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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Show off your expertise, build your trust with your potential clients and focus on reviews in a natural and authentic way.
— Robert Spinrad
| 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 |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
He is Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, and writes about not trusting AI for SEO advice.
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
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