Use AI to Kill the SEO agency Pre-Work, Not the Thinking | Erika Braeger, Tenspeed

Erika Braeger is not trying to automate the analysis. She manages organic growth strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency, and the automation she builds is aimed squarely at the pre-work: pulling numbers out of four systems and lining them up in a spreadsheet before anybody is allowed to think.

Key takeaways

• Automate the pre-work, protect the thinking. The distinction is the whole interview, and it is a better rule than most published AI policies.
• Her management job is confidence, not answers. A strategist who arrives for a gut check usually already knows, and she coaxes rather than signs off.
• The brief is where the quality is decided. Subject matter expertise, product research and ideal customer profile go in before a word is written, whoever writes it.
• Write for humans first, then make it machine readable. In that order, and for a reason she states plainly.
• Never rush a website migration. Her one red line, and her first question is always what business goal the migration is for.

On this page

• Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking
• Coaching a team out of the gut check
• Where the quality is actually decided
• Never rush a website migration
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking

I don’t want to take away the thinking part. I want to allow the strategist to arrive at the thinking part with more ease, without burning energy, on grabbing data, organizing it out of multiple systems, organizing it in the spreadsheet.

— Erika Braeger

It is a narrow claim and a much more defensible one than most agencies are making. The analysis, the narrative, the relationship and the decision all stay with the person. What gets automated is the hour of assembly that happens before any of that can start.

It’s the pre-work that can burn a lot of time, a lot of energy.

— Erika Braeger

Her example of a skill in use is deliberately mundane: gathering conversations scattered across several systems and summarising them, instead of a strategist opening four tabs to reconstruct where an account is.

Coaching a team out of the gut check

A big part of my role is helping people grow, helping them build confidence and trust their instincts.

— Erika Braeger

She was a teacher before this, and the method transfers directly. A strategist comes to her because a client is overhauling their navigation and they want a second opinion. They are plugged into the client and the industry. They usually already know.

I don’t just sign off on the gut check. I keep asking curious questions to coax the answer out of them.

— Erika Braeger

The point is not the navigation. It is that the same person will not need to ask next time. She is honest that some of her own early gut checks were impostor syndrome rather than genuine uncertainty.

Where the quality is actually decided

Some clients get finished content, some get briefs, some take the brief and run an AI-assisted process themselves. She is relaxed about which, because in every case the leverage sits in the same place: the brief, and the expert review at the end.

You need to write content for humans first. However, you need to keep in mind that in order to get the content in front of humans, it needs to be machine readable so that the bots that parsed the content can present it to the correct humans at the correct time.

— Erika Braeger

The ordering is the argument. Machine readability is a distribution requirement, not an audience.

The friend test

If I were to show this to a friend, would they understand?

— Erika Braeger

Her check against the occupational hazard of B2B SaaS writing, which is learning a product so thoroughly that you stop noticing how technical you have become.

Never rush a website migration

Don’t rush a website migration, I will say. Never rush a website migration.

— Erika Braeger

Asked for a red line, that is the only one she offers, and her follow-up is a better filter than any checklist. Before anything else she asks what business goal the migration is serving, which is often enough to reveal that somebody simply prefers a different platform.

She has no preferred content management system and says so, which is a rarer answer than it should be. Knowing how each one behaves is what lets you make a sensible recommendation. The thing she is still working on is centralising visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube, which is the same pre-work problem in a new place.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What should an SEO agency automate and what should it protect?
• How do you build confidence in a junior strategy team?
• Does a content brief still matter if AI writes the draft?
• Should I write for humans or for AI crawlers?
• What is the biggest mistake in a website migration?
• Which CMS is best for SEO?
• How do I track brand visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube?

Go deeper

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

• the superintelligence question she is answering, and the guest who asked it, from the episode recorded before hers.
• the Topaz sales conversation Jeremy carries into this one, on what a transcript cannot tell you about a call.
• the faceless client era, written up separately, following the same thread past the end of the interview.

Watch the interview

Find Erika Braeger

tenspeed.io, where the agency’s first research report is published. She is on LinkedIn under her own name.

Cite this episode

Braeger, Erika. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI to Kill the Pre-Work, Not the Thinking.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/erika-braeger-tenspeed-unscripted-seo/