Most agencies are still deciding what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad of SEOM Interactive already has an answer, and it is not the one being sold. He joined the Philadelphia agency straight out of Temple in 2015, when it was fifteen people, and now runs the SEO function across a team of about forty.

Key takeaways

• Do not optimise for the platforms. Improve the site so the platforms have a reason to trust it. Same work, completely different instruction.
• Be wary of anyone calling themselves an AI expert. The whole thing is new and everyone is learning, including him.
• Humble experts. His phrase for the honest posture: know what you know, admit what you do not.
• Keep AI traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits against two hundred thousand from Google organic.
• Report on data, focus on the money. The analytics are context. Leads and revenue are the conversation.
• Their PR requires a real owner quote. No AI-generated response is accepted, on principle and for the outcome.

On this page

• Do not optimise for the platforms
• The fear of going backwards
• Humble experts
• Report the data, focus on the money
• Digital PR with an actual human in it
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Do not optimise for the platforms

So don’t optimize for the platforms, but improve your site in a way that these platforms will actually trust you and use you in their results.

— Robert Spinrad

This is the internal argument SEOM keeps having, and it resolves a lot of the noise. The instruction to optimise for a model invites gaming, invites shortcuts, and invites a strategy that expires when the model updates.

The instruction to be genuinely worth citing produces the same technical work and does not expire.

The fear of going backwards

I’m a little scared that we’re going to go backwards now.

— Robert Spinrad

The worry is reputational. SEO spent fifteen years living down its own spam era, and a flood of cheap generated content is the fastest available route back to being the thing marketers apologise for.

The conversation includes Jeremy’s own confession from that era, which is the point. The people who lived through it are the ones most alert to the pattern repeating.

Humble experts

I think we encourage clients to be wary of people saying they are AI experts because this whole thing is brand new. We’re all learning.

— Robert Spinrad

I think a good term I want to use is we’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know we don’t know, and that’s OK.

— Robert Spinrad

It is a good phrase because it survives contact with a sales meeting. It is not false modesty, it is a claim about method, and a client can check whether you behave that way.

It also comes with a specific instruction to clients: do not take SEO advice from a chatbot.

Report the data, focus on the money

So we report on data, but we focus on the money, the big ticket items at the end of the day.

— Robert Spinrad

Their positioning has said the same thing since before any of this: it is not about clicks, it is about results. The analytics go in the report because a client should be able to see them. The meeting is about leads and revenue.

That is also how he keeps model traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits is real and worth understanding. It is not the two hundred thousand from Google organic, and pretending otherwise misallocates the budget.

Digital PR with an actual human in it

And you give a quote from the owner, no AI response accepted.

— Robert Spinrad

The rule is enforced internally. Mention and link opportunities require a genuine owner-written quote, which is slower and produces the one thing a generated paragraph cannot: something only that person could have said.

The local checklist he actually gives

• A fully built out profile listing, not a half-completed one.
• Profile posts used for promotions and events with real start and end dates, not recycled social content.
• Reviews earned naturally and consistently, because the citation sources models pull from are the ones people already trust.
• Genuine community involvement, which is where the defensible links come from.

Show off your expertise, build your trust with your potential clients and focus on reviews in a natural and authentic way.

— Robert Spinrad

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
SEOM Interactive	Philadelphia-area agency, in business since 2008, around forty people
Humble experts	Robert’s phrase for knowing what you know and admitting what you do not
Owner-quote rule	Their PR team will not accept an AI-written quote
Temple University	Where he studied before joining the agency in 2015
Google Business Profile posts	Repurposed for promotions and events with real dates

Questions this episode answers

• Should I optimise my site for AI platforms?
• How do I tell a real AI expert from a fake one?
• How much traffic is actually coming from LLMs?
• What should an SEO report focus on?
• Does digital PR still work?
• Why insist on a human-written quote for PR?
• What should a local business do first?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Mike Ginley on the same fundamentals from a consultant’s seat.
• Federico Fancinelli, for the research underneath the trust argument.
• Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Find Robert Spinrad

He is Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, and writes about not trusting AI for SEO advice.

Cite this episode

Spinrad, Robert. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/robert-spinrad-on-ai-seo-proper-targetting