AI search, local SEO, agentic AI and the demise of old marketing metrics

Intro and guest background: meet Dax and TJ from FOMO.ai

Hello, I'm Timmy with The SEO Party. Welcome. Today we're joined by Alex Alexakis, we have Naveed behind the camera producing, and joining us are Dax Hamman and TJ Stave. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So, Dax and TJ, we like to start off our podcasts with: who are you, and what do you do?

Sure, I'll jump in. My name is Dax, CEO and co-founder of FOMO.ai. I still can't believe we managed to get that domain name, by the way. Best marketing spend we've ever done. At FOMO.ai, we're focused on generating sales and leads without relying on paid ads. Our customer is usually the local business service provider, but we also have a full agency division where larger clients can come in and we can support them as well. Turns out we're really good at it. We've got a couple of clients where we've generated close to $20 million in revenue for them from this, so something's working.

Awesome. And I'm TJ Stave, the chief operating officer of FOMO. I'm in charge of making sure we do exactly what Dax said. My job is to make sure delivery happens efficiently and effectively, and then to talk to clients about how to make it more effective and where the world is going with this whole AI bubble and AI search.

Is AI search just a channel shift, or a bigger reset?

Nice. With your background, you've been through multiple waves of marketing disruption. With this new wave of AI search, do you think it's a channel shift, or a much bigger reset?

It's an interesting question. I used to build ad agencies and then ad tech companies, and the common thread throughout my career has been: find the bright shiny object and turn it into something effective and affordable that people want to buy. The reason we started FOMO is that there wasn't going to be a bigger, shinier object right now than AI.

I think it's a little bit of both. The industry lost its mind a little over what to call this. Everybody started declaring SEO is dead, AEO is the future, then suddenly we got GEO, and then LLMO. For those of us who have been in this space long enough, we all know it's essentially the same thing. If you do good work reliably and repeatably, you're going to get results from it, whatever you want to call it.

So I think it is more of the same in terms of evolution, with one exception. Every technology humanity has had until today has supported humans in being more efficient at their work. We're now at a point where the average person has access to a technology that can fundamentally replace some of the human thinking as well as some of the execution. So I do think this is a major shift. I don't think we're fully seeing it today, but the work we're all doing for clients right now is the work that will determine, for instance, whether they present themselves the right way when their customer's AI agent is out shopping or researching. The core tactics today are like high-quality SEO from years past, but the interaction and the outcome of our work are going to be fundamentally different.

FOMO.ai's model: AI speed plus human expertise for leads and sales

Awesome. I have a question, because I know we're going to get into the nerd mode, as I like to call it. How can a local business benefit from you? What do you offer that's different from any other agency or tool out there? Explain in simple terms how your system works.

First of all, the fundamental difference is that we're not an agency and we're not a tech company. We sit right in between the two. Even before AI came along, I think many agencies were quite slow in delivering things like SEO and content, and they weren't necessarily delivering the value that smaller business owners, the less sophisticated buyers from a marketing point of view, were paying for. AI has really highlighted that, and the agencies still operating largely as they did two years ago are in real trouble.

We purposefully built a technology and human hybrid organization. There are some very sophisticated individual AI users doing this work for themselves with Claude and similar tools, but the vast majority of businesses want the comfort and confidence of an experienced human being involved in the process. So we offer the cost saving, speed and efficiency of AI and technology, combined with the comfort, expertise and human touch of experienced people. We often replace more expensive agencies, but we also deliver a better solution than people get by trying to use a tech tool themselves.

So you basically provide the technology to do everything an agency would do. If you're a local plumber, you know what content needs to be created, and now you can do it at better scale, with a better product and better imagery, and build the pages at a lower cost. So it's a cost-driven initiative?

I'd sort of agree, but let me clarify. For the majority of our end-user clients, the businesses themselves (I'll talk about agencies in a moment), we are just delivering results. They don't really care how the sausage is made. Some of them like to see it, and seeing our technology is often a winning factor, but ultimately they just want sales and leads so they can get on with their jobs. We recently signed up a personal injury attorney, and he has already doubled his investment in FOMO. He doesn't want to think about this. He's still trying to figure out how AI is disrupting his legal business, not trying to replace his accountant and his marketing team with it. That's what we deliver.

