Rob Bonham on SEO in the Agentic Age

I recently joined Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk about what two decades in SEO — local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home services — have taught me about working in the agentic age. AI now handles the low-level busywork in minutes. The catch: that moves the value of a good SEO up the stack, to judgment and knowing what not to do. Here are the ideas that mattered most.

We are stewards of the AI

My central framing on the show: as SEOs, we’re now stewards of the AI. The tools are genuinely powerful, but they mostly recombine what already exists on the web. Point them at scale without oversight and you’ll confidently ship pages that pull in bots, five-second bounces, and thin answers — and Google will notice the missing user signals. Per Google’s own guidance on AI content, automation used mainly to game rankings breaks its spam policies, while original, experience-led content gets rewarded.

The 100-page concrete-wall trap

Jeremy brought the perfect real-world example: precast concrete walls florida — a company that used AI to spin up roughly a hundred near-duplicate pages — one for every city they service — each pulling random stock photos of concrete walls. The instinct was right: try to do a little more, cover more ground. But volume without information gain — no real user data, no first-hand expertise, nothing a machine couldn’t already generate — is just more of a not-great idea.

It’s what happens when a business goes into a “fugue state” with Claude or ChatGPT and sends over 40-page documents, convinced they’ve replaced expertise with volume. From an actual expert’s seat, the notion is fine; the execution isn’t. You can’t ship it raw — but with a human setting strategy and reviewing every output, the power is absolutely there.

Footprint wins the SERPs

If there’s one be-all-end-all, it’s this: whoever has the bigger footprint — more people talking about them across the web in a positive way — wins. That’s brand, mentions, and genuine authority, not link tricks. If you want the systematic version, SEO Arcade’s link building & authority resource guide is a solid starting point.

Don’t sell yourself short

We also got into the business of consulting. My advice to SEOs: don’t sell yourself short. Hourly or monthly retainer, price it so it makes sense for you and the client — a rate that lets you do the deep, judgment-heavy work is the rate that actually protects their results.

That’s the through-line of the whole conversation: use AI for leverage, keep a human in the loop for judgment. If you’d like that discipline built into your team, that’s what fractional SEO management is for — or start with a focused advisory engagement.