Sometimes the best conversations start out casual.
A few days ago, Tanner and I (Travis) were on a call talking through two completely separate things on our minds:
- The exploding ag robotics/automation landscape and what companies are doing in the space digitally.
- An article from the SEO for Lunch blog about how leaders say they want collaboration, yet reward competition.
The funny part?
After about five minutes, we realized these two topics aren’t separate at all. They’re actually deeply connected.
Below is a cleaned-up version of the conversation, because the overlap between crowded new categories/markets and internal misalignment is a good example of what’s happening within all types of ag companies right now.
Ag Robotics: A Category That’s Packed… and Still Basically New
Travis:
“I was looking at that Mixing Bowl / Better Food Ventures landscape again… Man. Robotic weeders, sensors, drones, equipment automation. It’s crazy. The image speaks for itself. And even in a tough funding environment for AgTech, it feels like every month there’s a new entrant. Which companies actually stand out, digitally, in this crowded space?”
Tanner:
“There’s definitely a couple on my radar. And honestly, the ones winning right now are doing it in the simplest way possible: they show up everywhere digitally. Carbon Robotics is the clearest example. Every unbranded search I tested [use cases, specific tools, general problem searches] YouTube had the top results. And Carbon was everywhere.”
Travis:
“It’s funny because this is still such an early category. Early adopters, small data sets, limited market penetration… but discoverability is already a battlefield.”
Tanner:
“Exactly. And new categories like this reward companies who understand modern discoverability. Not just SEO, not just PR—all of it working together. Carbon Robotics pairs video with digital PR, which builds backlinks, which fuels branded search, which reinforces everything else. It compounds fast.”
Why YouTube Is Running the Show
Travis:
“With your YouTube comment in mind, that’s something you’ve been beating the drum on for months. What are these companies doing that works so well?”
Tanner:
“Value creation. Demonstrations. Results. Real education. The kind of stuff buyers actually want when they’re researching something totally new. And LLMs are pulling those videos into discovery flows faster than websites. So the path is becoming:
- Ask GPT or Claude something
- Get YouTube videos surfaced
- Watch the breakdown
- THEN go to Google and type in the brand name”
Travis:
“So YouTube becomes the “first touch,” LLMs become the recommendation engine, and Google becomes the ‘show me the company’ step.”
Tanner:
“Yep. And since robotics is a visually driven category, video is doing the heavy lifting long before SEO even gets a chance.”
But Then We Shifted Topics: Some Ag Marketing Teams Aren’t Collaborating…Even When They Think They Are
The robotics discussion naturally slid into an SEO for Lunch article Tanner had sent me earlier in the week: “Leaders Say They Want Collaboration, But They Reward Competition.”
Tanner:
“The reason that article jumped out is because it highlights something obvious that’s still somehow ignored: companies create KPIs that pit channels (and teams) against each other. ‘This is my metric. That’s your metric.’ And nobody is looking at the shared goal.”
Travis:
“And in some instances in ag, it’s even more noticeable. You’ve got internal teams (the classic sales vs. marketing example). Outside agencies. Contractors and freelancers. Even within marketing, you’ll find the PR person and the SEO lead only interact on a weekly all-hands marketing call. Everyone working on their own corner of things… and sometimes the forest gets missed for the trees.”
Tanner:
“Exactly. And that leads to KPI silos. If SEO gets a win, it becomes an SEO win. If paid gets a win, they want the credit. Sales has customer intel that marketing never hears. People optimize for their dashboard instead of the business outcome.”
Where Collaboration Quietly Shows Up (and Where Teams Miss It)
Travis:
“You’ve shown me tons of real examples where channels impact each other—sometimes massively—but teams don’t see it unless they zoom out.”
Tanner:
“Yeah, like when a client ran a print ad in a traditional ag publication. Immediately, branded search shot up. The SEO dashboards looked amazing. But it wasn’t SEO. It was the ad. Still, the reason they captured the lift was because the SEO groundwork had already been done.”
Travis:
“So offline created demand, digital collected it.”
Tanner:
“Right. Another one is inside Google Ads. When you look at the search terms report, you’ll find tons of long-tail, high-intent queries that paid is capturing… but organic has zero content for. Those are content layups. SEO and paid should be feeding each other that data constantly.”
Travis:
“Great point. It’s an interesting topic that feels like it comes up either when things are going really well, or not. It seems to surface at year-end promotion time (like, ‘look at the impact I made, it’s bonus/promotion time, right?’) or when everyone is trying to figure out what broke down after a bad year (“it wasn’t my fault, xyz channel did ‘this!’”).
Tanner:
“Yeah, it’s cultural. You have to build collaboration into goals, not bolt it on as a polite suggestion.”
Why These Topics Are Connected
At first glance, a crowded robotics landscape and an article about team collaboration seem unrelated.
But here’s the overlap:
👉 In a noisy market, discoverability demands cross-channel collaboration.
Video fuels PR. PR fuels branded search. Branded search reinforces SEO. SEO improves site experience. Site experience amplifies conversion rates. And so on.
👉 The companies who win crowded markets [whether they are new like robotics or mainstays like ag lending) are the ones whose internal teams (and/or agencies) act like a single connected unit.
The robotics category is simply a magnified version of what’s happening everywhere in ag:
more noise, faster innovation, less room for internal silos.
