The Double Penalty: Mike Perez on Why AEO Without SEO Is a Trap
ABOUT EPISODE
Mike Perez spent more than two decades in the trenches of SEO. Not as a consultant theorizing from the sidelines, but as someone who built a digital marketing agency from scratch, grew it past $20 million in revenue serving some of the most competitive verticals in search, and then exited. He did not stop there. He kept building. Hoverboard AI, SerpIntelligence, FluxalityAI. Tools he built because he saw, firsthand, what agencies actually needed to navigate this next wave.
That background matters for this conversation because the topic is one of the noisiest in marketing right now. Answer Engine Optimization is everywhere on your feed. Most of what is being shared is moving fast and skipping the fundamentals. In this episode, Mike and Adam dig into where that advice breaks down. Mike explains why telling agencies to abandon traditional SEO for AEO is one of the most reckless things circulating right now, and walks through the specific tactics that can get a site penalized on both Google and the answer engines at the same time.
He also introduces the concept of atomic answers, how to structure content so that both humans and AI systems can actually use it, and why the real competitive advantage in search today is information gain, adding something original that does not already exist on the web. He also gets into linkable assets, the attribution problem that is quietly growing for every service-based business, and what agencies need to start building now before the rules tighten. This is not a conversation about following the trend. It is about building something that holds up when the trend fades.
GUEST BIO
Mike Perez is the Founder and CEO of Hoverboard AI and the founder of iLawyerMarketing.com. Over more than two decades, he built and scaled a digital marketing agency focused on search visibility and performance for some of the most competitive verticals in the industry, including personal injury law, where a single ranking mistake can cost a client millions. He grew the business past $20 million in annual revenue before exiting.
Mike has also launched SerpIntelligence and FluxalityAI, both focused on search intelligence and AI driven marketing. His work sits at the intersection of software development, digital marketing, and answer engine optimization, and his perspective is shaped by the kind of operational experience that most people talking about AEO simply do not have. That is what he brings to this conversation.