Earned exposure, SEO & AI search

Every answer 11 answers

• What is earned exposure?

  Earned exposure is getting found, cited and recommended because you're provably good at what you do, not because you paid for the spot. It's the search results, AI answers and referrals that keep showing up after the ad budget stops, and it comes from real work that's easy to verify.

• Can SEO bring leads to a bare-bones local website?

  Yes, especially in local niches with almost no competition. My outdated, partly broken AI consulting site brought in two multi-thousand-dollar leads purely from search, and a microsite with almost no content got its first inbound lead in about three months. Ranking in a city where nobody else ranks beats a pretty site.

• How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

  Make the AI confident in you. That comes from three things: lots of citations of your real work across the internet, steady content that answers the exact questions people ask, and the same facts about you everywhere. Nobody can guarantee a mention, but those are the parts you control.

• How do you build a local directory that AI search will cite?

  Build it for AI first and humans second. Store each business's data as answers to the specific questions people ask, give every business a page with real articles behind it, keep it on one strong domain, and use free listings to start conversations. My directory got about two submissions a day in its first month with zero promotion.

• Is WordPress still the best choice for SEO?

  Not anymore, in my view. "WordPress is best for SEO" is a 2024-and-earlier belief. I build local sites on Next.js with a headless CMS: faster, better looking, cheaper, and better for SEO. With AI doing the coding, the old reason to pick WordPress, that anyone can build on it, is gone.

• Should a newsletter's SEO content live on a subdomain or the root domain?

  The root domain. Subdomains are bad for SEO. Put articles at yoursite.com/article-name, not blog.yoursite.com, and keep all your local brands on one domain so every page you publish builds the same site's authority instead of splitting it.

• Should you publish your newsletter issues on your own website?

  Yes. Copy every past issue to your own domain as a real web page with clean headings, canonical tags, structured data and a sitemap entry. Treat your email platform as sending infrastructure only, so the search and AI value of everything you write builds your site instead of the platform's archive.

• What is an AI visibility audit?

  An AI visibility audit checks what ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini say about a business right now, and why. When I audited myself I scored 30 out of 100, mostly because my facts conflicted across the internet. The first fix is usually boring: make your name, location and numbers match everywhere.

• What is the 10-80-10 rule for AI content?

  The 10-80-10 rule says a person supplies the first 10% (the real insight, story or expertise), AI does the middle 80% (drafting, formatting, repurposing), and a person does the last 10% (editing, fact-checking, deciding what ships). Cut either human end and you get slop.

• What should founder-led content be about?

  What actually happened: what you're building, what broke, what worked, what a customer did this week, and what you learned. Founder-led content is your real thinking turned into good writing. It doubles as dated proof of work, which is exactly what search engines, AI assistants and future customers trust.

• Which businesses benefit most from showing up in AI search?

  Person-based professional services that people already ask AI about: insurance agents, estate planners, attorneys, public adjusters, and to a degree roofers. The more often people ask an AI for that kind of help, and the more one client is worth, the more it pays to be the expert the AI trusts.