Brandon Dendas - Insurance SEO/AEO

Every insurance agency owner who sold to private equity heard the same sentence. "Nothing's going to change." ya... f*ing right. KKR bought USI for $4.3 billion in 2017. They just sold it to Aon for $17 billion 9 years later. Here's what happened in between. AssuredPartners bought 500 independent insurance agencies. Kelso bought Risk Strategies in 2015 when it was doing $130 million in revenue. They ran 180+ acquisitions and took it to $1.7 billion in revenue. That's 680 agencies between two firms. Those were somebody's grandfather's agency. Somebody's name on the building on Main Street. And every single one of those owners signed thinking they'd found a good home for their people. LOL... Then the pile got sold. AssuredPartners went to Gallagher for $13.45 billion. Risk Strategies went to Brown & Brown for $9.8 billion. NFP went to Aon for $13.4 billion. Hub confidentially filed for an IPO in June after a private round that valued it at $29 billion. They were never buying a home for your book. They were building inventory. And Aon just told you who the inventory is for. Straight from the USI release: "the premier U.S. middle-market platform." MID MARKET. Not the roofing contractor doing $4 million, not the HVAC shop running 8 trucks, and definitely not the restaurant group your dad wrote back in 1998. Those accounts get shoved into a service center and forgotten. I'm not guessing at any of this. I watched it happen to my dad's agency. Nobody ever told him he was selling it twice. Here's what I've seen since. Owners I work with are picking up commercial accounts they never even pitched. The client just got sick of leaving voicemails. Producers are inheriting books where nobody has called the insured in months. Nobody at the roll-up is going to fix it either, because fixing it doesn't move the multiple. So if you're a young commercial producer sitting inside one of these things, hear me. You are sitting on a list. You know every orphaned account in your territory. You know exactly which ones stopped getting called. Go take them. Pick one to three verticals, not fifteen. Put a producer on each one who genuinely owns it. Build a separate digital brand for each vertical. Then use AI where it actually matters. I don't mean a bot answering your phone. Please GOD don't do that. I mean AI writing the submission, pulling the loss runs, chasing missing app info, and prepping the renewal so a HUMAN can call that client back in 60 seconds instead of six days. The bar is on the floor, my friends. Answer your phone during business hours. Call people back in under a minute. Do those two things and you will out-service a $17 billion platform. They were never built to service a $6,000 account. They were built to be sold. If you're a producer thinking about jumping, or you want to see what a vertical-first digital agency actually looks like, shoot me a DM. I'll show you the ones crushing it right now.

Insurance agencies.... time to claim your ChatGPT Business Profile. Yup... OpenAI is developing an analytics and business management tool (part of an upcoming "Business "Hub"/Webmaster-style feature) that allows you to claim and verify ownership of your business.

Insurance agencies... time to claim your ChatGPT Business Profile. Yup... OpenAI is developing an analytics and business management tool (part of an upcoming "Business "Hub"/Webmaster-style feature) that allows you to claim and verify ownership of your business.

An AI bot called one of my insurance clients asking for insurance. Yup...... My clients are now getting actual CALLS from people using AI agents to handle their insurance. For the past month we've been seeing AI agents email quote requests to a few of our agencies. This one actually called. My client runs a generalist shop in New York. He answers the phone and the first thing it says is "Quote." Then it asks if there's someone in commercial lines or new business it can speak with. It was calling on behalf of a guy who owns a small private steam room and cold plunge rental. And it knew exactly what it wanted. General liability at $1M per occurrence and $2M aggregate, sexual abuse and molestation coverage included (not excluded), plus property coverage on the equipment. That's a cleaner submission than a lot of humans give you guys! Halfway through, my client asks it where it comes from because he likes it so far and wants one for himself. It wouldn't say what service it was built on. The follow-up email came from a tab.bot address, so the secret didn't last long. It wasn't perfect either. It spelled the owner's name so fast my client had to ask it to slow down. It made him read the email address back, corrected him, and the address it gave him was still wrong. Then less than two hours later it emailed the agency on its own. Fixed the email address. Answered the two things it couldn't answer on the call, the square footage and the equipment value. So it hung up, went back to its human, got the answers, and followed up before most agencies would have even started the quote. It also kept pushing my client for an indicative premium range on the call. He told it the honest answer, he can't give a number until he runs it through a carrier. Here's what I keep thinking about. That bot never filled out a form. It didn't care what the website looked like. It wanted a person in commercial lines, a coverage answer, and an email address to send the quote to. So we're testing something on our clients' sites we're calling AI Info Booths. A section of the site that tells these agents exactly what info to send and where to send it. So the next one shows up with the square footage and equipment values the first time. If an AI agent called your agency tomorrow, would your team know what to do with it?

