The AI Reality Check
JaMichael Mitchell on why SEO still brings most of the leads
JaMichael Mitchell is the CEO of EraBright Digital Marketing, a Black-owned full-range agency he started in 2016 after years of climbing toward ownership. The business stands out for its cultural fluency with majority-Black customer bases, and for treating AI search visibility as a real client service rather than an internal experiment.
SEO still brings in most of EraBright’s new business, but the real shift is that AI assistants are now part of how customers find the agency. The practical work has moved from chasing rankings alone to making sure businesses are cleanly listed, consistently named, and easy for AI systems to cite.
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?
I started EraBright in 2016, after climbing steadily since 2011 to the point where the natural next step was ownership. We’re Black-owned, and one of the few full-range digital marketing shops in that position, which puts us in a strong spot to serve businesses whose customer base is majority Black. That’s not our only lane, but it’s one where we bring a level of cultural fluency that’s hard to find elsewhere in this industry.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
The majority of new business still comes from SEO, and honestly, I hope it stays that way. It’s the channel I trust most because it compounds over time instead of resetting every month like paid ads do. That said, I’m looking into investing more in LinkedIn going forward, since that’s where a lot of the decision-makers in this space actually spend their time.
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?
AI is doing the heavy lifting on content and copywriting, drafting landing pages, ad copy, and blog posts that used to eat hours of my week. I also built out an AI Overview citation framework, essentially a system for structuring content, GBP signals, and NAP consistency so that both traditional search and AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews actually cite the business. That’s become a real deliverable I sell, not just something I use internally.
Honestly, I haven’t had to reverse much of it. I’ve been skeptical by default with AI from the start, so I never handed things over blind. Anything I adopted got tested and vetted before it became part of the actual workflow, which is probably why nothing has needed to be walked back.
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?
Yes, and it’s the reason I’ve shifted so much of my own positioning toward AEO and GEO. I’ve done real strategy work here, auditing Google Business Profile signals and citation consistency specifically for AI Overview inclusion, and applying the same structured-data thinking to product entities so that AI-driven search treats a business as a clear, citable source rather than just another page in the index. I’ve already had customers tell me they found me through ChatGPT, which is proof this isn’t theoretical. Traditional SEO used to be about ranking. Now a growing share of the work is about whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI Overview will actually surface and cite you by name when someone asks a question your business answers.
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?
If I were advising someone right now, I’d tell them to get serious about AEO and GEO immediately, not down the line, because it’s already happening and not some future trend. Go clean up your Google Business Profile signals, make sure your business is listed the same way everywhere, and structure your content so AI can actually read and cite you. I’ve had customers straight up tell me they found me through ChatGPT, and that doesn’t happen by accident, it happens because the groundwork was already there. Beyond that, stay skeptical and test things before you build your workflow around them instead of jumping in headfirst just because everyone else is.
As for what to ignore, I’d say skip chasing every shiny new AI tool that drops, since most of it is noise and hopping from tool to tool every few weeks costs more time than it saves. And don’t ditch what’s already working just because it’s not the newest thing. SEO still brings in most of my business, and it keeps paying off in a way ads and trend-chasing never will.
Thank you to JaMichael Mitchell and the team at EraBright Digital Marketing for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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