What does that look like? We built the stack end to end: all the auditing, all the research, all the competitor gap analysis, covering both authority competitors and commercial competitors. We got our early success by being the company that nailed how to generate human-quality content from AI. We've been at that point for well over a year, which is why clients where we write accurate legal, medical, financial and technical content now send us no edits back. Nothing sounds like AI.

The piece we've been quietly working towards, and passed about 90 days ago, is this. We always believed the industry would shoot for faster and cheaper, which are the wrong goals. That's how you improve agency productivity. Faster and cheaper should be an equation: faster plus cheaper equals better. If everything is faster and cheaper, how can you do things better? What's the better experience? There are many ways we do that, but one is that we surpassed human-quality content about three to four months ago. That matters because, if we're all honest, most human-quality content is pretty poor. Go and read most company blogs; they're just not good. So the idea of everybody striving to build tech that replicates poor content, I just don't get it.

You mentioned agencies. For them, it's a little different. We found agencies were realizing they were losing clients to FOMO, so we launched a white-label version of our technology. Now agencies are replacing Jasper and other tools with FOMO, because it runs everything for them end to end. They know they'll get a wow-factor output for their client, and they pay a fraction of the price.

The London cab driver analogy: AI, job disruption and nostalgic jobs

Dax, I loved your London cab driver analogy, because it makes the AI job disruption conversation feel more practical. I'd love for you to talk about that for our listeners and viewers.

Sure. I grew up in England; I'm in Colorado these days. In London we have what we call black taxis, with that stereotypical shape, always painted black, all around the city. They're as iconic as the red phone box, which ironically we don't really have anymore. From a tourist revenue point of view, what a decision that was. I know they needed modernizing, but everybody went to London for red telephone boxes, and now there are only a few left.

London cab drivers take a test called the Knowledge. If you've never heard of it, I highly recommend watching a documentary about it on YouTube. There are around 28,000 to 29,000 different roads and points in London that every cabbie has to learn to get his badge. In the exam, an examiner will say: you're on such-and-such a street behind King's Cross, and the passenger wants to go to a club in Chelsea. Tell me road by road how you're getting there on a Saturday at 3pm. It often takes a minimum of two and a half years. You'll see people riding around London with a paper map on the front of a scooter, just learning the streets. Because it takes so many years and builds such an incredible body of knowledge, brain scans actually show their brains physically change to absorb and hold that map. That's how much knowledge it is.

The analogy is that all of that just got replaced by GPS. You could argue whether GPS is AI or not; it doesn't matter, it's on the spectrum somewhere, so let's call it AI. Sadly, the experience is now better if you jump in an Uber or a Lyft in London than in a black cab, and many black cabs have had to change how they work and, for the first time, put GPS in, because customers now expect it. That's a fascinating indication of where AI is going: it's replacing very specific human capabilities and knowledge and turning them into something better, if you set the nostalgia aside.

Super interesting. I don't know how you'd memorize thousands of street names. That's crazy.

It's crazy. Definitely go and watch the documentary. It raises a point worth talking about. Everybody on podcasts, online or on TV wants to talk about the doom side of AI and jobs being replaced. Don't get me wrong; I write about the future impact of all this at 84futures.com. But there will be something called nostalgic jobs. Just because an AI does something better than a human doesn't mean people want an AI to do it.

A great example is your primary care physician or GP. It has already been shown with Google's latest AI diagnostic tools that you'll live a longer, healthier life if you let Google diagnose you rather than a doctor. That has been tested. However, many people today, and it will change quickly, don't want to pay for a doctor's appointment and talk to a robot, a screen or a digital face. They want to talk to a human being. That's what's being missed in the jobs argument: the end user may not want that job replaced, so it will stick around longer than the data suggests it should.

We're programmed to see the doctor as the authority, and we know AI makes mistakes, so I think that would be hard for people. At some point I think we surpass it, but I don't think we're there yet.

