Jeremy Rivera:
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, on the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Permacast Walls. I'm here with David, who's going to introduce himself, his company, and tell us why we should trust him.
David:
Wow, okay, quite the intro. Thanks, Jeremy, for having me on. So yeah, I'm David, Dave Pourquery — founder of Groas. Why you should trust me? That's a tricky one, right? That's the ultimate human question. Look, I think — maybe don't trust me, trust what other people have said. We'll leave it at that.
Jeremy Rivera:
Alright, well what have other people said and what are they saying it about?
David:
So I think they're saying good things about Groas. Ultimately, I think we're here to help people do better with Google Ads. We can go into what Groas does in a bit. But generally, the people are pretty positive that we are significantly improving what they were doing before versus now what they're doing with Groas.
Jeremy Rivera:
So do you have a background in the ad space online? What is your background and history? Some of the experience you're bringing to the table — and the mission statement of your company as context?
David:
Sure, yes. I've come into the industry from probably a very different point than a lot of people might have. For context, I used to work in private equity and venture capital. I've been programming since I was quite young — 13, 14, I guess — which helps. But what led me to start with Google Ads was whilst I was working in private equity, in the evenings I was running my own dropshipping and e-commerce stores. And it was through doing that that I got pretty good with Google Ads, but also started to figure out that we could maybe do things a bit better. And that's how Groas was born from that, basically.
"We are now essentially replacing entire Google Ads teams. They just connect the campaign to Groas and it runs itself 24-7 — and measurably better than what a human can do."
"90%, 95% of those scenarios — what we see in those accounts is really tough. Businesses losing money on Google Ads. They've been charged a fortune and have absolutely no idea why."
"All our customers — 80% of them come from LLM-based SEO, just recommending Groas when people are looking for what they need. I haven't spent a dime in marketing so far."
Jeremy Rivera:
What is the primary approach? I've audited Google Ads setups from small businesses like lawyers or contractors are struggling — one guy doing 4D ultrasound was spending as much on ads to get an appointment as the actual 4D system cost. Coming from the outside, tell us about the approach you have with your company to make that a better experience.
David:
Groas is quite different. As far as I know, right now we are the first people to have genuine, fully autonomous campaigns, end to end. There are a lot of tools out there recommending keywords, negative keywords, giving you good ad copy — but we are now essentially replacing entire Google Ads teams. They just connect the campaign to Groas and it runs itself 24-7.
And measurably better than what a human can do — why? Because it's ingesting more data points. We did not start off like that. It took a long, long time — probably close to a year — to get to the point of full autonomy.
Groas started off with much more humble beginnings. It was a little tool — it helped you do some things, it gave you dynamic landing pages. But Groas evolved from being a tool people used every day, to now no one uses Groas — and we actually get alerts if people are logging into their account on Groas. It is not something that needs to be used anymore.
Jeremy Rivera:
You've set up internal agentic systems to handle all of the individual pieces for a Google ad campaign. Is that both search and display? What does the decision-making process look like?
David:
Our campaign types now are search and shopping. PMAX is coming later this month — we've left that last because PMAX is Google's own black box; they obfuscate as much as possible.
Groas is a collection of hundreds of different agents, all talking to each other simultaneously, reading in live data from the account and campaign to make its decisions. A human can maybe look at 10 or 20 data points before taking an action. Groas is analyzing hundreds of thousands per hour.
That's one of the things — and also dynamic landing pages, which increase conversion rates. Effectively, it's an agentic system working on that campaign 24-7.
Jeremy Rivera:
What does the onboarding process look like? What's the load on the front end to give the information needed?
David:
Since full autonomy — which has been live for about three to four months — there are two types of people who use Groas. One is people who've just fired their agency, maybe paying them $5–10K a month, and they plug everything into Groas for $1K a month. Or two, it's agencies themselves — plugging their own customer accounts into Groas, not telling their end clients, collecting their retainer and charging the difference.
The process is simple: you create an account, connect your Google Ads account, and then decide — either supercharge your existing campaigns with one click, or let Groas create a fresh campaign from scratch. Typically, 20% of usage is creating from scratch; 80% is people supercharging. Learn more at groas.ai/pricing.
Jeremy Rivera:
I know Google can, by its TOS, spend up to twice your designated daily budget. Have you had to invent processes to keep spending within the correct spectrum?
David:
You mentioned two times — we've seen it do up to four times in a day. They especially do that with newer accounts. Yes, Groas does have processes in place for that.
If it sees one particular ad group spending a lot with no conversions — automatically, it's going to pause that ad group. Or it might see overspend with one conversion when there should have been two or three — so Groas will write brand new ad copy and a new landing page, deploy that automatically, trying to get more conversions. It's case by case. There's a lot of rough edges in Google Ads. This is why it's taken so long to get to full autonomy.
