The SEO Team Is Collapsing to One Person. The Judgment Is What Survives.

Two out of three Google searches now end without a click to any website, according to SparkToro's read of Similarweb clickstream data, up from 60% two years earlier. More of the answer is resolving on the results page, inside an AI overview, before anyone picks a link. For a local business, showing up now can mean getting named inside that answer before a searcher ever reaches a link.

Eric McLaughlin has spent close to twenty years in SEO, and he runs Vibe Metrix AI, where a lot of his clients are cannabis dispensaries. He thinks the change coming for agencies is mostly about size. The tools now handle so much of the execution, the reporting, and the coordination between them that a full team stops being necessary. "Marketing agencies, they're going to go down to one or two person team, because the AI will literally handle everything," he said. Connect the website builder, the analytics, and the ad platforms to an AI, tell it what to do, and it runs the work across all of them. He points to voice-to-text as the part that surprised him most: you don't even have to type anymore, you talk to the computer and it gets things done.

McLaughlin remembers why the work used to cost so much. You needed a team, and the price had to cover salaries, backlinks, citations, and a margin on top of all of it. When one person can run what a team used to, that math stops holding. Some agencies are dropping their SEO prices in response and some aren't, which he chalks up to how people want to run their businesses more than to any rule.

Getting cited by AI is mostly just good SEO

Someone still has to check the work. AI makes mistakes and doesn't hold the full context of a business, so McLaughlin has to instruct it and confirm what it produces. His dispensary clients are the clearest example. The AI will cheerfully try to write Google Business posts for them, except Google doesn't allow posting for that category at all. Dispensaries can put up reviews and photos and a description, and that's it. The tool doesn't know that. McLaughlin does. He tells the system what to do and confirms it got done right.

McLaughlin started paying attention to AI overviews about six to eight weeks before the interview, when they began showing up heavily in local searches and pushing the map pack toward the bottom of the page. After adjusting for them, his read is that getting cited by AI isn't a new discipline. Google wants goal completion and searcher intent: a site where someone reaches what they need in three clicks or less, and content that matches the service instead of chasing national traffic. Plenty of local businesses get this wrong, he says, writing helpful blog posts that pull thousands of clicks from the wrong cities. If a shop is in Miami and someone in Chicago reads its post about a leaky faucet, that person is never calling.

His trick for figuring out why a competitor ranks is to feed the live search results into an AI and have it break them down: what kind of content, informational or transactional, what the headings look like, whether they use video, how many images. Then he asks it what to fix. He also leans on talking like a local, naming landmarks and intersections, because Google reads those as entities and ties the business to a place. "Feed Google the signals, it will rank you," he said. "I've seen it over and over again." The content has to change by market anyway. A dispensary in Manhattan and one in San Diego may sell the same thing, but the local context changes what the content needs to say. That's where he thinks an agency still earns its fee.

'You want leads, you want sales'

None of the traffic matters to McLaughlin on its own. "When you buy a drill, you don't buy a drill because you want the drill. You buy a drill because you want the hole." He applies it straight to SEO. "You don't want traffic, you don't want a website. You want leads, you want sales." He describes himself less as an SEO than as a conversion optimizer who uses SEO as one tool, because pushing traffic to a site that doesn't convert is wasted money.

He'd just picked up a dispensary client with 33,000 people on an email list who had never sent a single campaign, sitting on traffic they already owned while paying to chase strangers. That's the kind of thing he watches the numbers for: conversion rates, time on site, where they're dropping and why, then reacting to what the data says instead of grinding out a quota of blog posts and social updates.

One more shift he expects as teams shrink: the brand stops being the company and becomes the person. When the agency is one or two people, the customer is buying whoever's doing the work, and the business name is just the label on it.