The only traitor is you, @profgalloway. You moved away from America in 2022, but still get behind a microphone every week to talk shit about the country that helped make you rich. All while publicly calling yourself a Florida resident and talking up the tax savings that helped build your wealth. Then you lecture everyone about paying their fair share. You’re a raging HYPOCRITE. What have you done to contribute to the United States economy over the last five years? Musk’s companies employ people to build cars, manufacture batteries, launch rockets and deliver satellite internet. Your contribution to American industry doesn’t come close to his. Yet you have the nerve to call him a traitor and invoke the Rosenbergs’ execution. It’s disgusting and disgraceful. You can keep trading smug takes with Kara and having @edels0n laugh at your jokes. An audience clapping at your bullshit doesn’t make you America’s moral authority. Spare the rest of us the fucking moral superiority.

.@RetentionAdam was one of the biggest reasons I started posting on LinkedIn and X. He gave a lot to the B2B marketing and startup space, and he shared all of it openly. I’m absolutely gutted. Thinking about his family and everyone who knew him. RIP Adam.

The first protest in my lifetime that’s actually important 😂😂 Liberty Biberty is the worst insurance campaign I’ve ever seen.

Most insurance agencies hear "you need to create content for SEO" and immediately start writing blog posts. "Is my home in a flood zone?" "How do I file a claim as a plumbing contractor?" "My home has galvanized pipes. How does that affect my home insurance?" Helpful? Ya... Did any of them ever actually write a policy? HELL NO... Even 10 years ago, when those posts pulled real traffic, they barely converted. Slap a lead magnet on it, build a nurture sequence, whatever. It's really hard to nurture someone into buying insurance. Nobody buys a BOP because your blog taught them something on a Tuesday morning. They buy when they need it. A lot of you guys still latch onto "They Ask, You Answer" by Marcus Sheridan. It's a solid book. It came out of a pool company. But honestly... it was never that great a fit for insurance. And now the traffic those posts used to get is gone too. 68% of US Google searches now end without a click to anything (SparkToro, 2026). Ten years ago it was about 45%. On informational searches with an AI Overview, organic CTR fell from 1.76% to 0.61% (Seer Interactive). And ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini just answer the flood zone question themselves. Here's the part you guys miss. Google and the LLMs don't sell insurance (at least for now haha!). At some point they have to hand the person off to someone who does. Someone asks "Do I need cyber insurance for my restaurant in Colorado?" The AI explains why they probably do. Then it recommends who to talk to. That recommendation gets pulled from money pages. If you're not sure what the difference is, a blog post answers a question someone's curious about. A money page is your policy and industry pages, the ones that say exactly what you write, who you write it for and where. That's what someone reads right before they ask for a quote. And most of you guys have it backwards. You over-index on blogs and under-index on money pages. Half-assed, cookie-cutter, carbon-copy policy pages. Barely any industry pages. Then you wonder why you don't get rewarded for the content that actually matters. It should be the opposite. Hyper-specific, hyper-localized money pages, built at scale. Cyber liability for restaurants in Denver. Workers' comp for roofers in Colorado Springs. General liability for HVAC contractors in Fort Collins. When someone asks the AI that exact question, the agency with that exact page gets recommended. And those people are ready. Invoca found ChatGPT-referred phone calls converted to sales leads at 49%, the highest of any channel they measured. So here's the order we build in for our clients. First, money pages. The content that actually converts. Then navigational content. "Is State Farm better than Nationwide for auto insurance in Colorado?" Then, and only then, informational blog posts. They never converted. Now they don't even get traffic. What's the last blog post that actually wrote you a policy?

It's funny... I made this post almost 2 years ago. And the insurance-famous guys clowned me out in the comments. Actual quotes, still up on the post: "Zero percent chance this happens." "Are you going to tell us AI agents are going to run all the back office? If so, ya lost me right there." "Who cares about reality when you can just make bold statements on LinkedIn?" WELP..... Here we are in 2026. Go look at those same guys' feeds. AI agents answering the phones. AI handling renewals. AI doing certs. AI running the back office they said couldn't be run. It's legit all they post about now. The "ya lost me right there" crowd is now beating their chests on podcasts about the exact thing that lost them. I'm not mad about it (i know I kinda sound bitter about it). But I actually think it's great. But let's be honest about what it means. If AI runs the back office, the only thing left that matters is attention. And attention doesn't need 20 producers and a bullpen of CSRs. It needs one person with a niche, a point of view, and the stomach to post every day. We're still a couple years out and maybe a few million dollars off. But the thing I got laughed at for is now the thing everybody's scrambling to build.

