Rob Bonham on SEO in the Agentic Age

Jeremy Rivera and Rob Bonham first crossed paths through the search industry’s long, strange evolution — two twenty-year veterans who watched the same tactics rise, get spammed into oblivion, and occasionally come back around. This conversation, recorded for the Unscripted SEO podcast, is one of the sharpest we’ve had on what SEO actually is now that AI sits in the middle of everything.

We’ve both been doing this ~20 years. How does this moment feel to you?

Rob: “It feels like the pre-Panda, pre-Penguin days of wild-west SEO. Now that we have AI to contend with, we’re at a very interesting crossroads. There was a time, early in our careers, where you could do blog-comment posting and get some SEO value, or social bookmarking and get your site on Digg. Over time that became watered down, spammy… and I think we’re starting to see the same thing. We’re in this agentic age where we have AI-related workflows to do that low-level work — that’s not where SEOs are going to spend their time moving forward. Which I’m grateful for, because I want to be more steeped in strategy and overarching integrated campaigns.”

Stewards of the AI

A client auto-generated a hundred near-duplicate city pages. Should they have?

Rob: “With much power comes much responsibility, right? Just because you can publish a hundred city-specific pages for your concrete-pouring business, should you? Probably not. AI at its essence is typically regurgitating what it can find from other websites. That’s why I think that as SEOs, we are stewards of the AI. Because if you don’t know how to use the tools appropriately, you could get your website in a world of hurt. You might get all these users — half of them bots, the other half on the page five seconds or less and bouncing. Google’s going to devalue that content when it sees the user signals aren’t there.”

Agencies at a crossroads

Clients are tempted to drop their agency and “just use AI in-house.” What happens?

Rob: “Agencies are in a precarious position. Some clients are abandoning them thinking, well, I don’t need to pay 10K a month, my in-house guys can just use AI. But think about how that gets perceived — by LLM bots, by search bots, and by users. You might look like a hero for a month or two. But as soon as that site starts to tank — and it surely will — they’re going to start looking at their agency sideways. Use AI as a tool, but cautiously and with human intervention, so you’re actually adding value instead of the perceived value of ‘they knocked out five blog posts for me this month.’”

The black box of LLM visibility

Can the new LLM-visibility tools actually measure anything reliably?

Rob: “At best it’s directional. Rand Fishkin did a study where something like eighty percent of the time you’re getting different results whenever you run the same LLM query.” His practical advice for smaller budgets: lean on free citation data first — “that’s hugely beneficial, especially if you don’t have the cash to purchase a Profound or comparable tool.”

Earning your keep in a post-attribution world

When the data goes dark, how do you prove you deserve to be paid?

Rob: “It’s a matter of telling the right story — using data to show how you’ve impacted things. SEO is a game of sums: we’re seeing a win here, the value we add adds to that game of sums. It’s getting the client to understand that SEO is not an island. If you touch something over here, something over here might change.”

Link building, reborn

Which “old” tactics are quietly working again?

Rob: “Whoever has the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way — that is the ultimate be-all and end-all of winning and dominating the SERPs. It’s always been important, but now it’s more important than ever, and the bigger your audience is, the more important that is.” His favorite low-effort, high-integrity source: legitimate partners. “I worked for an e-commerce MRO parts provider carrying hundreds of brands with store locators — we’d get links from our suppliers and it worked tremendously well. Good link building is usually tedious. This was like shooting fish in a barrel, and we’re not doing anything bad — not paying, not twisting arms.”

Integrated marketing is the job now

Paint the picture of a campaign done right.

Rob: “I’ve run SEO for car dealerships for years, and one real needle-mover is capitalizing on sales events — Black Friday, Memorial Day, 4th of July. Stand up a landing page specific to that event, include it in your email marketing, send paid search and paid social traffic to it, add organic social. You can’t just do SEO. You can’t just do PPC. You can’t just do email. They need to be working harmoniously — a holistic campaign rather than just a paid-search or SEO campaign.”

Squeeze the juice

What are businesses sitting on that they don’t use?

Rob: “In almost every organization I’ve worked with, I’ll come across some mention or press release of something cool the brand did — and I never heard about it. That’s the biggest issue: the disconnected communication with the SEO department. Whether it’s the Marcom team or a social manager, they don’t realize the impact they could have just by getting that press release out the door and to the right people.”

Going independent

Advice for SEOs going freelance or fractional?

Rob: “Don’t sell yourself short. Whether it’s hourly or a monthly retainer, make sure the price makes sense for you — for your tenure in the industry — but also make sure it makes sense for the client. You don’t want them to feel ripped off, and you don’t want to feel like you’re ripping yourself off.” On scope and tire-kickers: “Set the right expectations so you don’t get scope-creeped. And be choosy — I’ll charge a small fee for an audit, even a fifteen-minute Loom for fifty bucks. It shows your time is valuable and that you’re both working in good faith.”

Where to find Rob

Rob: “Reach out to me on LinkedIn — I’m a LinkedIn head, always on there. Search Rob Bonham. I think I’m the only Rob Bonham doing SEO.” You can also find his fractional-SEO advisory work at The SEO Advisory.