Two SEO deliverables can solve the same problem, satisfy the same client, and produce the same ranking outcome. One took 20 hours to build. The other took 20 minutes because AI did most of the work.
Nick LeRoy, writing in Search Engine Land, argues the 20-minute version should not automatically cost less or count as lesser work. His case rests on a familiar consulting parable: an engineer charges $10,000 for tapping a broken ship engine once, itemized as $2 for the tap and $9,998 for knowing where to tap. Clients were never paying for the motion. They were paying for the judgment behind it.
That distinction matters more now that AI can compress research, drafting, and analysis into a fraction of the time a person would need. LeRoy ran an informal LinkedIn poll asking whether the method behind a strong result matters at all, and found that most objections to AI-assisted work have little to do with the quality of what gets delivered.
The objections that do hold up, he writes, are about trust rather than time. Hallucinations, bad recommendations, compliance exposure, and accountability when a strategy fails six months later are the real risks. None of them scale with how many hours a task took. A rushed, AI-assisted content audit can be just as defensible, or just as reckless, as one built entirely by hand.
The outcome test LeRoy proposes for judging any deliverable comes down to four questions: was it accurate, was it useful, was it better than the alternative, and would the person who produced it stand behind it with their name attached. If the answer is yes across the board, he argues the method used to get there stops mattering.
For agencies, that argument has a direct pricing consequence. Hourly billing invites exactly the awkward client conversation LeRoy describes. A rate card built around research and drafting time collapses once AI cuts that time sharply, while value-based and outcome-based pricing, tied to the ranking or conversion result rather than the labor behind it, survives the shift intact. Agencies still billing by the hour for tasks AI has largely automated should expect clients to start asking why.
For in-house teams reviewing vendor or contractor deliverables, the same shift changes what a sign-off process should check. A brief that asks how long a task took is asking the wrong question. A review that asks whether someone can defend the recommendation, and who owns the risk if it turns out wrong, tests for the thing that actually predicts whether the work holds up.
Search Engine Land published LeRoy’s piece as a contributor column, meaning the argument belongs to the author rather than to the outlet’s editorial staff. That distinction matters for how much weight the outcome test should carry. It is one practitioner’s framework, not an industry standard, and teams adopting it should treat it as a hypothesis to test against their own client relationships rather than a settled rule.
Agencies and in-house teams currently pricing AI-assisted SEO work by estimated hours should run a direct comparison this quarter: quote one deliverable by outcome and one by time spent, then track which conversation the client trusts more.
Search Engine Land published Nick LeRoy’s column on July 2, 2026.
