Is your SEO ready for AI? Jenna Hannon says probably not

Jenna Hannon is the co-founder of Hatter, a tech-enabled SEO and AI search company built on a simple but consequential observation: the way people find businesses online is changing faster than most companies realize, and the SEO industry has not kept up. Jenna came up through entertainment, kite surfing, Silicon Valley, and eventually Uber - where she was hired to work on Uber Eats when it was still a scrappy internal test product with sandwiches in car trunks. She stayed through the IPO, left in February 2020 with a one-way ticket to Asia, and returned three days before borders closed to figure out what was next.

What came next was a stint as fractional CMO for tech companies and eventually Hatter - a bootstrapped company now raising its seed round, with a thesis that AI has made it possible to take a service business and run it at software margins. Jenna's background makes her unusually well-positioned to argue that case: she has been a marketer, an operator, and a student of growth channels since before most people understood what a growth channel was.

What Hatter Does: SEO in the Age of LLM Search

The core insight Hatter is built on is that the inputs to search ranking have not changed - but the output your customer sees has. Traditional Google search delivers a list of ranked results. AI search delivers a synthesized answer. The underlying signals that determine whether your business shows up in either are largely the same: content quality, technical SEO hygiene, and the breadth of credible information about your business available on the web. But if you are only optimizing for the list-of-results format, you are not optimizing for where a growing share of your customers are going to find you.

Hatter sells what it calls a tech-enabled SEO service: the client gets a human expert who understands their business, a real-time dashboard showing exactly what is being done and how it is performing, a content editor for reviewing and adjusting the material being produced on their behalf, and full visibility into every technical optimization being made. The anti-pitch is the most clarifying thing Jenna says about the market: most companies describe their SEO agency as a black box. They hope it is working. Hatter is built to be the opposite of that.

Service as Software: The Business Model Thesis

The framing Jenna uses for Hatter's business model - coined by investor Kevin McCaffery - is “service as software.” The SaaS model flipped: rather than a software product that customers subscribe to, Hatter delivers a service (SEO and AI search optimization) and automates the execution layer with AI on the backend. The result is a service business that can operate at software-like margins because the repetitive, manual work - content production, technical optimizations, performance monitoring - is largely automated.

The investor reaction she describes is telling. Some investors immediately grasp the thesis and find it compelling: AI has finally made it possible to crack the margin problem in services. Others are not yet convinced that the automation can reach the level required to sustain those margins without ongoing heavy human involvement. The company is in the process of proving that out - which is the honest answer Jenna gives when asked, and exactly the kind of transparency that builds credibility with the investors who are actually evaluating the thesis seriously.

Human in the Loop: Where AI Stops and Expertise Begins

Jenna is direct about where AI helps and where it does not. The repetitive, mechanical work of SEO - generating content drafts, running technical audits, monitoring performance metrics - can be automated. That is what Hatter's platform does. What cannot be automated yet is the insight layer: the judgment call about what actually differentiates a business, what its customers care about, and how to position its expertise in a way that earns attention.

Her framing: marketing is about differentiation, and differentiation requires a lot of context. AI is excellent at pattern recognition across context it has seen. It is not excellent at doing something genuinely different. The human expert on an account is the one who understands the client's business well enough to know what the differentiated story is - and the AI tools are what allow that expert to execute on that story at a scale and speed that would otherwise be impossible. The biweekly call with an SEO strategist is not a deliverable - it is the product.

From Kite Surfing to Canva to Uber Eats

Jenna's path into tech is one of the more unlikely origin stories in this space. She grew up in Calgary, went to USC for journalism, ended up in the entertainment industry (talent agency, Universal Music licensing), and found the whole thing intellectually unstimulating. The pivot came through her hobby - kite surfing - where she met Bill Tai, a venture capitalist who turned out to be the first investor in Canva. She also met Melanie Perkins (Canva's founder) on a kite surfing trip during that period, when Perkins was young and describing a vision for a graphic design tool that almost no one took seriously. Canva is worth $40 billion today.

At 22, Jenna called Bill Tai and asked if she could come to San Francisco and shadow him at pitch meetings. He said yes. She drove up, sat in on pitches, and listened to Tai explain what he found interesting and why. That experience rewired how she thought about building companies. She found her first startup through that network, worked at several more, and landed at Uber in 2016 - hired to work across the internal test products that Travis Kalanick allowed teams to run freely. Uber Eats was one of them.

The original Uber Eats concept was not restaurant delivery. It was filling empty car trunks with sandwiches and burritos during the midday lull when rides slowed down. Customers could order within a specific radius in a two-hour window. It worked, but customers kept writing in asking if they could choose their own restaurant. A Toronto team ran with that version - and that became the product that launched in a new city every week for 70 consecutive weeks.

LinkedIn as the Only Channel That Matters Right Now

Hatter's entire business development pipeline runs through LinkedIn. Not ads, not outbound email sequences - Jenna writing about what she learned that week, consistently, every week. Her rule is simple: what did I learn this week about our customers or the industry that someone else would find valuable? She publishes that. Some posts catch. Some do not. Her second post on LinkedIn - the story about her time at Uber - hit 150,000 views. The posts after that mostly bombed. She kept going anyway.

The observation she makes about LinkedIn's algorithm is worth noting for anyone building on the platform: unlike Twitter or Instagram (where a post succeeds or dies in the first hour), LinkedIn has a genuinely slow burn. Posts can start gaining momentum five days after they are published. That changes the anxiety math around posting - the feedback loop is slower, which means the failure signal is also slower, which means it is easier to keep going even when a piece does not immediately take off. Her broader point: most companies fail at marketing because they try every channel at once and do none of them well. Uber had two main acquisition channels. Two. That is the whole lesson.

Tools & Resources Mentioned

• Hatter - Jenna's company; tech-enabled SEO and AI search service with real-time dashboard, content editor, and full transparency into optimizations
• AngelList blog - data scientist analysis of venture deal outcomes showing the power of diversification over concentration; ~20% of VC deals flow through AngelList
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) - early acronym for LLM SEO; now largely abandoned in favor of “AI search” or “LLM search”
• LinkedIn - primary business development and content channel for Hatter; Jenna publishes weekly value-first content about what she learned that week
• Kevin McCaffery - investor who coined the term “service as software” as used by Hatter
• Bill Tai - VC and kite surfer; first investor in Canva; introduced Jenna to tech and entrepreneurship at age 22
• Canva - $40B design platform; Jenna met founder Melanie Perkins on a kite surfing trip before Canva was anything
• Uber Eats - Jenna worked on the original concept (sandwich-filled car trunks) at Uber from 2016 through the IPO

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