Drazen vs doing it yourself
Every founder briefly believes they will do their own SEO, and to be fair, you could: none of it is beyond a person who ships products with AI tools. The real question is the accounting: what DIY costs in hours and errors, versus $99 once plus an optional $12 a month. Here is the honest version of that maths.
What DIY actually involves
The technical layer alone: learn what matters in 2026 (much online advice is stale), audit your site the way crawlers see it (your browser lies to you: it runs JavaScript, GPTBot does not), then write and ship fixes for metadata, canonicals, sitemap, robots.txt, structured data and llms.txt, verify each one actually landed, and re-audit after every rebuild because regeneration eats fixes silently. First pass, realistically: a working week of a founder's attention. Maintenance: a recurring tax forever.
The failure mode is not inability, it is attention. Founder SEO gets done once in an enthusiastic weekend, then never again. Rankings decay quietly, a rebuild wipes half the tags, and nobody notices for months, which is the expensive part.
The honest decision table
- You enjoy this and have slack: DIY genuinely works, our checklist page gives you the full list to work through
- Your time is worth more than $2 an hour on tag maintenance: automate it: the arithmetic is not subtle
- The knowledge itself: DIY teaches you; an agent teaches you too, every finding is explained in plain English before you approve the fix
- Regression watching: automation wins outright: no human re-audits their own site daily
- Judgement calls (positioning, content): yours either way: no tool owns your voice
A third option: DIY with an agent's eyes
Plenty of Drazen users are DIY founders at heart: they run the free scan for the diagnosis, read the plain-English findings, and apply fixes themselves via the paste-ready prompts (no GitHub connection required). The paid plan adds what DIY structurally cannot: fixes written for you, one-click shipping, verification, and daily monitoring so decay never goes unnoticed. Start with the free scan either way, it is the honest audit of how much work your site actually needs.
Questions
Can't I just prompt my AI editor to do my SEO?
You can prompt it to implement fixes, and it will do that well once told exactly what is broken. What it cannot do from inside the editor: see your live site as crawlers do, know what AI engines currently say about you, or verify afterwards. Diagnosis and verification are the missing halves; that is what the scan supplies.
Is $99 worth it pre-revenue?
The scan and the AI visibility check are free, use those regardless. Paying makes sense the moment traffic has value to you: one recovered ranking or AI citation typically pays for it, and it is a one-time cost, not a subscription.
Will I learn less by automating?
You will learn differently: every Drazen finding and fix is explained in plain English, and you review each diff. Most users report understanding their site's SEO better after automating, because the feedback loop finally exists.
See what your site scores
Drazen scans your site the way Google and ChatGPT see it, shows you everything that is hurting you, and writes the fixes itself. Free, about 30 seconds.
Run the free scan →