Visibility is a form of stewardship. If your ministry, nonprofit, or faith-driven business can’t be found, the people who need it can’t find it either. I sat down with veteran SEO Rob Bonham to talk about what’s changed in the AI era — and how mission-driven organizations can show up with integrity instead of chasing volume.
From manual fixes to the agentic wild west
Rob has spent about two decades in SEO. His read on this moment: it feels like the wild west again. The manual low-hanging fruit — fixing a hundred title tags, rewriting metas — is now automated. The unlock is real, but it means using AI well is table stakes, and the place we add value has moved.
Stewards of the AI — why volume backfires
Rob’s central metaphor will resonate with anyone who takes stewardship seriously: SEOs are now stewards of the AI. Just because you can publish a hundred near-identical pages doesn’t mean you should. AI mostly regurgitates what it finds elsewhere, so without human oversight you generate bot traffic and bounces, and Google devalues the content the moment the signals aren’t there.
“As SEOs, we are stewards of the AI. Because if you don’t know how to use the tools appropriately, you could get your website in a world of hurt.”
— Rob Bonham
The deeper warning is about integrity: don’t replace expertise with volume. Notional, machine-spun content founded in nothing real serves no one — least of all the people you’re trying to reach.
Measuring honestly in a post-attribution world
Measurement has collapsed — Google Search Console query data is wildly incomplete and LLM results barely repeat. The honest move isn’t fake precision; it’s telling the true story with the data you do have: branded-search lift and the “game of sums,” where everything you do compounds.
Footprint over PageRank: being known for good
Link building, reframed, is really about footprint — unlinked mentions and third-party visibility across the places people actually look. For a mission-driven org, that’s your real-world good showing up online: partnerships, community involvement, press. Rob (a guest on the Unscripted SEO Podcast) put it plainly:
“Whoever has the bigger footprint and the more people talking about them across the web in a positive way — that is the ultimate be-all and end-all of winning and dominating the SERPs.”
— Rob Bonham
Listen to the full episode
Listen to Rob Bonham on the Unscripted SEO Podcast → · Watch on YouTube →
Connect with Rob Bonham
Rob Bonham is a fractional SEO director and startup advisor. Find him on LinkedIn, or read his full recap of this conversation on The SEO Advisory.