Being Human in an AI World

How we rebranded Previsible from an SEO agency into an AI Discovery agency, and what the journey taught me about people, trust, and growth.

By Heather Larrabee

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Previsible is a human-centered AI Discovery agency that helps enterprise and mid-market brands stay visible, trusted, and chosen across modern search, AI Overviews, and large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Rufus, nd Perplexity, along with the discovery surfaces yet to come. Founded in late 2020 by three veteran in-house search leaders who led SEO programs for some of the largest websites in the world, Previsible brings clarity to modern discovery, builds authority across AI-driven systems, and executes hands-on to drive sustainable organic growth for the teams it serves. What follows is the story of how we evolved the brand together, and a love letter to the people who build it, past, present, and future.

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Key takeaways

• Previsible evolved from a respected SEO agency into the AI Discovery agency for high-performance teams, because discovery has moved beyond the blue links of traditional search and now lives across AI Overviews, LLM answers, and multimodal surfaces.
• Reimagining the brand was a process of polishing the mirror, of clearing away an identity that no longer reflected the special humans now blazing trails across AI discovery.
• The three founders, Jordan Koene, Tyson Stockton, and David Bell, built a human-first company on one belief: take care of the people, and the people will take care of the clients.
• The work rests on three convictions that hold steady while everything else shifts: clarity and interpretation, execution and implementation, and human judgment.
• In 2025, Previsible supported 85 top brands, grew revenue 113 percent to $7.5M, and studied 1.96 million LLM sessions, with average employee tenure above three years.
• The deepest truth is that in an AI world the human qualities matter more, and early data shows the models reward exactly that, the content and brands that are most human-centered, helpful, and attuned to real audience needs.

What does it mean to be human in an AI world?

There is a line from Rumi I keep returning to, that the heart is a mirror, and that our whole work in this life is the slow and patient polishing of it. “If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” The dust gathers, the ego clouds the glass, and the daily friction of the world is the very thing that wears it clear again. I sit in the large and lucky club of the Friends of Previsible, as a multi-tour client who later struck out to build my own advisory and now trusts this team with my own clients and their businesses, and I was deeply grateful to get the call to come jam with them on their inaugural brand strategy, following their second acquisition in a single year.

When I sat down to bring that brand to life, polishing the mirror is the image that kept rising in me, because a brand is so often a mirror gone a little cloudy, and in founder brands especially the DNA traces straight back to the specific humans who built the business. That throughline is alive and energetic, and it deserves to be revealed and respected rather than papered over. To me, brand identity isn’t just about logos and colors and typography. It is the joyful work of revealing the team and the company and honoring the customers they serve. Here, it’s bearing witness to all that Previsible had quietly grown into while it was busy taking care of everyone else. I came to it the way you would hope a strategist would, at first principles, asking what this company exists to solve and what it believes, and sitting with the three founders to hear how they had worked together across so many organizations and so many years. The more I listened, the clearer the message became. AI rewards great humans. That is the whole thesis of this brand, and the whole thesis of this reflection.

Why would an SEO agency rebrand as an AI Discovery agency?

For two decades the founders served as in-house SEO leaders for some of the largest and most demanding websites in the world, including eBay, learning the craft where the stakes were highest and the page counts ran into the millions. Something Jordan tells me again and again is that if you can get it right on the biggest sites in the world, you can apply it anywhere, and you feel that curious, humble confidence the moment you meet the team. They were dyed-in-the-wool SEOs, and now they are GEOs, among the very first to blaze trails into generative engine optimization, into AI Overviews, into answers that arrive before a single link is ever clicked.