I always find it funny when people base their marketing strategies around third-party market research. By the time a study gets published, it's measuring outdated behavior. And it's measuring whatever's easiest to measure. I saw someone post this past week telling insurance agents that AEO is just SEO, that there really aren't any clicks coming from ChatGPT, and that it's not worth your time and effort to focus on AEO. The click data is accurate. That "ChatGPT barely sends anyone to your website." But clicks ARE NOT the right way to measure what ChatGPT is doing for you guys. Here's what we're actually seeing across our clients. 12% to 15% of leads now tell us on the quote form that they found the agency through ChatGPT or another LLM. We know this because we ask it in every insurance lead form. And that's just the ones who admit it. Someone asks ChatGPT who they should talk to about insuring their business. It names a few agencies, with the name and phone number right there in the answer. Some of those people just call. No click, no website visit, nothing in analytics. The rest copy the agency name, Google it, check the Google Business Profile, read the reviews, and then click through to the website. Your analytics credit Google. Branded search. Or "direct." On top of that, we're seeing more and more emails from AI agents. They find our clients, find their email address, and send the request directly. Almost impossible to attribute, and it's climbing every month. Add it all up and AI search is realistically driving 15% to 20% of our clients' leads. And it's going up. Here's the part that should get your attention. 70% to 80% of those leads are commercial. If you write commercial lines, do not sleep on this. Think about your best referral partner. Your top CPA has probably sent you a dozen clients over the years and never once sent you a "click." Nobody would say referrals don't work. That's what these models are. A referral source, not a traffic source. Ask any of your friends how they research a purchase these days. ChatGPT comes up almost every time. Then go read a stat saying it doesn't. I don't know who the hell these studies are interviewing, but every single person I know uses an LLM before they buy something. That's why we don't run our business off third-party research. We test, and we look at what's actually showing up on our clients' quote forms. Whoever is telling you not to bother with AEO probably hasn't actually tried it. ChatGPT is sending you leads. It's just not putting its name on them. How are you guys tracking where your leads actually come from? Or is everything just "Google"?

Me to the cookie-cutter insurance website vendors after I take a client they’ve been lying to about SEO for years and get them more quote requests from SEO/AEO in one month than they got all of last year.

A client of mine got back from an owners-only conference a few weeks ago. 75 agency owners in a room, a dozen vendors, a lot of roundtables on SEO. One of the vendors was pitching the all-in-one thing. The website, SEO, intake forms, CRM, all integrated with the management system. He asked them one question. "If you're working with three or four agencies in my area, and someone asks Google or ChatGPT for a top-rated agency near them, how am I the one getting picked?" Their answer was "we're not sure." Uhhhh… WHAT. He told me that on our monthly reporting call, it's been bugging me since, because that one question is the whole game. So if you're about to hire a marketing agency for your insurance agency, specifically for SEO or AEO, ask these two questions before you sign anything. Question 1. Can I talk to four or five of your clients who've been with you for a few months or a few years? Not a testimonial page. Not a case study they wrote themselves. Actual calls with agency owners who've been paying them long enough to know what the service is really like. If they won't set that up, walk. There's no good reason to say no to that. Question 2. How many insurance agencies are you working with in my state? If it's more than 10, walk. If it's more than 6, I'd still walk. Here's why, and nobody is going to tell you this on a sales call. Page one of Google has 10 organic listings. The map pack has 3. When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity for an agency, it usually names 3 or 4. Those are the only spots that get calls. Nobody goes to page two. Now think about the vendors charging a couple hundred bucks a month. For that math to work they need 50, 100, 200 agencies in a single state. Every one of them wants to rank for "home insurance California" or "general liability insurance." Every one of them is competing with each other for the same 10 spots, and the vendor is collecting from both sides of the fight. Even if that vendor did incredible work and owned pages one and two, who out of the 200 is supposed to get spot one? So they tell you SEO takes time. And the invoice keeps going out. That's not a service. It's a marketing ploy with a monthly subscription.