Jeremy Rivera:
You said it generates a landing page to sync up with each unique ad you're writing? That's dope.
David:
Yeah, Groas takes your existing landing page and deploys dynamic versions that adapt to every possible user search intent. The result — more conversions because the user found exactly what they were looking for.
Jeremy Rivera:
How are you approaching this business to gain visibility? Are you using your own platform? Looking for white label partners? What's your game plan for growing your SaaS?
David:
The short answer, Jeremy, is we've done zero. All our customers — 80% of them come from LLM-based SEO, just recommending Groas when people are looking for what they need. The other 20% are customer referrals. I haven't spent a dime in marketing so far, because everything has gone into building the absolute best thing that exists currently.
The last two months particularly, we've been effectively unable to handle the organic demand that's just been generated. So I'm behind the curve on hiring. Once the team is in a better place, the obvious thing we're going to do is run Groas on Groas.
Jeremy Rivera:
What's next on your product roadmap?
David:
We still have a lot to do in Google Ads directly — it's still day zero in my mind. Number one, bring more campaign types. Continue to improve models. Then who knows? Maybe look at the organic side, maybe look at other ad platforms. We're in a space evolving so rapidly that what I think now, in three months might just be irrelevant.
Jeremy Rivera:
What have been some key learning curves when it comes to different verticals — service, leads, e-commerce — that run ads differently?
David:
It's been so hard. It's been so hard. We obviously cater to all possible niches — not just that, but geography. We have niches in countries I can't even name running on Groas currently.
Each niche has a different way that works well with Google Ads. Some people doing a SKAG structure might work really well. Sometimes broad match works really well for a particular keyword dimension. Sometimes it's trash.
The short answer is we've kept adapting and evolving with the users that have come to us. Now we're very well covered — we've seen all possible campaign types, what could go wrong and what could go right. If we hadn't had all those users from V1, back when Groas was just a little tool, we would never have solved for autonomy for all sorts of niches and campaign types. It wouldn't have happened.
Jeremy Rivera:
What was that process of taking the leap from having an LLM-based tool to these agent capabilities? I’ve talked with a few SEOs like Chris Tweeten who does Calgary SEO on how to take some of our processes and use agents to complete them. How did you connect those dots?
David:
When I first started Groas, I never imagined ever we would be where we are now. Ever. I was just building a simple little tool — recommended keywords, negated certain keywords, did the landing page stuff. It was quite basic.
It's funny — it was the smaller spenders who didn't understand a lot about Google Ads who kind of said, "isn't this supposed to do everything for me?" And it got us thinking — is this even possible? Taking action on a campaign is one thing. Anyone can set that up. It's making sure you're doing the correct actions, around the clock, better than a human might — really tough.
The short answer is that it came from a lot of early users who didn't know much about Google Ads, who questioned what was possible. And with them, we were effectively able to get to where we're at now.
Jeremy Rivera:
Any AI tool has its level of hallucination — false positive answers. With agentic systems executing something very real world, with very real money, a hallucination is potentially very dangerous. How have you addressed that elephant in the room?
David:
Two things. One — custom trained models, which would not have been possible without our big user base from V1. Two — context matters. If you can feed as much possible information about the business, the particular offer, what they're trying to achieve, the brand — the results you get are drastically better.
Short answer: custom models and feeding in the correct context — and also knowing what to ignore, not just dumping somebody's website in. There's a lot of things you have to be careful with.
Jeremy Rivera:
Here's a soapbox — step on it. What's your hot take? What do you think people should know?
David:
I don't mean to be disrespectful or inflammatory. But I would say truthfully what we have seen: when we take over accounts from other agencies, it's quite drastic. I want to say 90%, 95% of those scenarios — what we see in those accounts is really tough. Things horribly configured. Businesses losing money on Google Ads, having absolutely no idea why. They've been charged a fortune.
They correlate the price they've been charged with the quality of work delivered — and think, "I guess Google just has it out for me." That's really tough to see.
I think in five years time, the agency landscape will look very, very different. You can't justify charging 15% of ad spend plus lock-ins for a long time, because things like Groas are just going to keep making the market evolve. I've seen a lot of particularly smaller business owners get really badly burnt by multiple agencies consecutively — and I don't like to see that personally.
Jeremy Rivera:
I see that often too — taking over SEO accounts and saying, "Good Lord, what is going on here?" I've done audits on Google Ads accounts where they hadn't even set a geographic boundary — advertising in Omaha when they're in Southern California. Really basic stuff. So I can definitely see misconfiguration on a wide basis being a challenge.
