In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray sits down with Nathan Muhammed and Kenji, the founders of Exploi, an SEO execution platform built for small businesses. Calling in from Las Vegas, the pair explain how Exploi differs from tools like Semrush and generic AI writers by generating localized, competitor backed content without expensive dashboards or charts. Kenji shares how the idea started as a personal tool for his father's law firm before becoming a full app, while Nathan discusses his transition from agency and in house marketing into building a startup aimed at replacing traditional agencies for local businesses. The conversation covers their backgrounds growing up in Compton and Las Vegas, how they met at a UNLV fraternity party, and their views on SEO versus answer engine optimization as AI tools like ChatGPT reshape search. They also discuss why they believe Google will remain the front door of the internet, the technical challenges of keeping AI powered tools affordable, and their long term vision of building an operating system that helps small businesses handle SEO, ads, and content without hiring agencies.
Two young founders explain why AI didn't kill SEO, it just moved the goalposts, and how Exploi is built to help small businesses keep up.
Can you give a quick overview of what Exploi is?
Exploi is an SEO execution platform for small businesses, our current wedge. Unlike Semrush or generic AI writers, we focus on localized content and built a full workflow for onpage SEO. Long term we want to be a handheld operating system so small businesses do not need to hire agencies, essentially positioning ourselves as the agency replacer for local SEO.
Is SEO still relevant now that people are searching through AI instead of Google?
SEO is not dead, it just got renamed. If you look at a ChatGPT search, it still cites the same top ten sources you would find on Google. The ranking factors are still very much alive, the only thing that changed is where people are pulling the cited information from.
How did Exploi actually come to be?
I was using a competitor's content writer and the price did not match the output, so I studied the tool and realized I could build it myself. It started as a command line tool, then a small UI, and I was using it exclusively for my dad's website since he is a personal injury attorney in Las Vegas. Eventually I turned it into a full app.
When did you realize AI was going to change how the internet gets discovered?
When programming normally you're working within constraints, but with AI those constraints just disappeared. It felt like a bottomless pit of text generation that accounts for the unknown, unlike a static program. That's when I realized you could really create anything, something that wasn't fully possible before AI.
Why did you build Exploi without the usual charts and dashboards other SEO tools rely on?
Most SEO tools just dump charts on you, keyword data, competitor rankings, with no execution. A small business owner cannot also be a marketer reading charts all day. The whole point of Exploi was to let AI properly digest that data so business owners don't have to, turning them into business owners instead of marketers.
What do you think the front door of the internet looks like in three years?
I think Google will stay superior because they have a sweetheart deal with Apple, Safari defaults to Google, and their AI is one of the leading ones. People are already used to Google Maps and search. Companies like OpenAI have been running at a loss, so I don't think they have the same longevity, Google can survive an AI bubble bursting.
What's the difference between optimizing for SEO versus AEO?
SEO is building content clusters so you show up in search, like someone searching how to unclog a toilet and finding a plumber's content. AEO is optimizing the actual answer at the top of the page so Google's AI mode can cite you directly. You need a short, clear answer about your company for AI to pull from when it crawls your site.
What's the hardest technical problem you're solving inside Exploi right now?
Getting out a good product without inflating the fees. SEO tools are expensive partly because you need to crawl pages and run bots and servers constantly. I want to compete with two hundred or five hundred dollar a month subscriptions while keeping prices low enough for local businesses to actually afford.
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