We Roasted Deepgram's SEO: Missing Major Opportunities
An AI voice giant leaving very human-sized SEO gaps.
On the grill this week
Deepgram
deepgram.com
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben
S127:48
In this episode
A blind roast of a voice AI heavyweight where the very first button on the homepage sends you to an article, and it does not even behave like a real link.
We opened Ahrefs and found the tell: roughly 600 pages ballooning to 3,000 in three months, a programmatic AI apps directory carrying the vast majority of their traffic.
The catch is that it is all other brands' names. Filter out the directory and branded queries and about 86K monthly visits shrinks to roughly 10K that could actually matter.
We stumbled on Rabbi AI in their apps catalog and briefly planned to make him sound like Zeus with their text to speech.
One of us called it a B minus for the on page work, the other landed on a C because traffic without business value is just a vanity metric.
The roast scorecard
Deepgram
deepgram.com
CFinal grade
show avg · C+
FDCBA
On the grill:Programmatic contentKeyword strategy & mappingAuthor pages & attributionReadability & designCTAs & funnels
Key findings
The homepage's first call to action links out to a playground article instead of pricing or a trial, and the element does not register as a normal link, no URL preview and no open in new tab.
A programmatic directory of AI app pages grew the site from around 600 to 3,000 pages in three months and drives most of the traffic, but it ranks on other tools' brand names, searchers who already found what they wanted.
Strip the directory pages out and about 12 to 13K of the 86K monthly visits remain, and removing branded terms leaves roughly 10K non-brand traffic.
The blog sits at around 400 pages under /learn pulling in only about 2K organic visits.
Blog UX gets in its own way: no opening paragraph before the TLDR, a hero image eating the whole above the fold, a table of contents so long it needs its own scrollbar, and no author pages anywhere.
Top action items
1Stop building programmatic pages on other brands' names and research query patterns your actual buyers search, like transcribing specific document types to audio.
2Add real authors with faces and author pages so Google and readers know who is behind the content.
3Cut the table of contents down to H2s only and open articles with a proper intro paragraph instead of jumping straight to the TLDR.
4Go back and optimize the existing blog posts that are actually relevant to your core audience.
What we learned (steal these)
Programmatic SEO built on brand-name keywords buys traffic that never converts. Someone typing a competitor's product name already knows where they are going.
Before scaling any page pattern, verify that the person behind the search query could plausibly become your customer. Traffic is not the goal, ROI is.
Do not trust tool click estimates on branded SERPs. Ranking position eight under site links and image packs means the clicks mostly are not real.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben
SEO Bros · S1
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