I think that's right. I went to an event a few weeks ago where one of the speakers had invented the world's most widely used breast cancer drug. He was doctor to the late Pope Emeritus, to Steve Jobs and to Oprah, and he was talking about longevity. He said that if you can live five more years, AI will add ten more quality years to your life. There are many reasons behind that we could nerd out on, but the point is that, as a practitioner who built a lab to do this work, he's a great example of AI making a fundamental difference while still being best paired with human practitioners. That's why we built FOMO the way we did. It's better to give an expert better tools than to give the same tools to someone without experience in that area, because you can do a lot of harm with the wrong tools.

Trust, human review, and why Google doesn't hate AI content, it hates bad content

It's also interesting that Google looks at it that way. We mentioned trust a minute ago, and trust is so important, from a content perspective and in life generally. AI is really good, but where FOMO adds a lot of value is that we still have the trusted authority reviewing the content, with their name on it. AI can generate really good content, and a doctor reviewing it has just had their work made much more efficient, but checking it for authenticity and accuracy adds a lot of trust to AI-generated content. Google views it that way, we view it that way, and readers view it that way. It's important that trust stays intact as AI grows. How do we better trust AI?

We do 20 or 30 sales calls a week, and a common question from people who aren't practitioners or agency people is: "Google doesn't like AI content." Of course we know Google is quite happy with AI content; it just doesn't want bad content. That brings us back to human quality: bad human content is something Google doesn't like either. So AI isn't the deciding factor. That piece of knowledge alone is a great example of why companies work with us, and why some still choose more expensive agencies. They want someone who knows what they're talking about to have the right answer, so they get steady growth in sales and leads. Many people got it wrong by trying to take over their own SEO with ChatGPT, and they're in trouble. We know so many cases of sites getting de-indexed, particularly in the latest round of spam and algorithm updates.

To that point, a friend of mine owns a company that integrates AI into EMR (electronic medical records) systems. When doctors see patients, the AI is listening and diagnosing in real time, and the doctor's job becomes validating what it's doing. The same goes for reports. This technology has been around for quite a while, so I'm not afraid of it. A lot of people portray it negatively, but there will always be a balance. People know what to look for. In terms of technology superseding human intervention, I think it's truly a complement when it comes down to it.

I think that's right, and it will be for quite some time. Roll the clock forward, let's say ten years, because we know there'll be a fundamental shift over that time. You could debate whether it's two, ten or fifteen. We'll reach a point where AI is no longer a tool we use, but starts disagreeing with us and wants to be the deciding factor. The reintroduction of humans into many of these jobs will come quite quickly after that. If the technology you're working with is not only smarter and more experienced than you, but can also disagree with you and choose whether to help you, that will have an interesting boomerang effect at some point.

Yeah, 100%.

Search in five years: AI agents, shopping assistants and brands as plugins

With the way the technology is going, let's say search in five years. What are people currently underestimating?

Isn't that an interesting question? I'll start, and then I'm curious what TJ has to say. For clicks, people love to say exactly what's going to happen. It's far more sensible to say there are probably ten or twelve very realistic answers, and none of us knows which one it is. What people probably aren't realizing is the rise of search and shopping not being done by the human. That's coming fast.

For example, we used to use Instacart a lot. For those outside the US, Instacart is a service where someone does your grocery shopping and brings it to your house. We stopped using it after one Instacart driver stole an entire week's worth of shopping, which is kind of funny given he was registered with Instacart. Then our local supermarket started offering its own service: you order from them, they pick it, and they bring it out to your car at a set time. That's a better service. So what does Instacart become? If it doesn't get crushed by Whole Foods and Amazon, I can imagine Instacart becoming the shopping agent based on its data. It plugs into ChatGPT or Claude, you say "I'm out of food", and Instacart knows your data and what you eat, builds the list, maybe asks you to approve it, sends it to King Soopers (our supermarket, which is a weird name for a supermarket), and then maybe books an Uber or sends your self-driving car to pick it up. That's what's being underestimated: how many brands will simply become a plugin to OpenAI or Anthropic.

That's really interesting. Let me try to make sense of this. Have you heard of the Chinese teacup theory? The argument was that early Chinese mastery of porcelain meant there was no need to invent glass, which in turn held back the development of telescopes, microscopes and the scientific revolution. Obviously it's not really true. We made a video about the "end of content as we know it" claims around ChatGPT, and we made fun of that, because these premises never hold. I think AI actually frees us up to do more innovation, and that's what we're underestimating: how far it could take us.

