AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast

James Dooley: AI SEO strategies that are working well in 2026.

Today I'm joined with Mike Lovatt, Paul Truscott and Luke Bastin. Today we're going to talk about trying to get your brand cited in the AI overview of Gemini, Claude AI, ChatGPT or Perplexity.

I want to start with this simple question. Paul, if you were to sell this as a service to a client, and it was not for ranking the website but just to get cited more in the LLMs, what would you call that service?

Is it AI SEO, LLM SEO or GEO?

Paul Truscott: I would probably go with GEO because that seems to be the one that is turning everyone on from a marketing perspective.

Personally, I think it all comes back to semantics, but it is just a different way of presenting it.

If you're pitching it to someone, I would go with GEO because that seems to be the buzzword. That is certainly what I am seeing anyway.

James Dooley: What are you saying, Luke?

Luke Bastin: I tend to have a disproportionate number of conversations with C-suite people as clients, so I call it visibility.

I probably do something different from other people because I'm trying to tie it into the KPIs they might look at across a broader spectrum.

For me, it comes down to information retrieval, but clients are not going to know what that means.

I see SEO and GEO as the same thing, but it depends what you call SEO. For some people, SEO is content plus links. I do not look at it that way, so we are not always talking the same language.

I call it visibility. I talk about visibility in different systems where people look for information. I talk about brand equity and visibility in SERPs because those are the things C-suite people identify with most.

James Dooley: What about you, Mike?

Mike Lovatt: I've always said AI SEO, but from a tools perspective, if Ahrefs and Semrush are calling it AI visibility or visibility index, then usually whatever becomes the most popular will win in the end.

AEO seems like too much of a mouthful. AI SEO covers all bases.

I think everyone thought the AI engines would steal everything, but people still Google things anyway. AI SEO probably covers it.

James Dooley: Paul, a company comes along and says they are ranking well in Bing or Google on their own website.

They are happy with their visibility. Obviously, everyone wants higher rankings and higher traffic volumes, but they are relatively happy with their website rankings.

However, they want more visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.

What would you do as a service for that client that is different from traditional SEO, if they want more AI visibility?

Paul Truscott: I would be explicit about the fact that it is going to be mostly off-page work.

It will not interfere with their current rankings or their current website, so they do not need to worry about that.

Then I would explain that it is about visibility. Their website exists as one single source of data.

What we need to do is extrapolate a lot of the information that is already there, build upon it and then put that everywhere.

We want multimodal coverage. We want to spread the word across multiple domains and platforms because it is a consensus engine.

At the moment, LLMs do not really care about authority in the same way. If the platform or site you put the information on is visible to the LLM, and it can find it, then it can consume it.

We do not have to worry about backlinks in the same way.

I would push the idea that we need to get the brand seen as broadly as possible, covering as many relevant topics as we can.

James Dooley: What about yourself, Luke?

Luke Bastin: I agree with all of that.

The one thing I have learned the hard way over the last year is that you need good search engine rankings to get LLM visibility anyway because they work in tandem.

I see companies making changes designed to get more visibility in Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT, but they sacrifice their search engine rankings without realising it. That makes it harder to achieve what they were trying to do in the first place.

From an on-page perspective, I would ask whether the brand is strong enough and whether the brand signals are strong enough.

Sometimes websites have title tags stuffed with search terms rather than the brand, and that can harm LLM visibility.

Sometimes it is as simple as LLMs not understanding well enough what your business is about.

Some niches have nuances that make them hard to categorise.

There is one niche I am in around window decorations in the States, where the term is window treatments. That includes blinds, shades, shutters and other similar services.

It is hard for LLMs to understand exactly what the business is because there are blinds shops where you physically buy blinds, and then there are consultancies that go out and do custom installations.

Those are not the same thing.

So clearly educating LLMs about what you do and what you do not do is key.

James and I have recently discussed the idea of a page for LLMs, which acts as a single source of truth with clear parameters.

That is another really good thing you can do.

James Dooley: What about you, Mike?

