he needs to know about it just by chatting to ChatGPT and then he can build the website for, let us say, a hundred quid instead of three grand or five grand or seven grand or whatever we are going to charge him.

James Dooley: But you are missing a major point. You are saying that a 15-year-old can learn everything they need to know about SEO in two days. He cannot.

Mike Martin: They do not need to learn everything.

James Dooley: He does need to, because just saying it needs to be SEO optimised and make this perfect, what does perfect mean? How does it know? AI does not know. It hallucinates so much. It does not know what perfect SEO is. It is not good enough to understand what perfect SEO is.

Mike Martin: Three months ago, I would have agreed with you because I tried to do it myself. And I have built website after website after website after website. I have built five websites this week using AI. On one of your videos recently, I think I said to it, do not, and then I went, I should not have said meta title because I said it by accident. What I am doing is building as though I am a business owner. I built one yesterday. I think it was oldhamlocksmiths.com. It took me about 10 minutes and it is better than any website I would have built manually for a local business. You have got to realise as well that local business is a piece of piss. It is easy. If I am working for big national companies, it is not there yet. But that is saying it is not there yet. Within six months, it is going to be there and it is going to be accurate and it is going to be at a level where, because when I go into building it, it actually asks me loads of questions. I will build a website and it will say to me, do you want me to build local area pages? Would you like me to add more services? Would you like me to add a blog post? Would you like me to add 150 articles that make this contextually relevant? It asks them questions. The AI asks the questions, and when it asks all these questions, a business owner is going to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you like me to build all your internal linking? Yeah. Would you like me to do this? Yeah. And that is it. They do not need to know anything. And the 15-year-old child does not need to know anything.

James Dooley: But he does. That is the point. AI is only as good as the prompts you are giving it. It is garbage in, garbage out. So when it is saying, can you create me 150 articles, the content is not doing semantic triples. You are not feeding it the right schema information. A lot of these business owners do not even understand search intent. I know you are going to say artificial intelligence does understand it, but it does not. It is nowhere near good enough at present. They are just going to scale AI slop. It really does come down to the prompt engineering and what is being done. I get that for really long-tail local terms, you could go to Lovable, you can go to Claude Code, and you can get these sites looking nice, but for them to basically be replacing SEO, I think it is miles off. It is nowhere near.

Mike Martin: Mate, you are totally wrong. Honestly, everybody I am speaking to in the industry is saying the same thing. And you know why they are saying it? Because they are shitting themselves. They believe that, if they do not admit it, they can deny it and stay scared and stay nervous. But mate, honest to God, think about this. When ChatGPT came out, I had five writers. They were based along this wall here. I used to be in that office over there. I had five full-time writers doing blog posts and content. None of those people work for me any more. The most highly paid profession in most offices and most businesses used to be computer programmers. At the time when ChatGPT was released, and it has only happened recently, I had seven computer programmers working for me. Some of them were getting paid 350 quid a day. And my business partner Martin, who is a computer programmer, was overseeing all the developers. He oversaw all the products and all the stuff that we were doing and everything else. He did a bit of coding himself. We have not got a single developer any more. They are all gone. And that is way more technical than SEO. Martin now oversees and manages and does the work of eight people by himself. We are more productive. We are more professional. We have got more products being released. Everything that we are doing is by far exceeding anything we have ever been able to do. I was talking to him the other day and I said, when was the last time you changed code? And he said months ago. He has not written a single line of code himself in months. He has got framework knowledge, but when you are talking about SEO, it knows. Especially from a local perspective. If you have released stuff on SEO, and so has everybody else that you are working with, all of those articles exist online and AI can just go and read them all in a millisecond and then say, okay, so it wants schema, so it wants matching canonicals, so it wants this, so it wants that, so it wants the other, so it wants internal linking, it wants it to be relevant, it does not want to be single keywords. All the stuff that we know, it already knows it. I do not edit a single site that I have built with it because it just works.

James Dooley: Mike Martin, I am a massive advocate for AI. I love AI. I actually like vibe coding and I actually love what can be done. But it all comes down to the prompting in and what the output is. It amplifies shit if the prompts are shit. It amplifies brilliance if the prompts are brilliant. I am all for the building of the site, but to say AI will replace SEOs. AI can supercharge what you are doing. It can build websites faster, but they still need, if everyone is building out the site, there is only one person ranking in position one. So it still needs the trust. It still needs the brand. It still needs the socials. It still needs the backlinks and the power and the third-party corroboration, which all can be done and AI can supercharge it for sure. But I am not having it that it replaces that architect, that project manager, that person who fits it all together. And a business owner is going to understand, one, what topical authority is needed, two, what backlinks are going to be needed, three, whether tweets help or Pinterest helps or LinkedIn helps and what statuses need to be done, how often they need to be doing it. I am all for AI supercharging you, but to say it replaces it, that is where I am in complete disagreement.

