Why SEO Hacker focuses on AEO while AI writes titles
Jossette Frances Benjamia is a Web Partnership Associate at SEO Hacker, which provides SEO and digital marketing services including link building, content creation and campaign strategy. This conversation is worth reading because it explains where the agency uses AI in practice, where it pulled back, and why it has built Answer Engine Optimization as a distinct client focus.
Use AI for repeatable, scalable SEO tasks such as keyword-rich title generation, but keep humans on credibility-sensitive work like HARO pitches. Invest in AEO and original expertise, and ignore the urge to chase every new AI tool.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
SEO Hacker started back in 2010 as a personal blog by our founder, Sean Si, where he documented everything he was learning about SEO. That blog eventually turned into client work, and from there it grew into the full SEO agency we are today. What makes us different is that we started from genuinely learning the craft in public, not from a sales pitch, so our approach has always been rooted in what actually works rather than shortcuts.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Honestly, most of our new business today, including projects like Rankseer and Conversionz, came from the hard work our CEO put in building things from scratch. He’s been the driving force behind a lot of our growth.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Title generation was the first thing I let AI take over completely. We work across a lot of very different client niches, and coming up with unique, keyword-rich titles for each one used to eat up a ton of time. Now it’s a quick, repeatable process.
The one thing I tried and abandoned was letting AI handle HARO responses. It just couldn’t capture the specific, credible voice that actually gets a pitch chosen by a journalist, so I went back to writing those myself.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Definitely. We’ve seen more prospects come in already understanding some SEO basics, or specifically asking about visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, not just Google. That’s actually part of why we’ve built out AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, as its own focus for clients. We’re not seeing a flood of leads directly from AI assistants yet, but we’re seeing the questions shift toward it, which tells us it’s coming.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’d tell them to actually invest in AEO, making sure your content is structured so AI tools can pull accurate answers from it, because that’s clearly where search behavior is heading. I’d also tell them to keep doubling down on genuine expertise and original content, since that’s what both Google and AI models reward now.
What I’d tell them to ignore is chasing every new AI tool or shiny tactic that promises quick rankings. A lot of that is noise, and it usually doesn’t hold up over a 12 month timeline. The fundamentals still win.
Thank you to Jossette Frances Benjamia and the team at SEO-Hacker for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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