That is why they planted their flag in AI Discovery, because discovery has become so much larger than search ever was. It now happens across Google and Bing, across the AI Overviews that summarize before you scroll, across the answers that Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity generate, and across the multimodal and commerce surfaces where people look for everything from travel to financial guidance to the small daily things that make a life. Last year so many brands lived through declines in impressions and traffic of forty, fifty, even sixty percent, and the question on every CMO’s mind turned deeply human. I faced it myself, standing shoulder to shoulder with Previsible in the trenches through what I identified as a Black Swan event for our executive team, as organic and direct traffic steadily fell. Zero-click search had not even been coined as a term yet, and Previsible was already charging out ahead, studying and testing and showing clients how to adapt. I stayed up at night unpacking it all, asking the same thing everyone was asking. How do I adapt, and how do I make sure my brand is still found when the entire shape of finding has changed? The Previsible brand evolution exists to answer exactly that, and to give it a name people can rally around.

Can you actually track your brand’s ranking inside Claude or Gemini?

Here is one of the gentlest and most important truths the Previsible team keeps telling a market awash in AI hype. Large language models generate language from probability, and there is no ranked list living inside them, no position to chase, no fixed slot called rank three to defend. As money has poured into tools that promise to track your place inside the models, Previsible and other true practitioners have patiently explained that there is no rank there to measure in the first place. I learned about fan-out queries from this team, and I learned that these systems generate and recommend and respond rather than rank, which means the thing worth building, the thing I have always valued most anyway, is the underlying trust, authority, and clarity of your brand across the open web, because that is what they reflect back. I felt the weight of this in a room at SMX Boston this month, listening to Jordan and Danny Goodwin, the longtime editor of Search Engine Land, talk about protecting the open web and, with it, democracy itself. That this sits top of mind for the CEO of this company tells you most of what you need to know.

What the data shows is even more beautiful. AI-powered discovery events make up only around 0.13 percent of total traffic today, roughly one in every 769 organic sessions, which looks like almost nothing. As Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince has put it, earning a referral click from OpenAI is around 750 times harder than earning one from the traditional web, because these models are designed to keep people inside the conversation. So the visitor who crosses that threshold and arrives at your door is deliberate, high-intent, and hard-won. The work, then, is to optimize for inclusion, to be the trusted answer wherever your customers form their understanding and their confidence. When you become the cited answer inside the synthesis, you win the impression, and when someone cares enough to cross the friction barrier, you win the customer, often already convinced. The models choose who appears by weighing reputation and consistency and real-world validation across the whole ecosystem, so visibility now flows from credibility, the very foundation Previsible has built its house upon.

What makes one AI Discovery agency different from another?

I’m also reminded here of the saying, you can be a jack of all trades and a master of none, and the digital marketing world is full of agencies trying to be everything at once. Previsible chose a narrower and far deeper path, building and maintaining and growing great websites, preserving and accelerating the organic and now GEO traffic that arrives highly qualified and converts faster because the trust was earned long before the click. They are masters of the SEO and GEO craft. No PPC, no ABM, no branding, no social media, no general digital marketing. That focus is the first thing clients feel, and the reason they stay, including me.

The work rests on three convictions that hold while the ground keeps moving. The first is clarity and interpretation, the calm guiding of people through each new stage of the shift, because the interpreter of change now matters more than the producer of yet another dashboard. The second is execution and implementation, rare and precious, because very few teams trust an agency to write directly onto their website, and yet across Previsible’s 85 brands more than half have handed over exactly that trust, with strategists riding along deskside, writing and building and fixing and shipping, sometimes inside fully embedded teams that Previsible recruited and hired and retained on the client’s behalf. The quality stays identical whether a person sits in a Previsible chair or a client chair. The third is human judgment, the editorial craft and discernment and care that strengthen authority signals in AI systems precisely because machines, in the end, tend to trust what humans trust. Underneath all of it runs a moral spine I came to love, a desire to be the good and honest operators in an industry that has too often rewarded shortcuts, with integrity as the brand’s true watchword. The world needs calm, competent guides who deliver what humans actually need, everywhere, and that is the role this team was built to play.

Who does Previsible serve, and in which industries?

