Title: Your Elevator Pitch Is Not on Your Website | DynamiX Podcast Ep. 1 with Jeff Jahn
Summary: In the debut episode of the DynamiX Podcast, founder and Chief Nerd Jeff Jahn sat down with host Sam Sylvie to talk about how DynamiX got its start, what he has learned from reviewing thousands of websites across Vistage sessions and client work, and what 210 million unique visitors worth of platform data is revealing about how AI tools decide which sites to surface and which to ignore. Jeff breaks down the three areas where he sees websites consistently fail: the visual impression does not match the quality of the business, the code underneath actively works against search visibility, and the story the owner tells in person never makes it onto the site.
We Launched a Podcast. Here's What Episode 1 Is All About.
We are excited to announce the launch of the DynamiX Podcast. In our very first episode, DynamiX CEO and Chief Nerd Jeff Jahn sat down with host Sam Sylvie to talk about how DynamiX got started, what he finds when he pulls up a business owner's homepage after hearing their elevator pitch, and what Octane's platform data is showing about how AI crawlers decide which sites to include in a response and which to skip entirely.
How It All Started
Jeff built his first computer at age 9 and was setting up networks for businesses across Atlanta by 14. DynamiX started in 2005 when he traded a self-taught website build for a car alarm system, pitching it in a dress shirt after an hour-and-a-half drive from his dorm room at Berry College.
Early on, a client tried to bully Jeff into building a free second website by threatening to sue him. That moment became a turning point:
"This is my line in the sand. I'm going to turn down 85% of people who come to me. I am going to have two mantras: Hell yes or no. & Do it right or don't do it."
That philosophy still drives how DynamiX operates today.
The Three Things Almost Every Website Gets Wrong
The core of the episode is Jeff's breakdown of the three things he sees failing on nearly every site he reviews. These come from patterns across thousands of live audits, speeches, and the behavioral data DynamiX collects across client sites on its exclusive Octane platform.
The visual impression does not match the business. Most businesses do have a story worth telling, but the site makes them look less credible than they actually are, and that mismatch costs them before the conversation starts.
The code actively works against visibility. This goes beyond "make it fast." Jeff shared a case where a 1:1 site migration that simply removed a cheater script (a WordPress plugin that defers all scripts until mouse interaction to inflate Lighthouse scores) resulted in 244 previously unindexed pages getting picked up by Google Search Console in a single day. The content was already there. The code was hiding it.
The story the owner tells in person never appears on the site. Jeff tests this constantly. He asks owners to give their elevator pitch, then pulls up their homepage. Of the six things they just said, usually none of them are on the site:
"The biggest myth business owners believe about their website is that it's actually telling the story they tell someone in person. It almost never is."
What Octane's Data Is Showing About AI Search
Because Octane powers hundreds of sites on shared infrastructure, DynamiX can observe how AI crawlers interact with content at a scale most agencies do not have access to. Two specific findings came up.
First, speed is not a ranking factor for AI search in the way it is for Google. It is a pass/fail gate. Jeff's data shows that if a site does not respond fast enough when an AI tool queries it during a prompt, that site is not penalized or ranked lower. It is excluded entirely. It never enters the conversation.
Second, AI queries are structurally different from traditional search. Jeff walked through a plumber example. Instead of "best plumber near me," a user now describes two years of failed fixes and asks who can solve it permanently. A page that explains why most band-aid repairs fail, that replacing the full fixture costs an extra $6 in parts but eliminates the problem, and that includes FAQ schema around reoccurrence concerns is the page that gets cited. A generic "we fix leaks" page does not.
Jeff compared the current AI landscape to the early days of responsive design, when DynamiX was building mobile site generators before Google declared responsive the standard:
"This is the most excited I've ever been to be in my space. For someone who's pushing on technology, I am having the best time of my life. This is better than when responsive [design] became a thing to me."
On the content side, Jeff warned against mass-generating AI blog posts, a pattern he calls the "shooting star." Businesses see a short ranking bump, then a sharp decline. His observation across DynamiX's client base: an 8-year-old blog post rewritten with more actionable information, clearer calls to action, and proper FAQ schema will "very likely dramatically outrank" a new page targeting the same topic. The pattern has been consistent enough that he now actively warns businesses against purging old content to make room for AI-generated replacements.
The conversation goes deeper than what we have covered here.