Watch or listen to the full conversation: on YouTube or Nick LeRoy: If You Can Bullet-Point It, You Are Replaceable on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.
Nick LeRoy has been an SEO for sixteen years — ten agency-side, six on his own — and he runs SEOjobs.com, the board he built because typing “SEO” into LinkedIn still returns a Java developer role with “SEO knowledge, nice to have” buried in the bullets. “I ultimately built what I refer to as the site that I wanted when I needed it,” he says, “or after I needed it.”
Ask him to describe the hiring market and you get one word.
The market in one word: ugly
“I think that’s a single word is ugly,” Nick said. “And what I mean by that is not just like SEO is dead or nobody’s getting a job — like that’s not true. But where we are now with the combination of so much remote work, AI, and if I’m being completely honest, just kind of greediness, like we’re in a situation where it’s a buyer’s market.”
The structural shift underneath that word is the part worth sitting with:
“We have never had, until this last year or two, this situation where the demand for SEO talent being lower than the stock of talent that we have. That’s how a lot of what I used to call C-plus SEOs were getting six-figure A-plus salaries — because they wanted, they needed to fill the seat.”
The seat you are applying for is no longer desperate. When the hiring manager holds the upper hand, your conversation changes shape: “it’s how can I pay you less? How can I demand more for less? And it’s become very difficult.”
What AI actually removed
It did not remove your job. It removed the rung you used to climb on.
“Now that AI is kind of making these entry-level jobs almost irrelevant,” Nick said, “it’s now turning into, okay, well, there’s a lot of talent available, but because I have the upper hand as a hiring manager…”
How did your job get built that way? For a long stretch, what it rewarded was throughput:
“What SEOs were required to do at that point was less about how you present it, that critical thinking. It was how quickly can you execute tasks? And that was your value.”
If your value was execution speed, you are now competing with something that never sleeps. If your value was judgment, you are not.
Human-led AI, and the 25% question
Nick’s framing for the tooling is what he calls human-led AI, and his objection is not to the technology. It is to how the technology gets sold.
“People are looking at AI as a like 100% solution or zero percent,” he said. “And that’s where — that’s my whole basis of this whole like human-led AI.”
Then he asked the question that should be in more planning meetings than it is:
“I even wrote a post about it. It was something along the idea of, when did twenty-five percent efficiency not become good enough? If I came to you five years ago and said, hey, thanks for showing me your whole process, I have some ideas and it’s gonna save you twenty-five percent — you probably just roll your eyes.”
You do not roll your eyes at 25% anymore. You hold out for 100%, you are disappointed by 40%, and you conclude the tool does not work. The tool works. The expectation you were sold is what is broken.
Why he refuses the “who do I cut” meeting
If you manage anyone, this is the part to sit with.
“I’ve been in a very unfortunate situation where I’ve had leadership come to me and be like, who can I cut from my team because we’re gonna be using AI. And I refuse to get into those conversations. I was like, I’m not going to be responsible for somebody not having the money to feed their kids.”
He does not just decline. He counters:
“Why, instead of a one-time P&L boost by firing a bunch of people, don’t you realize this as opportunity cost? Instead of cutting your team in half, what about you won’t have to hire again until the output of that team is doubled?”
Same savings, different instrument. One of them ends careers, and the one he offers you ends a hiring req instead.
“Make Google look stupid”
On the results themselves, Nick is more optimistic than most people you will hear this year — and his reasoning is not sentimental.
“I always say the number one SEO strategy is basically make Google look stupid if you don’t display in their search results,” he said, reaching back to JCPenney and BMW, both penalized and pulled from the SERP. “But what kind of user experience is it when you type in BMW and…”
Your modern version of that leverage is an audience Google does not own. His own site is the proof: “every single month, give or take five percentage points, 50% is direct traffic.” When half your traffic types your name, your 15% organic dip is weather, not a crisis.
And when your rankings slip, the cause is usually not exotic. He described a client convinced a technical silver bullet explained the fall from #1:
“I had to stop him because he would not listen to me. We jumped on a call. I opened up Google in incognito, because I didn’t want him to talk about personalized results.”
Then he read the SERP back the way your buyer reads it: “They’re both cheaper than you are. You charge for shipping, they don’t, and you have a 10% restocking fee for returns. And they don’t have that.” His conclusion, delivered with feeling: “Why the f— would Google rank you over these other guys?”
Which is the optimistic reading of where search is heading. As Nick put it: “My hope is always that SEO is more of a reflection of building a really good business.”
What the work looks like if you want to keep it
We landed on the same place from different directions. The output that survives is the output a model cannot summarize back to your client for free. Three things that puts on your desk:
- Stop shipping volume. Don’t make another AI slop article — make a workflow, an SOP, something a business can actually run. That is what niching down looks like in practice, and it is specific to an industry in a way a generic post never is.
- Fix the unglamorous thing first. Ignitvio surveyed 1,824 businesses by hand and found 68% never responded to an inquiry within 24 hours. No amount of ranking fixes a business that does not answer the phone.
- Be the person who explains why. “We have to be critical thinkers, we have to take risks, we have to make mistakes, and we have to learn from it.”
Here is how Nick closed. It is the sentence to pin above your desk:
“If there’s anything we’ve learned from AI, it’s if you can summarize what you’re doing in bullet points, you’re replaceable.”
Nick writes weekly at SEO for Lunch and runs SEOjobs.com and PPCjobs.com.
