The AI gold rush vs. the boring truth: How Cadence SEO wins by ignoring the hype

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

In an industry chasing speedy results, Cadence SEO has doubled down on substance. Christy’s version of innovation isn’t found in miracle cures; it’s in the patient, technical, and human work that still drives nearly every click online.

And although the agency is well aware that keeping a finger on the pulse of AI and LLMs is non-negotiable these days—they’ve developed their own AI optimization services and in-house tools—Cadence SEO doesn’t need to shout about the future. They’ve already built one that will last.

It all started when Olsen had nothing but a laptop, five kids, and a decision to make.

Growing a “boring” SEO agency

When Christy talks about the early days of her marketing career, she skips the polish and goes straight to the truth. 

“I was working as a link builder remotely for an agency. My husband died, and I had five kids,” she says. The sentence lands without ceremony. It doesn’t need one.

“I decided I couldn’t work from home anymore. It was making me crazy. So, I told them I needed to go into sales, and I wanted a raise. I was shocked—they said okay.”

As a member of the lead qualifying team, she would show up an hour early every day, coffee in hand, and start bothering the SEO team for answers. “I would harass them,” she says with a laugh. “I would ask them questions incessantly, ‘How are you doing this, etc.’”

I was lead qualifying for a particular rep who was kind of difficult to work with, and he refused to take one of my calls. So I said, ‘I'll take the call.’ I ended up closing that lead on a $50,000 a month deal, taking his job, and working my way up to VP of sales. I was doing pretty well.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

She’d learned something she would build her entire agency on later: If you care enough to understand the work, you can outthink and outperform almost anyone.

Changes in management eventually led her to depart the agency and start her own business with her new husband, Kevin McLauchlin, Cadence SEO’s co-founder, in 2020.

However, the world had come to a standstill. To make ends meet as they tried to get their new agency off the ground, Kevin drove for Uber and Lyft.

One client at a time, Christy and Kevin grew their business. They worked at building and maintaining client relationships, and made sure they delivered the results that kept people coming back.

Five years later, Cadence SEO comprises a team of 25 people and serves more than 100 clients, ranging from B2B SaaS (the agency’s main bread and butter) to jewelry brands, dental practices, and other industries.

Rescuing clients from the brink of despair

Most of Cadence SEO’s clients reach out after they’ve experienced some sort of catastrophic event: a collapse in web traffic, a breakdown in their site architecture, or a bad experience with another agency that failed to deliver on its promises.

When clients arrive, Cadence fixes the foundations: human-written content, brand mentions, canonical structure, and schema.

What we're really good at is diagnosing why a website lost all of its traffic. Looking at our case studies, most people who came on with us initially did so because another agency did something that caused them to go from great to horrible.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

She laughs when she says her agency does “boring SEO,” but there’s pride under it. The work isn’t glamorous—it requires looking under the hood of a client’s website and getting your hands dirty.

Still, LLMs are here, and everyone is talking about them. They’ve started eating away at Google’s quasi-monopoly over search, and Google has responded with AI overviews and Gemini-powered results. 

Clients are inquiring about how to adapt, optimize, and track their LLM presence. Their questions are valid, and they need answers and solutions.

But there’s another reason why boring SEO works: LLMs need boring SEO to feed their insatiable appetites.

Feeding the machines: Why SEO fundamentals matter more than ever

Christy doesn’t treat AI like a revolution. She treats it like another stage in a system that never stops evolving. Every update she has ever experienced still adheres to the same core principles: structure, accuracy, and clarity.

The world is changing, but it's always been changing. How many updates have we had —Panda, Penguin, Helpful Content, Medic—all of it. Now, we have LLMs. Is this really any bigger of a deal than any of the other things I just mentioned?

To make a shift completely to LLM optimization would be shifting to something that currently holds less than 1% of traffic sources.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

She’s right.

ChatGPT’s share of search-like queries has been estimated at less than 1% of total volume, while Google Search continues to process trillions of queries annually.

Meanwhile, although it has seen a slight decrease, Google still earns 41% of traffic shares compared to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

There’s a reason for that.

Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude don’t index the web the way search engines do. LLMs are beginning to generate measurable referral traffic through UTM-tagged links and visible citations, but there’s still no standardized reporting system. For agencies, understanding how clients gain LLM visibility remains largely a manual, experimental process.

That’s why Christy’s team at Cadence SEO built their own LLM visibility tool: to start filling that measurement gap. It tracks where clients are being surfaced inside AI-generated responses and compares that against organic traffic trends using Google Analytics. It provides the agency with a baseline for understanding how AI models assess content quality and authority.

Using automation platforms like Make.com and n8n, the agency developed custom AI agents that were trained exclusively on Cadence’s proprietary SEO process to make client content more palatable to LLMs. Christy’s son, an AI specialist, designed them to assist with data analysis, content mapping, and competitive insights.

Both of my adult children work in AI. And my other son, I love what he said, ‘LLMs are both the smartest and the dumbest things you'll ever work with. They know everything, but they know how to do nothing.’

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

SEO-based discoverability remains the most effective way to ensure a client’s site is considered a reference or recommendation within LLM outputs.

For Cadence SEO, that means:

People are still doing searches online, and you're still trying to help them find the answers. As that evolves, we evolve with it. That's why we love SEO in the first place.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

So, despite the rapid rise in LLM usage, Cadence SEO’s mission hasn’t changed: Connect people to their clients’ answers. 

The tools may have evolved, and the interfaces may have changed, but the craft remains the same.

And when those results start showing up in the numbers, Christy brings them to life, sits down with the client, and talks through what’s working, what isn’t, and why.

