The short version: Hit Me SEO's founder spent 16 years in local SEO, stepped away in 2024 believing AI was killing search, and came back when he saw AI was becoming its own kind of search that names specific businesses in its answers. He returned in March and, with Pam (10+ years building the tools alongside him), built a platform that reads every client's live Google data each morning and fixes what it finds the same day, with a human approving every change. Want proof? Get the free "Where You're NOT Ranking" report.
About
I quit SEO in 2024. Here’s why I came back.
I spent 16 years running Hit Me SEO. Sixteen years of watching Google change the rules, watching local businesses get burned by agencies, and slowly building the tools I wished existed.
And then, in 2024, I got out.
AI was killing SEO, and it was killing it fast.
I partnered my clients with another company and stepped away from the business, partly because I believed the thing everyone in my industry was afraid to say out loud.
Anyone could suddenly generate a thousand pages of content in an afternoon. Search results were flooding with machine-written junk. It looked like the end of the craft I’d spent my adult life on.
AI wasn’t killing search. It was becoming its own kind of search.
But watching from the outside, I saw something I couldn’t unsee. People weren’t just Googling anymore, they were asking ChatGPT who to call. And when the AI answered, it named specific businesses. Somebody was deciding, with data and structure and signals, which businesses got named.
And here’s the part almost nobody says: AI made the SEO’s judgment MORE valuable, not less. Anyone can use AI to write a piece of content. The rules of SEO still decide whether that content ever gets indexed by Google, let alone ranks high enough to earn a single visitor. Knowing WHAT to build, HOW to rank it, and WHICH changes actually matter in your market, that’s the whole game now. The tools got faster. The thinking got scarcer.
The decisions should be made by data.
I came back in March of this year with one conviction: our data, and the data most businesses never uncover. Where you actually rank block by block, which keywords actually ring the phone, what your competitors changed last week, and what Google’s latest update did to you specifically.
So we built the system I’d been dreaming about for 16 years: a full-service software platform that reads every client’s live Google data every single morning, finds the gaps and the leaks and the changes, and fixes them the same day, with a human expert approving every move. It is the machine I always wanted to hand my clients.
I didn’t build it alone.
Pam has been building this with me for over 10 years. She started the way the whole platform started: making small tools, recommending fixes and changes, turning what worked into something repeatable. Then she refined it, added to it, and helped create the ultimate piece of software for helping our clients.
Careers spent in local search, now with a machine that never sleeps between our conversations.
We didn’t build this to be impressive.
We built it because local businesses deserve to know the truth about where they stand, and because “trust me, we’re optimizing” was never good enough.
If you want to see what the machine sees about YOUR business, that’s the free report. No meeting, no obligation.
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