I’m seeing a lot of ads lately from gym bros telling me that SEO is dead and I’m invisible without their new AIO package.
Business owners tell me they are seeing it too.
As if running a business wasn’t hard enough, you now have to wade through the murky world of AI FOMO. Thanks gym bros with your poorly targeted Facebook ads.
Check the agency, not the pitch
Spend 90 seconds before you book a call.
Google the agency name. Have they got a proper footprint? Multiple pages indexed, a real site, actual reviews, LinkedIn profiles for staff who aren’t the founder’s cousin? Or is it one slick landing page and a founder profile created in January?
Look at the website. Vibe-coded, three testimonials, no case studies older than this year. That’s a thin operation.
For the established players, look closer. Are the case studies recent and specific, or ten years old and vague? Has the messaging been bolted onto a site that was a “Facebook Ads specialist” last quarter?
Ask them directly: show me clients you’ve grown on Google. Real numbers.
If they can’t do that, they can’t do AI. That’s the answer.
The play
Same playbook, every time.
- The “AI Audit.” A PDF full of red bars for queries no one in your industry actually searches.
- The Hook. Traditional SEO is dying. You’re bleeding market share. Your current agency is “behind the curve.”
- The Keys. They want access to your site, Analytics, and Search Console. Now they own the data.
Twelve months later, your traffic is down, AI mentions haven’t moved, and the account manager has gone quiet.
The fear is the product. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a stranger in your feed or a competitor on Zoom.
What they won’t tell you
AI search runs on SEO fundamentals. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews—they all pull from the same web Google crawls.
The single biggest driver of AI citations is still being a top-10 organic result. That’s it.
Most “technical audit” alarms are just noise. Accessibility warnings, CSS bundle size, missing hreflang. What actually moves the needle is content depth, real expertise, and backlinks from sites that don’t look like Link Farms.
Plus, for most Australian businesses, AI referrals are still in the low single digits. Google is still 90% of the pie.
The majority of AI citation comes from sound SEO. Optimise your site for locations and service keywords, and you will appear in AI search. Add content to your site that is genuinely and specifically helpful to your market, and you will get cited.
Like our clients Perth Landscape Guys – we produced an article on local council approval, it got cited in GPT and they get traffic and links. Or Better Building Brokers – we produced a punchy informative article on building brokers, and they are showing up in AI Generative searches.
You see, its not complex or mysterious. Build a site that’s well organised and easy to crawl, answer queries well, and see outcomes in traditional search and AI.
The sniff test
Before you sign or switch away from an agency that’s actually delivering, ask three things:
- Show me real client results on Google. Rankings, traffic, leads, with dates.
- Show me one client whose AI citations you grew, with screenshots.
- What’s actually changing in the day-to-day work?
If the answer to that last one is “we’re doing what we’ve always done, just rebranded”—that tells you something.
The bottom line
AI isn’t killing SEO. High-quality SEO is what makes you visible in AI.
The agency that can grow a client on Google is the agency that can grow you in AI.
Don’t ditch a working strategy for a scary PDF and a slick video.