Don't sell people lies. I know that sounds incredibly simple, but in my industry, people often sell dreams that they never fulfill. We tell people what we're going to do, why, we get their approval, and we do it. And then we talk to them along the way.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

How AgencyAnalytics became a cornerstone of Cadence SEO’s client services

Christy admits she isn’t a fan of agencies that simply “auto-send” client reports once a month and leave it to clients to figure out where to go and what to do. 

Instead, the team builds a single, living dashboard for each account and treats it as the shared source of truth. Decisions happen with the data in view, so next steps feel obvious and agreed upon.

Customizable dashboards are the cornerstone of Cadence SEO’s client communication strategy. Discover how live, personalized dashboards help more than 7,000 agencies acquire and retain more clients. Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14 days!

Just before our chat, Christy was at the gym for her morning routine when her phone rang. One of her clients was running a geo-targeted paid campaign for an expo he was attending and wanted to know everything was working correctly. 

Christy opened the client’s dashboard and reviewed the live numbers with him. The call took seven minutes. By the end of the call, the client was happy, and Christy was back on the treadmill.

He was just feeling anxious about it and needed somebody to reassure him that it was going fine and give him the stats. So, sure, while I was waiting for my protein shake, I gave him the status update and listened to him. 

That's why people work with us: Because they have somebody who they can call who knows what they're talking about, who will give them what they need immediately. And there's a lot of anxiety with marketing. I mean, this is their money they're spending.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

Christy admits she has looked for other reporting solutions beyond AgencyAnalytics. However, having used the software for much of her marketing career over the past 15 years, she says there is no other reporting solution that works better for Cadence SEO.

I'm always looking. I'm probably the most unloyal client and I've stayed for years. That should say something. There is no other solution that pulls in all the APIs—I can build a report one time and have it be right every time.

That's why I work with AgencyAnalytics. I even looked into the cost of hiring someone to run my reports. Hiring someone would cost me at least double, and then they'd still need something that we're paying for as a solution. 

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

For Christy, being there when clients need you—whether it's because they need a rescue, a refresher, or just reassurance—is what makes Cadence SEO a “human-centered” agency. And AgencyAnalytics plays a big role in helping them get there.

Selling agency services in the age of AI

For Christy, every part of Cadence SEO begins and ends with people. Clients, employees, and even the tech stack serve one purpose: Making the work more human. Her philosophy of leadership is to hire well, listen often, and tell the truth even when it’s inconvenient.

I am always brutally honest. I never just say something to make somebody feel good.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

That approach shapes how the agency sells, operates, and grows. Christy’s husband, Kevin, leads sales with quiet precision. 

“He does all of our outreach—LinkedIn, mailers, cold calls, expos—all of it,” Christy says. “He’s consistent, and that’s why we keep growing. He knows how to talk to people and how to read what they need.”

When a prospective client turns to Cadence SEO to address something that’s gone wrong—a drop in traffic, a disappointing agency experience, or a broken system—Kevin steadies the conversation and moves it toward possibility. When the discussion turns to strategy, Christy joins the call. 

Inside Cadence, the same sense of human care and duty drives the culture. Christy calls herself a salesperson at heart but credits her success to team structure and intuition. 

I am so bad at process. I am a salesperson at heart. Even when I do SEO, it’s more of an art form when I diagnose something. It’s because I’m not following a checklist. That’s why I’m good at what I do. But that does not work if you’re trying to grow an agency. You have to have a checklist.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

That checklist exists because of Destiny, the agency’s operational lead—known internally as “the process queen.” Christy trusts her completely. “People ask me why I work with Teamwork. It’s because Destiny wants to work with Teamwork. If she wanted to work with Monday.com, we’d work with Monday.com.”

That sense of autonomy and ownership extends to every part of the business: Account managers handle their own clients, SEOs decide how to solve problems, and writers choose how to frame a story.

I'm always looking. I'm probably the most un-loyal client and I've stayed for years. That should say something. There is no other solution that pulls in all the APIs—I can build a report one time and have it be right every time.

That's why I work with AgencyAnalytics. I even looked into the cost of hiring someone to run my reports. Hiring someone would cost me at least double, and then they'd still need something that we're paying for as a solution. 

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

For Christy, being there when clients need you—whether it's because they need a rescue, a refresher, or just reassurance—is what makes Cadence SEO a “human-centered” agency. And AgencyAnalytics plays a big role in helping them get there.

Shiny object or silver bullet: What LLMs mean for the future of SEO

Every few years, the industry panics: A new tool, a new algorithm, a new headline about the “death” of something that’s still very much alive. Christy’s seen it all before, and this latest wave—AI, LLMs, generative search—feels no different.

Most of our direct contacts understand that it hasn't changed that much. But do their bosses? No. That's why we have to make all these things. It's not always about what is going to actually give results to the clients. Sometimes it's about making sure that their bosses are happy.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

Marketers may understand that SEO fundamentals still drive visibility, but decision-makers want reassurance that their agencies are keeping up with the latest trends. That’s why Cadence SEO has invested time in testing, documenting, and communicating every development in AI-driven search. The goal is to help clients feel confident throughout the process.

Schema, site structure, and content depth still form the backbone of search visibility—whether the result shows up on Google, Bing, or an AI-powered summary. For Christy, it’s about understanding where attention is moving and meeting it with the same precision that’s always mattered.

To ignore what’s happening would be stupid. The younger generation uses AI way more. I see my kids use it all the time. I think it’s coming, and I think we should optimize for it. But, as of today, so much of what we do for search optimization is the same as what we would do for large language model optimization.

Christy Olsen, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Cadence SEO

Search continues to evolve, but people still seek answers. That’s the truth that keeps Christy and her team grounded while everyone else chases the next big thing.