The AI Agency Journey

The episode contains a handful of usable ideas - test what AI knows about you on a fresh account, use FAQs to feed AI search, co-pilot vs. ChatGPT for summarisation, proprietary agent for member communities - but they are spread thin across heavy biographical backstory and generic change-management philosophy. Most of the runtime is padding, and the actual AI SEO advice is surface-level.

“I'm a podcaster, but I put all my podcasts into blogs with lots of long tail keywords. I ask them, what are the right keywords to use for certain things so that it'll be found?”

“Frequently asked questions is interesting because they're putting it on our website so that it's easy for them to find answers to those frequently asked questions.”

The anthropological framing on AI adoption is the one distinctive angle, but it rarely produces non-obvious conclusions - mostly standard change-management clichés ('the brain hates to change'). The AI SEO advice recycles familiar content-marketing principles with AI labels attached. The proprietary-agent client story is the only genuinely fresh concrete point.

“what they created was a proprietary database of really rich material and an agent that gave exclusivity to their members for access to the information and for training and development”

“I find Copilot did a better job taking interviews and summarizing them than Chat did... it summarized it but shrunk it down so it lost all of its personality. and co-pilot kept the personality in the context.”

Andy Simon is a genuine long-tenure practitioner - PhD anthropologist, 23+ years running her own consultancy, real named clients across banking and healthcare, four books - which gives the episode credibility as lived experience. However, the episode topic is AI SEO and she is explicitly an interested experimenter in that domain rather than a specialist, which caps the caliber score for this specific conversation.

“I spent 14 years helping banks change as an EVP of one bank and SVP of a savings bank.”

“I have 480 podcasts and they all have content there”

The guest offers a handful of concrete numbers (480 podcast episodes, 10,000 books sold, nine-month writing timeline, 600 autistic kids client, 8-year leadership academy engagement) that ground the conversation, but the core AI SEO claims - 'we're getting nice traffic,' 'his business continues to rise' - are unquantified. No ranked keyword examples, no traffic figures, no before/after comparison.

“we sold 10,000 copies, many of which were on speaking engagements in corporations”

“we can see for him how search has gone down since the end of the pandemic. And yet his business continues to rise”

The host asks reasonable directional follow-ups ('What did you do differently?', 'What's one quick win?', 'Tell me more about the repurposing process') that keep the conversation moving, but he is consistently deferential, stacks affirmations ('Excellent. Excellent insights there.'), and never pushes back on vague or unsubstantiated claims. The self-admitted lack of AI SEO expertise limits the quality of probing.

“What did you do differently compared to just normally what we do with ranking on Google? And what were those critical things that you were able to do so that you would rank higher?”

“I have to confess, Andy, I'm not an AI SEO expert”