An AI company that happens to do seo
That is not where we started. This is the story of how two people with nearly 30 years each in search saw what AI was about to do, rebuilt their entire company around it, and built microSEO along the way. It is also, we think, a preview of where this whole industry is headed.
Two people who have lived through every search shift since the 1990s
Daniel Burns, our COO, ran a web design agency for 20 years and has spent nearly three decades in digital marketing. He is the one who turns strategy into working systems, and he built the microSEO platform.
Two people who have already lived through every major search shift there is, which is exactly why we recognized the next one the moment it arrived.
We lost 80 percent of our traffic almost overnight
A Google update hit, and most of our visibility vanished in a matter of days. Here is the honest version. We panicked for about a day. Then we rebuilt, and out of that rebuild came the methodology we still run today, Micro SEO Strategies℠, a disciplined, repeatable way to move stuck pages onto page one.
That period taught us two things that matter to this story. Search can change under your feet with no warning. And the businesses that come out the other side are the ones with a real system, not the ones winging it. Hold that thought, because a year later the ground moved again. This time it was not a setback. It was the opportunity of a career.
We didn't treat AI as a threat. We rebuilt the company around it.
When ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, I did not treat it as a gimmick. I threw myself at it, six days and well over a hundred hours, and came out completely certain of one thing. AI was going to change not just search, but every industry.
Most agencies reacted by bolting a few AI tools onto what they already did.
That is not a tagline.
It changed how we hire, how we work, and what we build. We now run a full-time development team. And the speed of the shift is the whole point. If you are not paying close attention to AI right now, you could be out of business in six to nine months. Google itself is turning from a search engine into an answer engine. We intend to be one of the companies that saw it coming, and helped others see it too.
We built the tool for ourselves first
The pivot needed a system. Within those first six days I had a working prototype, and I took it to Daniel and told him we needed to build a real platform, because almost everything inside our Micro SEO Strategies℠ process, the research, the content, the optimization, could be automated or AI-assisted. Daniel started building. It went through many iterations, and it kept getting better.
Today that platform runs every client we have. It saves our team hours every single day, and the goal is to have it handle roughly 80 percent of the work we used to do by hand. We did not build it to sell. We built it to survive, and then to win.
Everyone has AI now. Almost nobody has a strategy.
Here is the lesson underneath the whole story, and it is what microSEO is built on. The content engine is not the hard part anymore. Anyone can generate content. Roughly 80 percent of what works in search is still the same fundamentals we have done for decades, and you still have to do all of it. But the other 20 percent, the strategy and the AI-search work, is now where 80 percent of the results come from.
That is why we lead with strategy and treat the AI as the engine that executes it. It is why we care as much about getting cited in AI answers, what people now call GEO and AEO, as we do about ranking in Google. And it is why, even with all this automation, a human stays in the loop. Strategy is judgment, not output.
AI this is just the beginning
We are opening microSEO beyond our own agency because the shift we saw coming is now arriving for everyone. Marketing teams and agencies are being asked to produce content at scale that actually ranks and gets cited, and most of them have the tools but not the strategy. That is the exact gap we spent three decades and one very hard year learning how to close.
The next few years of search will look less like anything that came before and more like a conversation between people and AI. We intend to help the businesses we work with win that conversation. If that sounds like the kind of partner you have been looking for, we would love to talk.