Previsible serves enterprise teams as its first home and mid-market companies as its fast-growing second, speaking to a few specific humans inside them. CMOs and heads of growth come for clarity, for predictable and resilient organic demand, and for the confidence to walk into the C-suite with an investment plan that compounds. SEOs and in-house practitioners come for execution and influence, for the partner who finally ships the work and gives them the credibility to lead modern discovery rather than defend last year’s playbook. The transformation looks much the same across all of them, a move out of confusion and traffic volatility and blocked work and into clarity, useful content, and momentum that compounds.

The team serves dozens of industries, with outsized, specialized expertise across SaaS, finance, marketplaces, retail and eCommerce, direct-to-consumer, healthcare, media, and non-profits. It shows up through five core services that map onto those convictions: GEO Strategy for winning visibility in AI search, SEO Strategy for prioritizing the work that drives revenue, Technical SEO for fixing the foundation, Authority Building for earning trust across search and AI, and Content Marketing for creating content that earns demand. The proof lives in the case studies, in the mid-market eCommerce client having its best year ever despite an industry full of declines, the workplace safety provider that cut its reliance on paid search by ninety percent in a single half by growing organic visibility, and the marketplace platform that ran twenty-five percent more winning experiments and lifted organic performance by more than eighty percent.

Who are the humans behind Previsible?

Everything so far is really the frame around the thing that matters most, which is the people, because to a person, every human I have met at Previsible has been light-filled and kind and generous and unhurried in their care. They are problem solvers who act as though the business were their own, and the numbers quietly confirm what you feel in a single conversation. For a company founded in late 2020, average tenure already exceeds three years and turnover sits below seven percent, a small miracle in the agency world, and it happens because the founders believe that if you take care of the people, the people will take care of the clients. Meetings and one-on-ones begin by checking in on the human in the seat, and people show up resourced and nourished and ready, which is rarer than it should be.

It starts with the three founders and what the team affectionately calls their triangle of strength. Jordan Koene, the CEO, is the gas, all influence and momentum and charisma and an ambition that pushes everyone to stretch past what they thought they could reach, disarmingly approachable, treating the Fortune 500 CEO and the part-time content specialist with the same dignity, and possessed of endurance enough to remodel his own house by hand at the very moment the company was being born. Tyson Stockton, the COO, is the brake, the grounded and practical builder who sees where a structure might buckle and quietly reinforces it first, who met Jordan over a coffee in San Francisco that was meant to last thirty minutes and ran well past an hour, who came up through seven years of search at (then) Sports Warehouse and seven more at Searchmetrics, and who believes the team is changing the lives of the people it works with even on ordinary days. David Bell, the CPO, is the vision, the wholehearted and creative builder who merged his own practice, Diving Bell, into Previsible because he could feel something rare taking shape, the most compassionate person on the leadership team, who loves a gnarly problem the way some people love a good novel and quietly tests every new model against what he calls the SAT for SEO, monitoring millions of LLM responses so the team can keep telling clients what is real.

Around them has gathered a company I could write a whole letter about on its own. Elle Santos, employee number four and leader of the content team, worked alongside Jordan for years and is, by everyone’s agreement, the heart and soul of this place. Alex Hepburn is the brilliant SEO strategist who fought hard and lovingly for the terracotta orange now threaded through the brand, the warm clay of California’s mission rooftops. He was my brand and website building co-captain, and worked tirelessly to bring this brand to life with integrity, authenticity, and deep care for the values and the team members of this organization. Ana Fernandez is the strategist and writer whose work on the business case for organic, on how yield compounds across twelve and twenty-four and thirty-six months, fearlessly guides clients and teammates toward new horizons of GEO visibility. Christine Athens is a thoughtful, reflective, highly accountable writer and storyteller whose craft quietly raises the standard for everyone around her. Chris Sullivan is the growth engine who joined through the Internet Marketing Ninjas family, a twenty-year veteran and one of the most trusted advisors in the field, a servant leader with a vast network and the rare gift of being a deeply sound practitioner himself. Adam Edwards built the partner network that lets agencies of every size, including very small ones like my own, reach for trusted expertise when their clients need it. And Masha Prigodina, based in Santiago with a global pedigree leading brands like Lego across Europe, has helped set so many puzzle pieces of this brand in place as we pass the baton.