Mike Martin: You said there about the architect. The point I am trying to make here is, let us say you have got 15 SEOs based in your office, but you understand the architect, you understand the prompts, and you understand everything that needs to be fed in. You can sack all your SEOs, every single one of them. You do not need them any more. They are worthless. Then there is your office, then the next office, then the next office, then the next office. That is getting rid of SEOs at scale. What happens then is it becomes commoditised. The value of the service they are offering becomes worthless. They are still going to exist, and there are still going to be outliers that are really, really good. But if I had five SEOs based in an office working for lots and lots and lots of different clients, I could sack every single one of them. I could build an SOP, and I would probably have to do a little bit of work on it over a week, and I could feed that into the AI and that could do the job of all five of those SEOs. Not indefinitely, because I would have to keep updating it and changing it as things change, but I could replace all of my staff with an SOP, with a Google Doc, and then I would just keep the doc up to date. That is where what I am talking about comes in. It is commoditising the expertise that exists.

Yesterday and the day before, I was sat with one of my mates looking at one of these environments. It is almost like a Claude environment, but it is in the cloud. We built an ad expert. We took everything that he had done over the years and years and years of becoming an ad expert and put it into one of these systems. It has all the documentation. He has created this little person and you can say, right, do me an ad campaign for this business in this location. Thirty seconds later, it spits out something that you can upload to your Google Ads platform that is better than he would have been able to do himself, and he would have had to spend three or four hours doing it. He can do it at scale now. He can literally have somebody just feed that in and it will spit it out, feed it in, spit it out, feed it in, spit it out all day, every single day.

James Dooley: I get it. And I get it. Again, I am a massive advocate for AI. I want to repeat that. We are doing multi-agent systems. We have got supervisors and an orchestra. We have got different AIs speaking to each other for the way we write the content. We have got a sales copywriter, we have got a semantic copywriter, and we have got a compliance officer that all speak to each other with the way the content is being written. And it is brilliant. And I get it, but that still needs tweaking from time to time. The content still needs information gain. Otherwise, it is just AI slop. If AI is just writing everything, there is no uniqueness because they have already got that information.

Mike Martin: Exactly.

James Dooley: So, if the SEO can be doing a data-driven survey, feed that information to the AI and then start getting that as part of the content that is being done, which makes that article unique and very specific to what they are doing, they can then go and run a campaign, do press releases, do digital PR, all about that data survey, which AI cannot do because it does not have that data that you have just created to make that information gain. And I think that is where the difference is between AI slop and being able to take AI to the next level and supercharge what you are doing and amplify what you have and what you do.

Mike Martin: Yes. Press releases are a good example of something that is going to be pretty safe for a short period of time. If we just look back at the last two years, content writers and copywriters are pretty much gone unless they are really high level now. Computer programmers. We always had job positions up advertising at 350 quid a day. Now I would not even take one on at 20 pounds an hour, which is ridiculously low. I just would not. I would rather have an appointment setter getting paid 20 pounds an hour who can set appointments that I can then turn into clients that are going to spend money with me. Logo design, data entry, transcription services, basic web design, it is all becoming commoditised to a point where if we do not look at it and say, all right, all of this is changing, businesses do not give a shit. If I go to a plumber and I say to him, right, I am going to build your website. I am going to do X, Y and Z. All the other stuff that you are talking about in the background, optimising the Google Business Profile, doing the press releases, doing the link building, okay, those services are valuable. But the actual on-page SEO and the web design and the graphic design and all the other stuff, it is being commoditised. The rest of it will come. It will keep getting better and better and better.

