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If your SEO rankings have been climbing lately, don't celebrate yet — new data shows that trend might mean nothing for whether AI is citing you.

Kevin Indig's latest Growth Intelligence Brief tracked roughly 2,600 companies across two separate scores: organic search visibility, and how often AI systems mention them. The correlation between the two, over the same four-week window, is effectively zero. Companies are climbing in Google and disappearing from AI Overviews in the same month — same content, two different verdicts.

In this episode, Jeff breaks down the mechanism behind the split: Google's organic algorithm still rewards the aggregator — the page that collects and compares, because a human reader still needs to choose. AI Overviews skip that step entirely, reaching past the collector to cite the primary source directly. The data proves it at scale — aggregators gained visibility and lost AI citations, while integrators (primary sources) gained both.

Jeff also shares how his client Burbank Dental Lab moved from static PDF success guides to an interactive, AI-citable education platform — and the confirmed backlink that followed.

Source credit: This episode is built on original research from Kevin Indig's Growth Intelligence Brief, published by Growth Memo.

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Somebody is going to tell you SEO is dead and you need a whole new AI strategy. This episode is built around a moment where two SEO experts, live on air, fundamentally disagreed about that — one arguing AI search is a brand-new game, the other stopping mid-sentence to say: take away Google, and AI SEO equals zero.

I break down why that math problem matters more than the acronym war, where the "new game" camp is actually right, and why the shortcut version of "more AI content" can get your site penalized instead of found. If you're a business owner being pitched a GEO strategy, these are the 15 minutes that keep you from buying the wrong thing.

The ideas in this episode were sparked by a conversation on The Edward Show, hosted by Edward Stern and featuring guests Zachary Long and David Quaid.

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A digital agency founder in Melbourne has audited close to 70,000 websites over seventeen years. He keeps finding the same problems, over and over, no matter the industry — and it's not because businesses are ignoring conversion best practices. It's because they're following them and getting a hollow copy of what actually works.

In this episode, Jeff breaks down why the standard conversion checklist — a call to action here, a testimonials page there, a steady content cadence — so often fails to move the needle, and what separates businesses that convert from businesses that just check boxes. From the real reason "contact us" buttons don't work, to why AI-generated images are quietly costing businesses trust, to a Houston photographer whose single headshot got credited with a million dollars in client revenue — this episode is about the difference between doing the tactic and building the substance underneath it.

If your site already has the calls to action, the testimonials, and the content — and it's still not converting — this episode is for you.

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Epigenetics research. 1031 exchange specialists. Dental labs doing highly specific implant work. Every one of them convinced their industry is too niche for link building to work. They're right that it's narrow — wrong about what that means.

In this episode, Jeff breaks down a case study (credit to The Edward Show, sourced from a 2023 r/SEO thread) about a chemical manufacturing startup that hit a wall — too few blogs in their exact niche to build links on — and solved it not by lowering standards, but by widening their aperture to adjacent industries. Two months later, they outranked the major players in their space.

Jeff applies the same lesson to two real businesses: Daniel Goodwin's Provident 1031, where expert positioning (not link volume) built keyword concentration in a niche with zero dedicated blogs to pitch — and Burbank Dental Lab, one of the top labs in the country, which holds a real, earned backlink from CAD-Ray by recognizing its actual niche isn't "dental labs," it's implant technology. The takeaway: relevance isn't a category, it's a distance — and the businesses that get stuck aren't failing because they're niche, they're failing because they're waiting for a perfect-fit website that may not exist.

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You have data nobody else has — usage numbers, pricing data, performance stats sitting in your CRM or billing system that a competitor would love to see. Most businesses sit on it and do nothing. The ones who do publish it usually still get zero credit: AI never cites the page, Google never ranks it.

A recent Growth Memo analysis found that only 8 of 301 pages AI systems actually cited were genuine first-party research — under 3% of the set. But those 8 pages pulled 8% of all citation volume, punching nearly three times above their weight. The catch: publishing original data isn't enough on its own. Almost all of that citation weight came from one specific format — a named, head-to-head benchmark answering "which of these is best."

In this episode, Jeff breaks down the one 2022 benchmark that still earns AI citations four years later, why owning proprietary data isn't the asset (the benchmark is), and how to find the comparison question in your own category that nobody's answered yet.

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When you think about YouTube, what do you see? A video platform? A secondary line item on your marketing calendar somewhere between LinkedIn and TikTok?

It’s time for a radical reframe: YouTube is the second-largest search engine on Earth. It’s owned by the first. And almost nobody treats it that way—which means almost nobody is actually competing for it.

In this episode, we break down why the game of online visibility has fundamentally shifted from "rented" attention to compounding search assets. Thanks to massive data drops from Semrush and Surfer SEO, we now have proof that AI models like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews disproportionately turn to YouTube video to back up their answers. If you aren't optimizing for video as a core SEO channel, you're leaving your biggest organic AI visibility opportunity on the table.

What You'll Learn This Episode:

• Rented vs. Compounding Visibility: Why posting on traditional social networks is just renting attention from a landlord, while YouTube builds an evergreen asset that works for years.
• The AI Citation Data: A look into the numbers proving YouTube is the single most-cited domain across Google AI Overviews, beating out Wikipedia and Google itself.
• The "Found vs. Believed" Loop: How to ensure the depth behind your website matches the confidence in front of your videos so you don't lose buyers downstream.
• The Trust Multiplier: Why AI doesn't cite you just because you post more volume, and how third-party trust signals multiply your visibility by 75x.

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Send us Fan Mail