I think adoption is where the challenge is. Take education: it's possibly the latest adopter of new technology. Insurance too. When I first got into tech, my first four projects were moving people off massive insurance platforms built on ColdFusion. It was fantastic technology, but so dated they couldn't keep up, and that legacy tech made upgrading hard. We'll have to see, but I hope that with this latest innovation we'll see more adoption and adaptation, so we can make everybody's lives easier.

AI in education, personalization, and what people may be underestimating

I like that idea. On education, let me add to that thought. There was a Hollywood actress, one of the iconic names in Hollywood (I wish I could remember her name), who created a campaign called "If she can see it, she can be it." The idea was that until the last five to ten years, if there was a woman who was a lawyer in a movie, that was the story. There were no female attorneys casually in the background, and not in major roles. The same was true for almost every industry. We have the same problem in different countries, and in the US there's still underrepresentation of people of color in leading roles. If an African-American man is doing something very specific, it's probably the story that he's African-American, and it really shouldn't be that way. We should represent all of society in different roles. I'm probably an entrepreneur because my parents had their own business, so I was making little businesses at twelve.

So "if she can see it, she can be it" matters. I think most education will start including AI avatars teaching in some form. Isn't it interesting that a teacher teaching a thousand people remotely might look different, sound different or talk differently (maybe accent, maybe culture) so that the student is taught by something inspirational and familiar to them? We know that if you give girls a female physics teacher, they're far more likely to go into STEM than with a male teacher. It's someone you can identify with. That could be transformative for how we raise our children.

Can AI help small businesses compete, or create a bigger digital divide?

I agree. I wanted to bring up your initiative with Fireside. You've often spoken about the marketing work small businesses need, and how they're often overcharged by agencies or let down by contractors. We've all heard the horror stories. Do you think AI finally gives smaller businesses access to marketing sophistication they couldn't afford before? Or does it make the gap bigger, because bigger brands have more data, more authority and more resources? I read an article you did with Shoutout Colorado, and I have the same thoughts. I do what I do specifically because of the horror stories I'd hear: "I've been with my SEO guy for years and lost everything." There was a parasite phase, which I think it was. I wanted to hear your thoughts.

Fireside feels like a lifetime ago. We sold it a little while back. But if we're going to nerd out on SEO for a minute before I answer: credit to whoever built Shoutout Colorado, because they did that interview with me six, seven, eight or nine years ago, and it still ranks in the top ten when you Google Dax Hamman, against much newer and more curated content. And now that we're in AI search and talking about authority, we as practitioners need to think about what to do about that, because I'd rather Shoutout Colorado wasn't a big part of my authority. It was so long ago, and I don't have Fireside anymore. That's an interesting topic in itself.

Do I think AI will finally give SMBs access to the technology? I do. You might know the phrase "digital divide". It came from when the internet first arrived. I was living in Chicago at the time, new in town, and someone recommended I visit the Chicago library, a beautiful building. I went in and there were about 200 terminals set up, big old-fashioned CRT monitors and towers, and nearly everybody working at them was non-white. That matters because, at the beginning of the internet, when services started going online, the goal was to give access to everybody, which was a good goal. The problem was that Chicago, like many cities, had a real skew in wealth and in the ability to afford a computer or an early smartphone. So it created a divide between those who had and those who didn't, and in a place like Chicago that was often based on the color of your skin.

As smartphones and access to technology got easier, at least in Western countries, the digital divide started to shrink. But now we'll see it amplified by orders of magnitude. If you're an SMB that starts with a company like FOMO, using AI to accelerate your success, and another business says "I don't need to worry about that" and tries to get in a couple of years from now, the gap between AI and non-AI will be almost impossible to cross.

Interesting. And the cost of things goes up as AI becomes more advanced. You need better equipment, and I see better performance in the Claude desktop app than online. I used to pay $20 for ChatGPT; now I'm on Claude at $100.

I want to bring this up because we talked about other businesses. My wife worked in corporate for a long time and quit this January, and she started helping friends of ours who own multiple businesses. Using Claude, she built a platform in a week that tracks sales tax for every state they sell into. There are companies like Avalara that create an ecosystem where you have to use them or you're in trouble. In a week she built something that will save the company millions of dollars over its lifetime. But she could do that because we have access to things: there's money in the companies, my background, all of that. She actually got me into Claude, because I was still busy with work and hadn't even looked at it. When I did, I thought: what am I doing with my life? It's going to be important to figure out how everybody can get this kind of help.

