Episode Description
There are two ways to point AI at a market, and Mike Montague only likes one of them. The Terminator approach builds agents that go out and hunt your leads. The Iron Man approach wraps a human in the technology and sends the human. Avenue9 is built entirely on the second one, and this conversation is mostly an argument for why the first one loses.
Key takeaways- AI reliably earns a C plus. Genuinely useful, and not the part you were ever paid for. The hard twenty per cent is still human work.
- Bad strategy plus AI is faster failure. It amplifies whatever you were already doing, in both directions.
- Your online reputation should mirror your real work exactly. Not an outsized rank. The rank you can evidence.
- He turns down volume work. His argument is a question: why would a model cite a version of an answer it can already write?
- Degenerative engineering. His name for using AI to distil what a business already is, instead of generating more of what it is not.
- The C plus problem
- A reputation that mirrors real life
- Degenerative engineering
- Old school, on purpose
- Chapters and timestamps
- People, ideas and sources mentioned
- Questions this episode answers
- Go deeper
A C plus is a really good grade. The problem is that other 20% is the hard part. That’s what we needed humans always to do.
— Mike Montague
His explanation for why smart clients get fooled is the sharpest thing in the episode. If you ask a model about a subject you would fail an exam in, it looks like a genius. The grade has not changed. Your ability to mark it has.
Which is what he sells: not the output, but the person who can tell a C plus from an A. He is candid that the C plus is worth having. It is a good afternoon’s work. It is not a strategy.
If you have bad SEO strategy or bad marketing strategy, it’s going to allow you to do it faster, which is just gonna get you to fail faster.
— Mike Montague
Jeremy contributes a name for the failure mode on the client side: Claude hopping, where a client arrives with twenty documents of forty pages each and the announcement that they have solved it.
A reputation that mirrors real lifeI think the goal should be that your online reputation exactly 100% mirrors your in real life work.
— Mike Montague
This is a quiet rebuke of most of the industry. He thinks SEO has spent two decades trying to win a rank the business had not earned, and that the machinery on the other side is now far too good for that to keep working.
The practical instruction is unglamorous and much harder than it sounds. Document every job. Capture real quotes from real customers. One representative case study used to be enough and no longer is, because a single example is now a drop in an ocean.
Degenerative engineeringIt will give you the rating that you deserve.
— Mike Montague
I call it degenerative engineering. How can I take AI and use it to distill down what I’m really about?
— Mike Montague
His metaphor is concentrated orange juice. Take everything already happening around the business, the interviews, the jobs, the founder’s actual opinions, and reduce it rather than inflate it. He thinks most people are working the wrong end of the problem entirely.
Which is also his answer to a client who insists on publishing at volume. He does not talk them out of it. He declines the work, and then explains why.
Why would it cite your version if it can already write one that doesn’t need to be cited?
— Mike Montague
He is not against a thousand posts. He is against a thousand posts that add nothing a model does not already hold, which is a different and much harder brief.
Old school, on purposeBoth of them land in the same place: the tactics that got drowned out are now the ones with room. Jeremy’s example is ten handwritten letters sent from Raven Tools that earned ten links. Mike’s is printing ten copies of your own book and mailing one to a prospect with a sticky note pointing at chapter three.
Nobody gets a printed book in the mail, nobody gets a handwritten note, and nobody understands their business well enough.
— Mike Montague
The same instinct drives the cross-pollination section: seminars, trash cleanups, sponsoring the thing in the park, and then making sure any of it is visible online. PureAire Monitoring comes up as Jeremy’s worked example, an oxygen-monitor manufacturer whose customers span a dozen industries that would each happily be amplified.
Chapters| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | The Batman opener and the Iron Man analogy |
| 01:28 | Avenue9, and the small business AI problem |
| 03:35 | Why AI only ever earns a C plus |
| 05:52 | Publishing at scale versus offshore writers |
| 07:15 | Making a boring niche like garage doors interesting |
| 10:28 | Traffic losses and AI Overview click-through |
| 13:10 | Reviews, case studies and documenting every job |
| 16:37 | In-real-life marketing and cross-pollination |
| 23:49 | Degenerative engineering instead of more slop |
| 26:41 | Direct mail and handwritten letters that earn links |
| 35:26 | Superintelligence, science fiction and automation |
| 44:31 | What Avenue9 actually sells |
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Avenue9 | His company: AI strategy, systems, and what he calls scalable stories |
| Iron Man versus Terminator | Augmenting a human with AI against automating the human out of the loop |
| Degenerative engineering | Using AI to distil an existing story rather than generate new volume |
| Claude hopping | Jeremy’s coinage for the client who arrives with twenty AI documents and a solved problem |
| PureAire Monitoring | The oxygen-monitor manufacturer behind Jeremy’s B2B cross-pollination example, linked above |
| Kalicube | Jason Barnard’s entity-first practice, one of the names Jeremy reels off in the entity riff |
| Human First AI Marketing | His own podcast, past a hundred episodes and a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube |
- Should I use AI to automate marketing or to augment my own team?
- How good is AI-generated marketing content, really?
- Why would an AI model cite my article instead of writing its own answer?
- How do I make a boring niche interesting?
- What should a small business document online to earn a better reputation?
- Does direct mail still work as a link building and outreach channel?
- Is publishing AI content at scale a viable SEO strategy?
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
- Patrick Stox on fixing the thing people are actually complaining about, the conversation Jeremy quotes back at him mid-episode.
- Grant Simmons on the entity work Jeremy invokes by name, from someone who has been at it for decades.
- the tactic library where plays like these get written down, if you would rather have the checklist than the argument.
avenue9.com, or Mike Montague on LinkedIn, which he says is where he actually talks to people.
Cite this episodeMontague, Mike. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/mike-montague-ai-iron-man-not-terminator/