About 12 years ago, I sold my companies and moved to South America — but recently, when I saw what AI was about to do to local businesses, it stopped me cold. It was stepping in front of their prospect flow — quietly intercepting the customers a business had always counted on and redirecting them to whoever the AI decided was the better fit.
For most owners it was invisible. The phone just rang a little less. The new patients, the new clients, the walk-ins — a slice of them were being routed somewhere else before the business ever knew there was a race.
This is the same disruption we had more than twenty years ago — back when Yahoo was king of search and AltaVista was right behind it, and then Google arrived. There was no certification. No classes. No school. No experts who’d been doing it for twenty years that you could ask. We had to reverse-engineer the top businesses to find what they had in common.
My background made that a natural next step. I spent fifteen years in business process reengineering for some of the largest corporate entities in the United States — taking complex, opaque systems apart to find the few things that actually drive the outcome.
And I know why many in the marketing and SEO industry in particular are struggling to get their clients ranked. It’s almost like coming from a classroom with a super-strict teacher who, for many years, gave good grades for following the rules — then being forced into a different class with a schizophrenic teacher who has six different personalities and six different ways of grading you. It has been a shock to a lot of good people.
Getting to the answer wasn’t fast. It took tens of thousands of individual analyses — iteration after iteration, reverse-engineering more than 30,000 different local businesses that AI actively recommends — to surface what they all had in common.
What came out was a list of roughly 200 factors AI appeared to be evaluating. Over time we eliminated about fifty of them that turned out to carry no real weight. What’s left is 141 concrete, system-derived, mathematically calculated factors — things that need to be present on the website, off the website, or through external sources — for a business to get recommended into the list.
And because the AI engines keep shifting, we re-weight those factors on a regular cycle, so you always know which ones are gaining or losing importance.