I think your wife's example is so important, because she's an expert in what she does. Any of us on this call could probably go away and build something in Claude in the next 30 days that did some of that tax work. But in the US right now, not to get into politics, the rules change daily, sometimes hourly. Something crazy happened just yesterday. So you need a practitioner operating it, dictating what it becomes, how it works, how it gets updated and what the processes are. That's where someone like TJ comes in. You need that know-how, at least for another couple of years, because tax is what Google calls "your money or your life". If you get it wrong, there are major consequences. This morning my wife spent two and a half hours on the phone with the IRS because they incorrectly said we owed $14,100 in fines. We don't, and it took two and a half hours to sort out. I wouldn't have wanted to be on the other end of that call. But she got it done. It takes experts, and sometimes it takes humans. People who think "AI builds anything now" are in for a world of pain for a couple more years.

Yeah, you still need it. On her end, she put the idea together and my team built it. Tax rules change, so we created a dashboard for all of that. But what amazed me was that she was in a corporate job I felt she was stuck in forever, a really good job with good pay. When she stopped, the first thing she did was ask why we were paying for this, and she put the whole thing together. She came back to us for help launching it and maintaining the databases so we keep track of everything. Honestly, I was surprised, and it made me question a lot of what we do, because we build websites.

Will websites still matter? MySpace comparisons, local SEO at scale and new measurement models

So how does my website survive the future? It might not. So now we build websites and give all the data to whatever needs to connect to it, so the website becomes more like a library of the business's data. There's value in that, but I don't know for how long.

I think you're right. The websites of today are going to be the MySpace of today. My co-founder sent me a page yesterday for a very modern tech company using supercomputers for AI video generation and graphic design. My first reaction when I opened it was: wow. It was an onslaught of things moving, flashing and making noise, just like my original MySpace page with flashing GIFs and music playing on load. We laugh at that now, and we'll laugh at the websites we're building today in a couple of years, because the paradigm will have changed so dramatically.

It makes me wonder whether websites will still be the center of digital strategy.

It's a great question. Will you just be absorbed? Will you be a node on Google? If you're selling anything online, I can't help but think you'll end up as a node on Amazon, and I think Etsy has a place. I saw eBay is up for sale, and GameStop of all companies is bidding to buy it. I think that brand and its capabilities, or at least the principles of that business, have more value than the industry thinks. You'd struggle to raise money to buy what's left of eBay, but I could see an organization like that becoming the connecting node, where you're a store in a mall rather than a standalone entity.

One of the most interesting things that will change in the next couple of years is measurement. What does success look like through all these changes? The fun fact I like to tell clients is that people still want to buy things. Just because how they buy has changed doesn't mean we'll stop buying. With direct-to-consumer brands, you still need your vitamins, and you'll still buy them even if you research differently. The transaction is still there. That's one reason we talk about getting you sales and leads: if you're a business owner, what matters is the money coming in. How agencies show clients they're winning won't be clicks or impressions, or even how many times you're cited, because 99.999% of those citations are different every time.

On the small business question, it will be interesting to see how Google and LLMs continue to favor small and local businesses. If local intent should be there, they assume it is, and I think that will help small businesses win. But measurement in general is one of the most interesting evolutions coming in the next year or two.

TJ, you hit on a really interesting point about whether a business can survive without using AI. In March 2025 there was a big algorithm update where Google basically told multi-location and franchise companies they need more of a local presence. You can't just have /denver with mostly the same page and a different franchise owner or manager. We've worked with multi-location clients with 600 to 2,000 locations. If you suddenly need five local service pages each, and we'll pick a thousand locations for simplicity, that's 5,000 pages to produce and manage. Before AI, some agencies came to us who were farming that out to freelance writers and then having to collect it all. It was impossible for those companies to pay for 5,000 pages done that way; the math never works. With AI, we built an entire layer on top of the FOMO.ai stack to hyper-localize at scale in a way that's optimized for AI search. If you're not using AI like that, you're not in the game anymore. That answers your question about the consequences of not using AI in your marketing.