There is a thread I have come to treasure, that great leaders bring their teams with them, again and again. Matt Rigdon, now Chief People Officer, came back into the fold after working with Jordan and Tyson at Searchmetrics, one of several who circled back, along with Amir Yazdi and more, because they trusted the humans at the center of it. Matt is still based in Germany, a former Army serviceman who lives a genuine life of service. That German thread runs deep, in the discipline Searchmetrics instilled, in the November acquisition of Improove US, founded by former Google Search Quality leader Michael Schwarz, and in friendships that span continents, all braided with a warmth that keeps the precision human. At the tip of the spear bringing in new talent are Joaquin Valenzuela Parodi, who leads talent acquisition, and Efrain Ruz, who wears many hats including head of operations in Chile, keeping the trains running on time, and in Christine Albers who is a consummate steward of the company’s, and the clients’ resources.

How did a San Francisco SEO team end up anchored in Santiago, Chile?

The team is drawn west, and drawn toward freedom. The Bay Area shaped how these founders think, a place that has always belonged to the risk-takers and the reinventors, from the gold rush to the Beat poets to the free speech movement, wave after wave of people willing to step toward the unknown and build what did not exist yet. That innovator’s instinct, the reach toward new horizons and limitless possibility, lives in how the team sells and serves, with curiosity and generosity rather than pressure.

What moves me most is how literally that pull shows up in the company’s geography. The same architect who built San Francisco’s iconic tower designed a sister tower in Santiago, where Previsible sits on the twenty-ninth floor, while in San Francisco the team is nestled into a small two-story building in the Mission, one door from OpenAI’s original headquarters. Two coasts face the same great ocean, sharing a strikingly similar light and climate and topography, the vegetation of Viña del Mar echoing the hills of Petaluma. Today thirty-eight percent of the team lives across South America, part of a global company spanning the United States, Chile, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, France, the Philippines, and Japan, all of it reaching toward connection and possibility rather than conquest. The waves moving across the new website are the Pacific, the water that ties these two homes together, and the palette was chosen to feel like expertise and calm in the middle of the storm, a guiding light, with blues and teals for connection and emotion and the terracotta warmth Alex gave us, carrying the Spanish roots that run through the company by way of Jordan’s own family in Nicaragua. This is the beautiful design of Vinny Lestari and Arga Dahana of SDB Agency, longtime partners under the leadership of founder Tiago Martins, who, like me, polished the mirror with love.

What does the Previsible logo mean?

The mark was made with the same inclusiveness that defines everything here. We partnered with Ivan Lima, a gifted brand marketer who has shaped enterprise brands like Le Creuset and Adidas and was introduced to us through Elle, and true to form the founders insisted the whole company, from frontline leaders to the marketing committee, have a real voice in choosing among the five or six concepts he explored. The official meaning says it best, just as Ivan conceived it:

“The Previsible logo is inspired by the interpretation of data and our company’s ability to move organizations from overwhelm to confidence, from chaos to clarity, and from stagnation to momentum. Its abstract nature comes from our dynamic ability to make future discovery foreseeable, navigable, and winnable.”

Look a little longer and you will find the small gifts inside it. There is a gateway into the future in its shape, and tucked within that gateway, a quiet nod to a ninja star, a loving wink to Internet Marketing Ninjas, the twenty-year organization Previsible acquired in May, the team that essentially wrote the playbook on earning digital authority at scale. Keep looking and you will find a hidden P and a hidden V, Previsible itself, woven in. The brand extensions soared under the creative care of Brian Winston, an AI creative director who has built brands for the likes of Whole Foods and Amazon, multiple Vista Equity Partners portfolio companies, and beyond, and the website was lovingly built by Dewa Alit and project managed by Syifa Mujahidah at SDB, a team as strong in technical SEO and user experience as in code.

