Ranking Locally: Your Guide to GMB & SEO (Unknown Secrets Revealed!) Ep. 580
Are you struggling to rank for local search terms? Have you ever wondered if creating separate local landing pages for various locations could be the…
AI Search
From Google to Everywhere: How to Win in the New AI-Driven Search Era feat. Micheal Buckbee
AI search is fracturing the search ecosystem beyond Google, and brands must optimize for LLM visibility by distributing content across platforms, tracking AI-specific rankings, and shifting focus toward bottom-of-funnel content.
Key takeaways
- The biggest ranking factor in AI search is repetition across platforms, not domain authority or page rank.
- There is no duplicate content penalty in LLM search, so publish the same content to your site, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
- Ask ChatGPT or Claude what it thinks about your company to find gaps in how LLMs represent your brand.
- A post-purchase survey asking customers how they found you reveals AI-driven attribution that analytics tools miss.
- Check your robots.txt and run your site through an AI search console to confirm all bots can index your pages.
About this episode
AI is fracturing the search ecosystem and creating new opportunities for SEOs to expand their role and demonstrate greater business value in this evolving digital landscape. • Michael Buckbee discusses how AI is changing search and creating "siteless SEO" • Traditional SEO has primarily been Google optimization, but search is now becoming a feature embedded across multiple platforms • ChatGPT and other AI tools are…
Questions this episode answers
How do you track how your brand appears in AI search results like ChatGPT?
Michael Buckbee's tool Noatoa runs queries across AI platforms tracking your domain, company name, product names, and even key executives as strings. It monitors competitive searches such as best in category and sentiment questions like is my company trustworthy, then shows how responses change over time.
Does duplicate content hurt your visibility in LLM search?
No. According to Buckbee, there is no duplicate content penalty in AI search. He recommends publishing the same content to your website, as a LinkedIn article, and as a YouTube video, because repetition across platforms is the biggest ranking factor in LLM search.
What is siteless SEO?
Siteless SEO refers to the reality that prospects ask LLMs questions about your brand and get answers without ever visiting your site. If ChatGPT says a SaaS company is not HIPAA compliant, that prospect may never visit the site or enter the sales funnel at all.
What is agentic search and why does it matter for SEO?
Agentic search means a bot performs some of the searching for the user. Google's AI mode is described as a key example: it finds around 10 links, reads their content, and returns a summary with a recommendation. Pages must be written so a bot can read, understand, and recommend them over competitors.
In their words
The biggest ranking factor that we see in AI search is repetition, just repetition, repetition, repetition, and so so much of what we recommend beyond content. You have to create the content, but then you have a distribution strategy.
Michael Buckbee
There is not a duplicate content penalty, which is something SEO people just cling to, and so it is not a problem. You post something to your site, you post an article Great. You go to LinkedIn and maybe you post a link to it, maybe you post a summary.
Michael Buckbee
Terms defined in this episode
- Siteless SEO
- A scenario where users get brand information directly from LLMs and never visit the brand's website, making LLM visibility critical independent of traditional site traffic.
- Agentic search
- Search performed partly by a bot or agent on behalf of the user, as with Google's AI mode, which retrieves links, reads content, and returns a personalized summary and recommendation.
- Faceless content vs face content
- Faceless content is impersonal material that earns raw AI rankings. Face content carries a human voice or point of view and drives conversion by building a relationship with the reader.
- Common Crawl
- A publicly accessible web crawler whose large text dumps of the internet were used by AI companies as foundational training data for their language models.
Full transcript is being added.
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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