Computers Know When Computers Are Talking with Rotimi Kehinde of Kingdom Branding
This is a special content edition, which means Isaac Morey from Content Cucumber sat in with me, and the whole conversation went where he and I both spend our days. Rotimi Kehinde is the founder of Kingdom Branding, a full service marketing agency in Chicago doing web development and social media, which they call growth marketing. He came on to talk about what content is for now, what he will hand to a machine, and what he will not.
A Mayoral Campaign and a Living Room
Rotimi came to the US from Nigeria and has been here twenty five plus years. He arrived with a plan to run his own company, spent one year in corporate work, and left.
“I walked in corporate for one year, which I hated,” he says. “And I decided I was just going to start out as a graphic designer.”
What came next is the part I like. He took a creative director job on a Chicago mayoral campaign and offered to work for nothing to get in the door.
“I was like, I’ll work for free, I’ll do whatever,” he says. “And that’s how I got into the political space.”
That door stayed open. Kingdom Branding has since done the brand design and development for the Democratic Party of Illinois, and built the Secretary of State’s campaign website and his branding. The agency grew out of Rotimi’s living room into a team of seven, and it works in politics, entertainment, and nonprofits.
He runs it on a line he repeats to his team.
“I always tell my team that we’re building a company, not one that we work for, but one that works for us,” he says.
Everyone has unlimited time off, and he says the team uses that “judiciously.” The agency does no marketing of its own at all, and the work arrives through word of mouth, through partners, and through conversations like this one.
Content as the Bedrock
Isaac asked what role content plays for the agency and for its clients, and Rotimi put it underneath everything else.
“I think it’s a core part of it,” he says. “Content, I think, has always been the bedrock, because it’s all about communication. Marketing is communication. It’s telling someone, this is what we do and this is how we can help you.”
I have watched development agencies treat content as the last thing anybody thinks about, so I asked him how he leans into it. His answer is that it is baked into the workflow before a line of code exists.
“When we do discoveries with our clients, a lot of times our clients aren’t thinking, I need to think about what I’m going to put on my website. It’s usually an afterthought,” he says. “We try to make that something that is key and part of our primary strategy, that you’re not just building a website.”
His reasoning is that a site sitting on its own does nothing for a business, and the links back to it have to come from somewhere, which puts social and search in the same conversation as the build.
Smarter Websites
Kingdom Branding’s theme this year is supersonic, and underneath it are three frameworks Rotimi is building. He kept two of them to himself because they are still his intellectual property, and he walked through the third.
It is an agentic way of comparing what a brand publishes against what is trending and against what competitors are doing, and then acting on the answer.
“Are your CTAs working? Is your hero section working? Is your about page working? If there’s news or trending news, can you serve up content that’s relevant to that?” he says. “Can you personalize your website experience using AI supported engines? Can you create a concierge service on your website?”
The concierge is the piece I keep coming back to. Instead of a visitor calling the team, an agent trained on the site answers, because it has crawled the site and knows what is there. He is thinking about compliance the same way, on legal questions and on accessibility, and he says the static brochure website has turned into something else.
Accessibility Becomes Law
This is where the conversation stopped being about marketing. Rotimi says Illinois has issued guidelines requiring government agencies, government websites, and parks and recreation to meet WCAG, and that federal movement is behind it. He could not pin the date down on tape and said so.
The business case he makes does not rest on the deadline.
“There’s also been over 4,000 plus lawsuits in California only on accessibility on your website,” he says. “So think about it from terms of not just a business perspective, but also from just a moral perspective. Like the same way we’re making buildings accessible, you’re making hotels accessible, your website should be accessible as well.”
He says clients have called after getting sued, and the work now is getting ahead of that. Isaac added the part that gets missed, which is that Google reads accessibility as a trustworthiness signal, so the legal case, the moral case, and the search case all point the same direction.
Getting Found by the Machines
I asked what basic tactics he gives people who want to be discoverable by LLMs, and his answer started with a file most of us have been editing for twenty years.
“We used to have what we used to call robots.txt that we would put into a website,” he says. “But now we also have LLM text files that you can put into your website, which is great. So we’re doing that as well, in addition to kind of tuning up content to make it AI friendly.”
Beyond the file, he is building FAQs and comparison pages for clients, because the AI engines seem to reward them. He frames the whole thing as a fight that has only started.
“There’s such a huge battle right now between traditional search, because it’s crazy that we call it traditional search, versus searching through AI,” he says. “And so it’s a new frontier of the battle, and it’s not going to end anytime soon.”
The Line He Draws
I told him what I heard at Shoptalk in Chicago, which is that vendors are seeing a vanillaization of content, and that human writing is starting to stand out against the machine kind. He had already written a policy about it.
“I’m very, very particular about this phrase. There’s AI-powered content, and there’s AI-supported content,” he says. “And where we stand at Kingdom Branding is AI-supported.”
The distinction is where the thinking happens.
“We’re not throwing our brains away and saying, computer, do this for me,” he says. “We’re still thinking, we’re still putting our strategy together, and we just use AI to research, to refine, before we push anything out.”
He is blunt about the shortcut.
“You can’t just prompt engineer your way and just produce junk, right? And just push it out there.”
Then he gave the reason it fails in the market, which is the line that stuck with me and gave this episode its title. He has watched content agencies fold because clients decided they would handle the writing themselves, and then watched the results come back.
“But then it’s not being picked up on SEO, because believe it or not, computers know when computers are talking,” he says.
I see the same tell in my LinkedIn comments, where somebody rephrases my question back at me, agrees with a point, and leaves a trail of dashes behind. Isaac had the better story, about a student caught using AI who was given a second chance to write an essay about how AI would rob him of his education, and who wrote that one with ChatGPT too.
Rotimi’s own position is old fashioned and he is fine with that.
“For all the content people out there, we’re still traditional, still writing your own stuff. Power to you, because I believe in that, and I still write on paper and I’ll keep writing on paper,” he says.
The Age of Supersonic
His read on the year ahead is that content stays front and center and gets harder, because everyone has the same tools and the same volume.
“We’re saturated with information,” he says. “And so you realize that now more than ever, you need to differentiate in your content strategy.”
Supersonic is his answer, and it comes down to three pillars, smarter systems, faster execution, and unified growth.
The plug at the end is a service built out of something he kept running into, which is a big brand with a website nobody is managing. Kingdom Branding launched kingdomwp.com to take those over, handling compliance, site performance, content updates, and search optimization, and keeping the thing from being hacked while nobody is looking. He is running that play now for a multi-location restaurant chain that wants to show up in AI and in search.
Kingdom Branding is at kingdombranding.com, the website service is at kingdomwp.com, and Rotimi is at ceo@kingdombranding.com. Isaac Morey is the chief editor and co-founder of Content Cucumber.