Mike Lovatt: As has already been said, the off-site signals are key.

Sometimes when you Google a brand name, they have a really good website. From an old-school SEO perspective, with content and links, it might be really good.

But all the links might be keyword or phrase-match based, with nothing really mentioning the brand and no digital PR.

If you take away their website, Facebook page and LinkedIn, sometimes there is literally nothing else on the web.

There might be ZoomInfo-style pages or scam report pages that say how many visitors a website gets or whether it has a security certificate, but there are no real directory links, citations or brand mentions.

It is becoming more important that there is at least a sentence or two somewhere saying who you are and what you do.

For years, you probably got bombarded with emails saying you had been nominated for the Birmingham Small Business Awards, and they wanted you to pay and go get an award.

Now I am thinking it is probably worth paying the £500 to go to the local award.

James Dooley: Yes. I'm there in a tuxedo. We have won.

Let's have a quick-fire round. The podcast topic is AI SEO strategies that are working in 2026.

We have spoken about the importance of it, what we call it and the off-site signals.

Paul, let's start with you. Give us one thing that is working to help you get better AI visibility.

Paul Truscott: Listicles, but with a few caveats.

Do not make it obvious that you're promoting your business. I would never put the business I am trying to promote right at the top of the list.

I would use other ways to lead the person reading it to that conclusion.

For example, you could use a series of questions where you say, “Always make sure that whoever you use ticks these boxes,” and then make sure you're the only one that does.

It is more subtle.

I have noticed that a lot of LLMs are becoming more discerning about obvious promotional material.

That is probably only going to become more of an issue as they get more intelligent.

Luke Bastin: I would say multi-hop visibility.

If you can reverse engineer the brands that are currently winning in your market and where the LLMs have gone to define those brands as the winning brands, then you can get visibility in those spaces.

James Dooley: Great strategy. Mike, what is one strategy that is working for you?

Mike Lovatt: Podcasts. Same as you.

James Dooley: Podcasts, you dirty dog.

Videos and podcasts are working great.

I will throw another one in there, then we will go back and do another round. Comparison pages.

You mentioned listicles, so being compared against your biggest competitors and saying why you are better than them works well.

I would have a slightly different nuance to Paul. I would go aggressive on why I am better than the competition.

I would put myself number one. I would not do it in a promotional way. I would do it factually.

Paul Truscott: I think if you can justify it factually, that makes sense.

James Dooley: It is not me writing it. It is on a third-party source.

I want them to feed the LLM why I am better.

Paul Truscott: I am just concerned that at some point they are going to work out the pattern.

I am starting to see that, but it is hard to know whether that is what is happening or whether I am just not doing it very well.

James Dooley: I think what is happening is people are doing listicles by saying, “Here is the top 10 list,” but giving no reason why number one is better than number two or why number two is better than number three.

They are just putting the list in.

This has always been the case with SEOs. Generally speaking, SEOs are lazy.

They use a single prompt and ask for a top 10 list with no reasons, no information gain, no surveys, no data, no USPs, no awards and no reviews.

All this needs to be corroborated together to explain why you are better.

You need to understand why you are better than the competition and shout about it everywhere so the LLMs can pick it up.

If you're not better, you need to have a good look at yourself and ask how you can become better.

Everyone has a USP. Everyone has a story. Paint the picture of who you are, what you do and why you are brilliant.

If you cannot be brilliant at something, you need to find another brand where you can be.

You need that USP to be the best, or to show how you are slightly different from your competition and why that makes you better.

Comparison pages are another way of being compared.

Paul, give us another AI SEO strategy that is working well in 2026.

Paul Truscott: Press releases are working well again, but it depends on who you use.

A lot of what people call press releases are not really press releases. They are essentially just PBNs, and they can be absolute garbage.

People use that kind of service and then conclude that press releases do not work.

That is an important distinction.

I have had a fair bit of advice from you on that side of things because I never used to do press releases, but they are becoming so important now.

Going back to what Mike touched on, awareness of the brand is so important now.

