How I built Hurculeads.com — and why pay-per-call still teaches AEO

Years before anyone said 'agentic web,' I was running Hurculeads — a pay-per-call lead-generation platform that aggregated buyer intent, routed it to the right seller, and got paid on outcome. There's still footage floating around YouTube if you search the name.

What pay-per-call taught me

Intent is the only product. Everything else is plumbing. We didn't 'sell calls.' We sold the precise moment a person decided they were ready to buy and connected them to a seller within seconds.

Attribution is sacred. If you can't prove which signal produced which call, you can't price the channel. You can't scale it. You can't defend it. The same is now true for AI citations.

How that translates to AEO

Today the 'call' is a citation. ChatGPT names a source. A user clicks (or doesn't). The conversion happens. The question 'which signal got me cited?' is exactly the question Hurculeads forced me to answer for phone calls a decade ago. Track everything. Attribute relentlessly. Reinvest in what works.

Same job. Different protocol. Phones became prompts.

What I'd build differently today

If I were starting Hurculeads now, the buy surface wouldn't be a landing page — it would be a WebMCP endpoint and an llms.txt manifest pointing AI assistants directly at our buyer-matching tool. The brands that own the verbs will own the next decade.