Got asked to be on a podcast yesterday. I said no thanks. (screenshot below) The host interviews founders of small to mid-sized marketing agencies. Nice guy. Probably a solid show. But the people listening are other agency owners. And I have zero interest in being known by other marketers. None of them are hiring me to do SEO for their insurance agency. I only want to show up where my buyers live. And I see you guys making the exact same mistake all the time. There are a ton of insurance podcasts right now. Most of them bring on agency owners to talk about their strategies... to an audience of other agency owners. That's not building your book. That's making you insurance famous. And look, insurance famous feels good. People recognize you at conferences. Maybe you get asked to do a keynote. But nobody listening is buying a policy from you. They already sell insurance. What you actually want is to be Vertically Famous. If you're a commercial agent, pick one industry and infiltrate that world. Say you want to own med spas. You don't go on an insurance podcast and talk about med spas. You go on a med spa owner's podcast and talk about insurance. You engage with the people med spa owners already follow. You show up at their events. You become the insurance guy that whole world knows by name. Now, is there a version of this where being known by marketers helps me? Sure. If I was ever looking to sell Convirtue, maybe. I'm not there. So right now it does absolutely nothing for my business. I don't need to be famous. I need to be well known by the people who will actually buy shit from me. Same goes for you. Be honest.... Who's your audience right now? Other agents, or your buyers?

This is bad.... really bad........ 60-70% of independent agency websites could be compromised right now. I've said this 8x on LinkedIn and X... it's time to GTF OFF Wordpress!! Three separate clients messaged me this morning asking if their site was going to get hacked. One of them forwarded me a warning email from Chubb about it. They'd all seen the PHP news. Two critical flaws in the language itself, both rated 9.2 out of 10. Every PHP version going back more than a decade is affected. Cloudflare saw tens of thousands of exploit attempts within 45 minutes of the details leaking. Governments in Europe pulled websites offline. The NSA told everyone to patch immediately. All three wanted to know if our security patches were up to date. My reply took about 30 seconds to write. There's nothing to patch. Your site isn't a PHP site. I've been saying this for years and I usually get an eye roll from other web vendors for it. We don't build on WordPress. The five most well-known website vendors in the independent insurance agency space all build on WordPress. Every single one. It's cheap, every freelancer knows it, and most of the time it's fine. But WordPress runs on PHP. The core, the theme, every plugin, and the server underneath all need someone watching them and applying updates. Most agency owners I talk to couldn't tell me who hosts their site, let alone what PHP version it's running. So right now there are thousands of agencies with an exposed site and no idea. The vendor who built it isn't going to email you about this. The host might patch it this week, or might not. We build on a fully hosted platform (Duda, if you're curious). There's no server, no plugins, no PHP. The platform patches itself. All three clients got the same reply from me: there's nothing you need to do. That was the whole email. If you're on WordPress, this is the week to send one message to whoever built your site: What PHP version are we on, and has it been patched? If you don't hear back in a day, that's your answer. And if you want to get off WordPress, shoot me a DEE-EM!

LinkedIn just made it hella easy to build an audience of engaged followers. If you've been posting for a while, go open the reactions on one of your posts. You'll see a Connect / Follow button next to everyone who reacted but isn't connected with you yet. Before, you couldn't tell who was a connection and who was just a follower without clicking into every single profile. Now it's right there. And these aren't random people. They already saw your stuff and liked it enough to react. That's about as warm as it gets. So here's what I'm doing. I set up a Grok bot to go through all my posts, starting with the ones that got the most engagement, and connect with 40 to 50 of those people a day until it's worked through everyone. Such a stupid easy way to build your audience.

💯💯💯

The more time I spend building my marketing agency and working with independent insurance agency owners, the more I realize I just want to be this guy....

It's pretty crazy how much money you can make from posting on X and LinkedIn once you stop being a BITCH and just NICHE down. And the model is stupid simple. Here it is: 1. Upgrade to LinkedIn Premium. It's like $70. 2. Pick an audience to talk to (obviously one that's vibrant and active on LinkedIn). 3. Rewrite your headline and profile for that audience only. 4. Remove any connections that aren't in that audience. 5. Only connect with people who fall within that audience (only connect with people who buy shit from you). 6. Set up a Grok bot to find the biggest influencers in that audience and connect with 10-15 of them every day. 7. Comment on those influencers' posts every day. DO NOT outsource this to AI. Real comments. 8. Download Fathom and have it record everything you talk about with prospects, clients, and your team. 9. Set up a LinkedIn Ghostwriting Claude Agent. Connect it to Fathom and create viral LinkedIn posts automatically. 10. Post remarkable / polarizing / value-based content for that audience at least 4-5x a week. 11. Wait to DM someone until they like or engage with one of your posts. AKA never cold DM anyone. 12. Pin your best post and put your quote link in your Featured section. 13. Make bank. I've teased this idea for a while, but I'm now fully committed to launching it. I want to get you Vertically Famous and make LinkedIn the primary revenue stream for your insurance book of business. If you're interested, shoot me a DEE EM. I'll send you the waitlist details. Let's get you Vertically Famous in 2027.