How we replaced a $96k SEO hire with $690/mo

Last quarter we did something uncomfortable. We ran an AI employee and a human junior on the same SEO workload, side by side, for six weeks, and tracked every output.

The point wasn't to embarrass anyone. It was to answer the question every founder is quietly asking: what actually changes when an AI employee costs $690 a month instead of $8,000?

The setup

Same brief. Same tools: Search Console, Ahrefs, the CMS. Same weekly goals. One lane run by Sam, our AI employee for SEO. One lane run by a capable junior hire.

What we measured

• Briefs shipped per week
• On-page issues found and fixed
• Time from task assigned to draft ready
• Edits required before anything went live

What happened

Sam didn't win on taste; the junior had sharper instincts on a few editorial calls. Sam won on throughput and consistency: research that takes a person two days landed in an hour, every backlog item got touched, and nothing slipped because it was 4:58 pm on a Friday.

The person stayed essential for judgment, relationships and the calls that need a gut. You don't replace the person. You replace the part of the job that was quietly eating their week.

The math that closed it

Loaded cost of a mid-level SEO hire: roughly $96k a year. An AI employee's salary: from $690 a month, under 9% of that. Tokens are billed on top at cost, and even with them the gap stays an order of magnitude.

Don't hire for the busywork. Employ for it.