David Hunter is the CEO of two influential companies, Local Falcon and Epic Web Studios, where he drives innovation in digital marketing and local search engine optimization. Throughout his career, which spans over 15 years, he has reshaped how businesses understand and engage with their online presence, particularly in the realm of local SEO.
Company: Local Falcon
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
David Hunter: My name is David Hunter, and I am the CEO of Local Falcon and Epic Web Studios. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, I’ve focused my career on helping businesses understand and improve their online presence, especially in the world of local SEO. Local Falcon helps agencies and multi-location brands pinpoint exactly where they appear in local search, not just by zip code, but with precise latitude and longitude coordinates. Years ago, we popularized the geo-grid approach for measuring visibility at precise lat-long points, then built an SEO metric called SoLV (Share of Local Visibility), which calculates the percentage of a geo-grid where your business ranks in the top three spots, displaying how much of the map you win. That work put us ahead of the local rank tracking universe. We achieved a 257% growth rate in just two years, without any outside funding or paid ads, scaled to over 100 countries, and verified over 125,000 real users.
I’m proud of that, but I’m not fully satisfied yet, as the surface has expanded. Customers are discovering local businesses through AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI Agents. As a result, we’re evolving from a maps-only rank tracker into a multi-surface visibility platform that measures where a brand appears across AI answers and search results. The goal is simple – actionable truth for operators who live and die by local demand.
What was the defining moment or challenge that prompted you to pivot your business model, and how did you recognize it was time for a change?
David Hunter: The defining moment wasn’t a single event, but a massive shift in the entire search engine landscape: the mainstream adoption of generative AI in search engines. For years, our core value proposition was providing the most accurate and granular local ranking data. We are the best in the world at that, but as we watched Google and others begin to integrate AI-powered answers directly into search results, we recognized that the value of local data, on its own, was about to change.
We started hearing from clients who were performing really well on Google Maps but were absent in AI answers. That created uncomfortable conversations for marketers who were doing the “right” things but losing surface area where customers were actually looking. The data didn’t match their reality. This disconnect revealed a blind spot in traditional SEO reporting, and it was our responsibility to close it. When you have a measurement product and your users feel blind in a new channel, that is your moment. We ran side-by-side tests, captured the gap in a Whitepaper, and decided to treat AI answers as a first-class surface, not a “someday” measurement.
Can you walk us through the most significant change you made to your business model and the immediate impact it had on your company’s trajectory?
David Hunter: The most significant change was fundamentally redefining ourselves from a pure B2B SaaS single-surface rank tracker to an AI-first multi-surface visibility platform. This wasn’t just about adding an “AI feature”; it was a complete pivot in our product philosophy and roadmap. We developed and integrated a proprietary AI, trained specifically on our vast dataset of local search analytics, to provide actionable, plain-language insights and strategic recommendations.
The immediate impact was a dramatic increase in user engagement. We saw users spending more time analyzing their results, rather than just glancing at them. The AI became a conversational partner for them. This shift transformed Local Falcon into a strategic partner, not just a monitoring tool for our clients. It validated our hypothesis that our customers were hungry for guidance, not just graphs. This has laid the groundwork for the future of our subscription models and solidified our position as an innovator rather than just an incumbent.
How did you convince your team, investors, or stakeholders to embrace such a dramatic shift, especially if it involved risk or uncertainty?
David Hunter: Since we’re a founder-led company, our primary stakeholders are our team and our customers. For us, the conversation wasn’t about abandoning what made us successful; it was about leveraging our success to conquer the next frontier. I didn’t frame it as a risk but as an inevitability. The world was changing, and we had a choice: lead the change or be disrupted by it. The team was energized by the challenge of building something truly cutting-edge and securing our leadership position for the next decade.
For our customers, we didn’t try to convince them with a presentation; we let the product do the talking. We rolled out the AI to beta testers and early adopters, and their enthusiastic feedback became our most powerful tool. Their feedback didn’t just validate our direction; it provided momentum for our roadmap. When your customers are telling you, “This is the feature I didn’t even know I needed, and now I can’t live without it,” you know you’re on the right track. Their validation created an undeniable momentum that propelled the rest of the company forward.
What was the biggest obstacle you faced during the pivot, and how did you overcome it to ensure the new model’s success?
David Hunter: Measurement in AI answers is a moving target. Models shift, prompts vary, and “ground truth” is less obvious than a ranked list. We solved it with volume, consistency, and transparency. We run large, repeatable scans at fixed geo-points, store snapshots, and have Falcon AI analyze patterns so users understand what likely drove a change. We focused on reproducibility and practical recommendations over vanity metrics. Building these new surfaces has been a slow, deliberate process, but our refusal to take shortcuts is what makes our AI so popular and trusted by our users today.
Looking back, what’s one key lesson from your pivot experience that you’d share with other CEOs considering a major business model shift?
David Hunter: The key lesson for me was not to pivot away from our core strength, but to pivot on top of it. Local Falcon’s pivot to AI would have been impossible without our foundation as a leader in local SEO data. Our years of collecting precise, granular, high-quality local search data became the proprietary fuel for our AI engine. That was our unfair advantage.
Many leaders think a pivot means abandoning the old business for something new. I believe a true, sustainable pivot uses your existing success as the launchpad for your next evolution. Look at what makes you great today and ask yourself, “How can I leverage this unique asset – whether that’s data, customers, team expertise, or infrastructure – to solve the next, even bigger problem for my customers?” As AI continues to reshape discovery, we’re committed to staying ahead, not just by tracking visibility but by defining it. Your past success isn’t something to be discarded; it’s the foundation you must build upon.
