GenAI has flooded SEO marketing workflows with promise of faster content and smarter strategy. But in practice, it’s not always clear how to turn that promise into performance, especially for founders juggling a dozen priorities. Is GenAI just a copy-paste machine? A glorified keyword tool? Or something closer to a full-stack optimizer?
The answer depends on how you use it. In the hands of resourceful founders, GenAI is reshaping SEO from the ground up: auditing what’s underperforming, reviving what’s been forgotten, and scaling what works – not to mention that it’s giving startups a new search channel to optimize.
We sat down with two RSCM founders to find out how they’ve adopted GenAI into their SEO workflows to get a real-world understanding of how founders are using this technology, and how they’re future-proofing their strategy for GEO-powered search.
Two Founders that Are Using Generative AI SEO in Marketing
Jennifer Lea, Founder & CEO of EntryEnvy, launched her business three and a half years ago after spotting an opportunity in the home décor market. Her business delivers customizable address signs and faux-floral arrangements that update seasonally. Today she leads a lean, product-obsessed team shipping nationwide on a quarterly-subscription model. Jennifer still writes every blog post herself—more than 250 so far—driving 85% of the site’s traffic organically and nurturing a fiercely loyal audience.
Mario Martinez Jr. is the Founder & CEO of Vengreso, the creators of FlyMSG.io. Mario spent nine years turning Vengresso—his digital-sales training firm—into the world’s largest digital sales training academy. In 2023 he pivoted the services powerhouse into a full SaaS provider with FlyMSG, a 9-in-1 AI writing, sales-engagement, and productivity suite used by 27,000+ sellers, marketers, and founders. Mario’s content-first growth playbook helped explode organic traffic to over 35k visits per month in one year, while his content creation framework and AI tool stack keep the content engine humming.
Best AI SEO Tools for Founders
The first step in any good SEO plan is to audit your existing site. Before GenAI, auditing a site for SEO was manual and time-consuming. Now, AI tools make the digital marketing process faster, more precise, and more accessible.
Mario turned to AI tools when his site traffic plummeted to get a sense of what went wrong. “March 2023 was one of our worst months ever for website traffic,” he recalls. His first step was to analyze and adjust page speed. He installed NitroPack to speed up the site enough to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals. “We installed it and within 24 to 48 hours our website was screaming fast.”
Mario also ran a deep analysis of his site using Alt-Text AI and discovered over 8,000 images without alt text. “If you want Google to index you, then you need a site that serves the blind,” he says. Alt-Text AI let him bulk-label the backlog, boosting impressions and crawlability.
Jennifer used Schema Plus to flag indexing gaps and structured-data issues, which exposed issues that later showed up in Google Search Console. “There were pages that weren’t being indexed on Google that should have been. I only realized it when I applied Schema markup that Google didn’t even see those pages.” With Schema Plus and Google Search Console, she could manually re-index posts that had fallen through the cracks. Her audit process became a loop: surface issues, fix them, resubmit.
How Founders Use AI SEO for Writing and Content Creation
After diagnosing the gaps, both founders turned to AI for retroactive optimization. Jennifer focused on refining her 250 post archive. She skipped writing tools like ChatGPT for older content and jumped straight to tools that surface errors and boost visibility. “We went through Yoast on every single one of our blogs to make sure that we were getting green lights across the board. You can do a lot with the AI features that are being added to the tools you’re already using,” she says. That lightweight workflow—update metadata, apply schema, re-index—makes old content new again. “Going back through existing content is better than having to start from scratch,” she says.
Mario brought the same mindset to his own content updates. After using AI to label all 8,000 untagged images, he deployed Internal Link Juicer to improve internal link structure and topical cohesion. Internal links are hyperlinks that point to pages on the same domain, and they help search engines find, index, and understand all of the pages on your site. “We went from about 5–10 interlinks per article to 15–20,” he says. These updates didn’t just polish the content; they reshaped how search engines comprehended his site and turned forgotten assets into active SEO drivers.
The Role of AI Blog Writers in Scaling SEO Content
When Jennifer began EntryEnvy’s blog, she was writing into a void. “We are the first and only company that specializes in custom personalized home signs with faux floral seasonal decor. How the hell do you search for that on Google?” she laughs. With no clear keywords, she turned to SEMrush for direction in the early days—but over time, she found a more scalable co-pilot in AI. “ChatGPT is a wonderful marketing strategist. It asks questions and creates direction,” she says. Jennifer still writes every post herself, but lets ChatGPT help frame the objective, define the audience, and pressure-test the angle before she begins.