Winning before the click: AI search metrics, fake dashboards and what really matters

Someone came up to our booth in Brighton, where I was offering consultations on the spot in booked slots, and we were talking about LLM optimization. I told them, and I hope I've coined the term: with LLMs, win the answer before the click. Own the answer and you own the demand. The north star for winning in GEO, or search in general, has so many variables now. To TJ's point about measures and metrics, you have to take into account your share of voice on LLMs, your share of citations and your sentiment, and apply all of that to the competitive landscape. You have to measure against your competitors, across many platforms. I was only looking at ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. I'll be interested to see what the KPIs end up being. Right now, thank goodness, we have a few, the ones I mentioned, and it's interesting how it's evolving.

I agree, and I'm glad you mentioned more real metrics, because what worries me is this "rate of citation" idea. It's shockingly bad these days. The simplest way to see it: most tools claim they'll tell you how many times you're cited for a given question or term. Give five of them the same question and you'll get five very different answers. People are filling a void with these tools. We have one client paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month for one of them, and I don't think it's any more accurate than the other five we benchmarked it against. So I worry about people optimizing for a fake AI citation score. ChatGPT itself says it can't measure that, so how are these companies claiming to? We know how: the same way we used to build SEO rank tracking. Build a huge server farm, buy 100,000 IP addresses, run 10 million queries a day against Google and average them. They're trying to do the same thing against the OpenAI API, and it just doesn't work. So yes, share of voice. And are you actually selling things? Getting cited is one thing; are you shifting product or services? Maybe engagement on other channels too. Outside of that, I don't think we have reliable metrics anymore.

That's one of the questions I was going to ask: are AI search tools today actually useful, or are they just dashboards chasing a trend? I asked people exactly that at the booth: everybody is selling the same dashboard to different degrees. I shocked someone when I said DA and DR never mattered any more than any other metric. They're something we're used to applying, but in hindsight they're more irrelevant than ever. The whole industry revolved around "I want to get my DR up, my DA up, my Semrush Authority Score up". You're chasing something so subjective, and I don't think it matters to Google or to AI.

I don't think Google cares about it at all, and it doesn't need to. Google is still the window most people go through, unless it's a very well-known brand getting direct traffic. I think Google is pretty happy that Gemini is working so well, AI Overviews is becoming a better experience, and it'll be interesting to see how AI Mode embeds into things. A final thought from me on Google: I think there's only one great tech race left. I have an iPhone, and many of you have Androids. Apple and Google are both trying to become your personal AI assistant for the rest of your life. I think we'll have court cases in the future on murder charges if someone deletes your AI assistant after you've had it for 25 years.

So Google is in a different game. I don't think it's worried about the likes of Perplexity. Google wants to give you as good an experience as possible so you embrace it more and more as your default AI, and that motivates it to behave differently. It has always done a good job of ignoring the noise, setting its coordinates to the future and sailing there, grinding away with very smart people. So I don't think Google could care less about some of the metrics we as an industry are passing off to clients as more meaningful than transactions and revenue.

Wrap-up

For our listeners, I think we all heard Alex's dog snoring. Was that your dog, Alex?

I think so. She's far away, but that's definitely her.

I was wondering what that noise was. I thought it wasn't a lawn mower.

I didn't hear it, but I think the noise cancelling picked it up and was trying to send the signal through. We can fix it in post.

Let's wrap it up. Go ahead, Timmy.

Thank you both for joining us. The way we like to close is to give you both a shameless plug. Take it away.

I'll take that. FOMO.ai: the perfect combination of humans and technology to help you generate sales and leads without paid ads. We talked a lot today about the future of the world with AI, and I need to get all that out of my head, so I write at 84futures.com. We also have a Substack, learn.fomo.ai, for SEO topics. We need to get better at posting regularly, but there's good material on there. And you can find me at dax.fyi.

And reach out to FOMO.ai. We're happy to set up a call and walk you through our technology. We love to showcase it, and it works really well. We start with a playbook and get people going from day one; we don't need weeks or months to get started.

Wonderful. Dax, TJ, thank you very much. Thank you all for watching, and we'll see you in the next one.