James Dooley: I think it will get better, but I still think you are missing something. You are one of the best salespeople that I know. Surely you agree that business owners buy outcomes. They are not bothered about the service. They are not bothered how long it takes. They buy outcomes and return on investment. So, if building this website and doing this SEO makes it 10 times faster for you, they are not really that bothered about the time it takes. They are bothered about whether this is going to get them a return on investment. They are more bothered about the product and the service that they deal with than buying tokens and buying Claude Code and doing whatever. They are scared by it. What they want to know is whether you are leveraging AI yourself and whether you can generate them leads or sales from their ecommerce store, or leads that they can turn into profit. They might be leveraging AI for voice agents or nurturing and stuff like that, but they want the outcome. They do not want to be dealing with, oh, do I need to sign up to Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT? They are going to need to start learning all that. They are going to need to go, do I need to use Lovable or Claude? What is better? Why is it better? I do not think they want to research that. They do not want to be answering the questions that come back. And yes, it has made it easier. I do not think these business owners really care. I think what they really care about is, can you generate me more leads or more sales? Now, as a salesman, what do you have to say to that?

Mike Martin: You have just repeated exactly what I said at the beginning. The three areas I said that are still going to exist, that are worth being involved in, are lead generation, rank and rent, and Google Business Profile optimisation.

James Dooley: No. No. Yes, but you are missing the point of them generating their own leads from their own website. So let us say, from an SEO agency, they want their own website to generate leads, not a lead generation agency. They want an SEO specialist to build them a website that ranks and generates their own leads, which you are saying is commoditised. I do not think they care how quickly it gets done. I just think they want the best result. And then it comes down to branding. This 15-year-old kid that has just learned in two weeks how to use vibe coding and stuff, he has no personal brand. He has no trust. Why are they going to go with him? Even if he is 100 quid and you are 3,000, but you have got the case studies, you have got the trust, you have got the reviews, they are going to go with the one and say, do you know what, I am going to pay three grand and know someone is going to deliver me results, rather than a 15-year-old kid that might understand a little bit of vibe coding.

Mike Martin: I will tell you what I see happening. We were doing some research the other day and over 75 per cent of local business websites in the last three months have been built with AI. It is not a massive test, but that was the data we were getting back. Now think about this. You have got clients that you bring in now and they pay you three grand and say 500 quid a month or a grand a month or whatever it is for your website. Your existing client base is over here and your new client base is over there. You have got to be the best salesperson in the world to charge someone three grand up front when this guy over here is saying, I will do it for 300 quid. Now, we are talking about website design and website building. We are not talking about the digital PR. We are not talking about the link building. We are not talking about all the other add-on services you are going to charge them even more money for.

James Dooley: Well, that is a big part of SEO.

Mike Martin: It is a big part of SEO, but that part comes later. You do not give them that free with the website and web design. So what is going to happen is they are going to say, okay, I keep getting phone calls off these kids who are offering me this for 150, 200 quid. Eventually people are going to think, do you know what, I am sick of spending a grand a month with this guy, whether it is working or it is not. I am going to try it out. In fact, it is worth me trying out with an extra site. Then that child gets the testimonials. That child gets the reviews. That child gets the experience. And all of a sudden, the industry is up here and then it is down here really, really quickly. Businesses are going to fail at the speed of their churn rate. They are not going to fail overnight, but they are going to fail at the speed their churn rate comes through. If they are losing 5 per cent of clients a year, they are going to drop off at 5 per cent a year. But then getting new customers is going to be almost impossible at their current price range. And they cannot advertise 250 or 300 quid a month websites when they have clients over here paying them two, three, four, five grand. Those clients are going to say, I want one of those websites then.

James Dooley: But wait a minute, Mike Martin, because now you are saying that they cannot. They can. They could lower the price and still be very profitable.

Mike Martin: If they lower the price, existing clients are going to say, I am not paying you five grand and this guy is getting it for nothing.

James Dooley: No, but what I am saying to you is the three grand it takes to build the site, with leveraging AI, they can still be very profitable. I am all for leveraging AI, but to say it is going to replace them, I completely disagree with. I do not think they are going to go direct. They might go to someone cheaper, I agree. It might become cheaper, but it is going to be 10 times faster, so it is only half commoditised. Then it comes down to branding and how you can sell it. You run a big company, do you not?

Mike Martin: Yes.

James Dooley: What is your most expensive thing?

Mike Martin: Lead generation. Prospecting and outreach. Most expensive thing for any business.

James Dooley: Right. So, if I am charging three grand for a website, I can afford prospecting and outreach. Well, I tell you what, if my team cannot win a job charging five or 10 grand against a 15-year-old kid that has got no trust, then my sales team needs sacking. We win the job at 10 grand being 100 times more expensive than a 15-year-old kid that has learned vibe coding.

Mike Martin: That is right now. That is now. But as the industry starts to change, the prices are going to go through the floor.