Mario uses AI to optimize for speed with content creation, and he shares how other founders can do the same. “Here’s the easy button when you’re brand new and have little to no content: Make a list of 20 burning, fiery, red-hot questions your buyer is trying to solve that can lead to your solution. I do this, and then I type a written response—sometimes a few sentences, sometimes several paragraphs. Next I open Zoom, look into the camera, and record myself reading that answer. I upload it to YouTube and post it natively on LinkedIn.”
From there, Mario uses FlyMSG as an AI post generator to create a social post. “FlyMSG watches the video and spits out a complete LinkedIn post optimized for LinkedIn’s algorithm,” he explains. Later, he uses the videos for longer form blog content. “After the video and social post, we pull the transcript, run it through Surfer SEO, an AI blog writer, and build an article around the same keyword. I make edits, and then we embed the YouTube clip in the blog post so we double-index on Google and YouTube.”
What’s the difference between AEO and GEO?
AI is changing the way people search for information, and that should play a role in your SEO strategy. There are two disciplines that come into play when thinking beyond SEO: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). AEO focuses on structuring content so that it’s eligible for featured snippets and direct answers in traditional search engines. GEO, on the other hand, is about optimizing for generative AI platforms like Google’s SGE or ChatGPT—tools that synthesize answers using multiple sources and often never send users to your site at all.
This shift toward zero-click search has real consequences for site traffic. “Google’s AI Search Overview absolutely tanked us in terms of clicks. People get the answer right in Google and never hit the site,” says Mario.
Preparing for the AI‑Driven Search Future (GEO/AEO)
Vengresso turns up in search results via LLMs, and Mario credits their content strategy with that victory. “If you ask ChatGPT, ‘Who has the best text expander?’ it replies, ‘If you’re in sales or marketing, it’s 100% FlyMSG.’ ChatGPT understands our domain because of all the LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and long-form articles pointing back to that theme,” he says. “A prospect booked a call two weeks ago and told me, ‘I asked ChatGPT who the leading authority on AI for SDRs is, and it gave me one name—Mario Martinez from Vengreso.’ That lead came straight from GenAI search, not Google.”
He notes that LinkedIn in particular is a great place to put time and energy if you’re strapped for resources. “I tell founders to spend budget on AI tools that help you write LinkedIn comments and posts fast. My LinkedIn profile ranks higher than our website, which also has huge domain authority. LinkedIn content gets indexed quickest, builds domain authority for your name, and now feeds those GenAI answers, too.”
Jessica says that she wants to optimize not just for LLM-powered search, but also for search via voice-activated devices – and that she’s using Schema Plus for both. “Two years from now, prospects may never touch a browser; they’ll simply ask a smart speaker for ‘a black modern address sign with gold numbers,’” says Jennifer. “Schema is the bridge between today’s content and that future. It’s what’s driving LLMs, too.” If your pages aren’t wrapped in clear, comprehensive Schema markup, LLMs and voice-activated search may not even know your brand exists, no matter how strong your keywords are. Treat Schema as a future-proof layer: keep creating authoritative content, optimize it with tools like Semrush, but always tag it with structured data so AI assistants can parse, rank, and recommend you when customers swap keyboards for conversation – be it with a smart speaker or a chatbot.
How to Get Your Whole Marketing Team to Use AI for SEO
In Jennifer’s opinion, the biggest bottleneck with AI isn’t the tech; it’s getting your team to use it. She started by shifting the mindset. “About a year ago, I started being more open with my own team and encouraging them. I’d ask, ‘Have you talked to ChatGPT about this?’ when they had a question.” Framing AI as a brainstorming partner—not a threat—opened up creative collaboration. “The ideas that have come out of that, collectively as a team, have been amazing.”
Her advice: ditch the stereotypes. “Don’t assume only the 22-year-olds will adopt it and the 52-year-olds won’t,” she says. “GenAI adoption depends more on curiosity than age.” ChatGPT offers a low-stakes entry point. It’s an approachable sandbox where anyone can experiment. Jennifer highlights Shopify’s internal memo as the new standard: every employee, in any role, is expected to use AI—and no one gets extra headcount or budget unless they prove AI can’t do it first.
AI as SEO Strategist
GenAI is helping founders and marketers boost their SEO strategy, but humans still need to be at the wheel to dictate direction. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Every startup has different needs,” says Jennifer. “There are so many tools out there, it’s easy to feel the need to do everything all at once or replicate someone else’s strategy. That approach simply won’t work. Diluted focus equals diluted results. Pick two to three that make the most sense, stay agile, and execute.”
What Jennifer and Mario show is that the real advantage doesn’t come from outsourcing the work, but from rethinking how the work gets done. It’s not about replacing writers or marketers. It’s about accelerating strategy, scaling execution, and surfacing insights.
For founders, the opportunity is clear: you don’t need a big team or a massive budget to compete in search. You need a smart audit, a tight workflow, and a willingness to experiment. The tools are ready. The question is whether you are.