How do you rebrand an agency for GEO without losing your soul?

You drink your own champagne and eat your own breakfast. Here, we skip the dog food. From the beginning we treated this website as our own laboratory, taking the structures and methodologies the marketing committee writes about and advises clients on every day and testing them on ourselves first. So you will find answer capsules and clearly stated sentences that serve both the human reader and the language models, navigation that plainly names the industries we serve and the people we drive outsized impact for, and FAQs that meet real questions where they live, with comparison tables and more arriving in the next phase of the site. There is even an interactive piece, in the lower left of the footer, that invites you to ask LLM models directly how Previsible shows up against other agencies, because transparency is part of the integrity, and entity coherence is part of the craft.

The fuel behind all of this is a research distribution engine born from a team that shares with almost irrepressible generosity. The marketing committee publishes fresh insight every week, sometimes more than once, interpreting every meaningful change as it happens, the way Ana and Jordan went live the day after Bing’s AI performance reports landed, the way David tests each new model the moment it drops. There is the study of 1.96 million LLM sessions, the AI SEO Benchmark, the work on brand perception drift, and the Voices of Search podcast that Jordan and Tyson have hosted for years, relaunched with the help of the wonderful Ben Shapiro, another Searchmetrics friend, now past 1.5 million downloads and in the top two percent of all podcasts. If you take one small action today, let it be this.

Subscribe to the weekly newsletter, and let the team’s research land in your inbox, fresh, every week. It is the easiest way to feel the rhythm of this work, and it is free. You can sign up from the blog.

There is so much more being built in this same spirit, an events page that celebrates Previsible’s gatherings and the wider SEO community’s, because this field has always been beautifully communal, career guides for SEOs navigating a changing job market, a growing library of case studies, and a partner program that knits together a trusted ecosystem of web development, PR, and paid media. Everywhere you look, the same instinct repeats, to be useful, to be generous, and to bring the whole community along.

Being discovered for what matters most

I am a marketing leader who believes in being heart-centered, and I came to Previsible first as a customer and a believer long before I came as an advisor. I have two teenagers in my life, and I read the same headlines you do about a generation anxious about what AI will mean for them, and I have spent the last few years learning from generous teachers in the B2B world about how to hold technology well. I love AI, and I have built my own work around it, and at the very same time I am certain in my bones that as the world fills with machine-made everything, people will reach more and more for what is genuinely human, for the warmth and the judgment and the care no model can counterfeit. AI should serve humanity, never the other way around, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that Previsible stands on that ground, which is the whole reason I bring my own clients here and trust this team with my own business.

I owe a debt I am happy to carry forever to Tom Tsao, a board member of mine at FORM.com who worked with Jordan for years at eBay and who, with the quiet authority of someone who knows, told me this was the SEO he trusted most and made the introduction that changed my path. I am grateful to Jordan for the advice he gave me as I built my own agency, to work with people you trust and have succeeded with before, especially in the beginning, and I am grateful beyond measure to every person named in this letter and to the many more who worked night and day to make this brand beautiful and true. They are humble and authentic and driven and focused, servant leaders all, anchoring two coasts of the Americas with real love.

What I hope you feel when you arrive at Previsible, on the website or in a conversation, is the warmth of a team that exists to help you be discovered for what matters most, for your products and your values and your innovation, in a world where being found has become harder and more human all at once. That is the mirror this company helps you polish, and the work I am so honored to have witnessed up close.

If any of this resonates, the best next step is a conversation. A discovery call runs about thirty minutes, with a team innately interested in helping you grow. You can reach them any time at previsible.io/contact.

I am thankful for the beautiful, breathtaking brand we have built together, for the GEO innovations we have explored and that I have already shared and tested with my own clients, and for the mentorship and joy of working with this world-class team. Together, we wish you, season after season, sustainable growth and prosperity. The sun shines on all of us. Let’s keep polishing until we all see clearly, and the sky is ablaze with the light of a billion stars.

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