James Dooley: I think for the people on the cheap end, yes. But I think people are just going to be scared and go, do you know what, if anything the price might even go up because they are just going to say I do not want this AI slop. I am willing to pay more for a quality brand with the case studies, the reviews, the testimonials, that has got a brand and someone scaling it. Wasting time is worse than wasting money. I am going to spend more and know it is going to be done right, rather than waste time with a 15-year-old kid who does not really understand CRO, does not really understand search intent, he has just vibe coded something on Claude Code or vibe coded something using OpenClaw or Lovable. I just see, if anything, that you can charge more because now the difference in quality, if anything, is widening more and more.

Mike Martin: Now you are going round in circles because before you were saying to me that people do not give a shit about that, they give a shit about results. Now, if I am a 20-year-old, let us say I am 22, it does not really matter where I am coming in from or how old I am. But let us say I go to 10 businesses in my area and I say to them all, I am going to build your website for 50 quid a month and it is going to outperform everything you have already got. All I want is video testimonials, reviews, testimonials to say that I have done an amazing job. Within four weeks, I can sell that easily. And within four weeks, I have got all the online proof that you have got. The only difference is I am charging 250 quid and you are charging three grand. The business does not give a shit. It is like, you know what, this guy has got just as many reviews as you, or not as many reviews, but he has got all the testimonials. He has got all the history. He has got everything he needs, but he is charging me 250 quid and you are charging me two and a half grand, 10 times as much.

James Dooley: But then it comes down to the expertise of this person that is doing it for 50 quid, or 250 quid, to the business owner. I bet they are not doing the data studies. I bet they are not doing the links. I bet they do not understand that. Like you said before, they give a shit about outcomes, but they are not going to get the outcomes if they come up against us and they are not doing information gain and the topical authority and the backlinks and everything else.

Mike Martin: Hey, I can do all that now.

James Dooley: It cannot. It cannot do the backlinks and everything.

Mike Martin: No, no, it cannot do the backlinks the way you are doing them yet. So it has not got the outreach. It cannot do the PR. It cannot do the high-level backlinks. It can do the spammy shitty backlinks. It can do the citations. It can do the on-page SEO. It can do the contextual relevance. It can do all of the other stuff that you are talking about, but some of the services it cannot do yet. Like the high-level link building, like what you guys do with your high-level links and things like that. That cannot be automated. I do not think it ever will because you need the relationships and you need to know the businesses and you need to know the website owners. So that stuff cannot be automated. But we are not talking about that. We are talking about your local business SEOs that are trying to sell websites. Their prices are going to drop through the floor. But the reason you can charge so much for Google Business Profile optimisation is simple. When you teach a business to do it, it is 30 to 60 minutes a day they have to do themselves. Or I am going to charge you 500 quid a month and I will do it for you and you know it is done properly and perfectly. There is no automating it. Well, there is almost with GBP Optimiser, but because we have done the research and we can see exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to stay within the terms of service, then we know we are doing it right every single time. The reason I have doubled down on this is because I can see where it is going. I used to have 20-something staff all working for me. Hardly any of them even work for me any more and we are just as productive as we ever were. The only thing we have still got that is valuable, which is difficult, is prospecting and outreach and lead generation. We need to get more bums in seats to have meetings with us so we can convert them into clients. That is it. Everything else that we used to do that was sat in front of a computer is almost worthless because you can do most of it with AI. The only part you need is where you are sat with a human being and you are saying, right, I want to meet and chat to you about something like this. But then it does not. If somebody says to me they will do your website for 50 quid or 100 quid or 200 quid a month, I am going to say, you know what, it is worth a punt because if it works I can cancel this guy over here that I am spending a grand or two grand a month with. Instantly, it just drags the price down and over a period of time, over the next 12 to 18 months, mate, watch what happens. The industry is going to get commoditised. The industry, as with all clerical industries, and unless people are looking at things that cannot be commoditised, they are fucked. They are absolutely fucked and need to open their eyes to it now or they are fucked.

James Dooley: Mike Martin, I love you to pieces. I completely disagree, but I love you to pieces. Anyone who is watching this, check out the link in the description. There is one about Google Business Profile optimisation. I do actually agree with him on this part where I think Google Business Profiles are becoming more and more important. I think paid ads are becoming more important as well for lead generation. I think people are getting down the funnel a lot faster. But personally, I think you are wearing the glass half empty and I have got the glass half full. I think you are thinking that AI is going to replace people. I think it is going to supercharge people. But make sure you check out the link in the description. Mike Martin, I love you to pieces and I will see you again soon.