Before, you could be discovered by keyword, make a lot of money and be successful while relying completely on that alone.

You did not really have to exist as a brand. That was not a problem back then, but it is definitely a problem now.

People need to focus on the brand. They need to start getting brand traffic and brand mentions. That is absolutely critical.

James Dooley: For sure. Luke, what other AI strategies are working well?

Luke Bastin: The more you can structure content from an HTML perspective, and the more data-rich you can make it, the more ammunition you have for a lot of the things we have been talking about.

With press releases and talking about why you are great, the more LLMs can see that it is not subjective and is instead objective and data-backed, the more weight they generally give it.

I look at this largely through a local SEO lens.

It comes down to case studies. When you have done a really good job for someone as a local home services business, can you get a case study on your website summarising that job?

Include the materials you used, how long it took, the process, a quote from the customer, lots of images, visuals and your logo.

That becomes a huge data-backed piece of content that you can structure around data-rich HTML.

It works for conversion because it makes people call you rather than a generic blog-heavy competitor, and it works for LLMs as well. It is a win-win.

James Dooley: Mike, are there any other AI SEO strategies working well?

Mike Lovatt: I think it is what we have already touched on, which is getting the brand out there as much as possible.

John Mueller and some of the people at Google said years ago, when asked for SEO advice, to just do traditional marketing.

If you do offline marketing, people will search for your brand name. If you do social media, it helps with direct traffic, reviews and real human mentions on the web.

Digital PR creates brand mentions that involve the CEO, founder or other important people connected to the company.

You want those important facts mentioned across the web rather than having no paper trail for the brand whatsoever.

As SEOs, we are good at manipulating things, so the question is how many different places and mediums can you get your brand mentioned in?

That could include image sharing, videos on YouTube and Vimeo, podcast distribution across YouTube, Amazon Music and podcast platforms, PDF sharing sites and PowerPoint sharing sites.

Then you have more complicated things like writing a book or journals.

Any way you can distribute your knowledge and expertise across different platforms helps.

Some of those carry a lot more weight. It is easy to buy a guest post and have someone publish it on a blog.

It is not so easy to write a journal and get it on Google Scholar, or to appear as a guest at a university and have that recorded and published on their YouTube channel.

The more things you can do within the client's budget, the better.

Some are cheap and easy, like podcasts and PDFs. Some are much harder.

It also depends on the client because it can take a long time to get approval depending on company size, directors, brand reputation and image.

James Dooley: I think you touched on brand mentions and brand search volume being key.

What you said about getting into as many third-party corroborative sources as possible is important.

I have just finished recording a few podcast episodes with Jabez Reuben, and he was talking about repurposing content you already have.

If an old tweet did well, could you reword that tweet with the same context around who you are, then force index it to get Google to pick it up and potentially help LLMs pick it up too?

You can go into the analytics to find that information.

You can also share similar statuses on LinkedIn and force index those URLs.

You can do the same on Facebook and Instagram.

If you have reviews, you can take a Trustpilot review, turn it into an image, put it on Instagram, include the content of the five-star review in the caption and force index it.

It is just repurposing.

If he has a strong article with five or six different entity attributes covered, such as cost or the benefits of using a company, he might take one section and put it on LinkedIn.

Then he can try to rank it for the question in the H2 and say, “If you want to see the full article, check out the first link in the description.”

That gets people back to the site from social media.

It is exactly what you're talking about, Mike. It is traditional marketing, but you can do it with social media now.

It is free, easy and cheap to do.

You can put one H2 on LinkedIn, one on Twitter, and if it is image-based, one on Pinterest or Instagram.

It is about being a good holistic marketer who can drive branded search, branded mentions and traffic back to the site.

That is the differentiator now.

Everyone is buying links and everyone can scale content, but traffic is harder to get. You need to work in those ways.

Anyone watching this, if there are any AI SEO strategies we have missed, leave a comment in the comment section.

Mike, Paul, Luke, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Mike Lovatt: Thanks for having us.