Why Your Marketing Dashboard Is Lying to You (And What AI Search Has to Do With It) | AJ Ghergich, Botify [Part 1 of 3]

What Google's AI Mode Data Reveals About How People Search Now

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2527394/fan_mail/new] 📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter. Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe [https://cassieclarkmarketing.beehiiv.com/] User behavior in AI search has moved, and Google's own data confirms it. This week, Cassie breaks down what that shift actually looks like, why Bing's newest Webmaster Tools features were built to measure exactly this, and what both mean for your visibility strategy. We also cover Semrush's expanded 2026 AI Visibility Index (126 million prompts — the biggest AI search dataset we've seen), Google's June spam update, and a quick note on Anthropic's Fable 5 and what it signals for the frontier model landscape. In this episode: * Semrush 2026 AI Visibility Index — 126 million prompts analyzed across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and AI Overviews. What the citation gap between "mentioned" and "cited" means for your brand, and why brands with integrated SEO + AI visibility workflows are outperforming everyone else by 2x. * Google June 2026 Spam Update — Rolling out globally as of June 24th. No new policies, but worth flagging in your reporting. * Anthropic Fable 5 — Export controls lifted July 1st. Why this matters beyond the headline, and what it tells us about where frontier model governance is headed. * Google AI Mode data + Bing Webmaster Tools — The anchor segment. Google released a full year of AI Mode usage data showing the average query is now triple the length of a traditional search query, with follow-up queries growing 40%+ month over month. Then Bing drops four new AI Performance features — Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare — that are essentially built to measure exactly how users are searching now. Here's how to use both together. If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do. I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.  Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/ [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/] Let’s connect: LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-wilson-clark/]Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/]

Stop Optimizing Keywords for ChatGPT (with Shane Tepper)

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2527394/fan_mail/new] 📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter. Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe [https://cassieclarkmarketing.beehiiv.com/] Most brands trying to figure out their AI search visibility start with the same move: take their existing keyword list and ask which ones to "optimize for AI" too. Shane Tepper, co-founder of Resonate Labs, thinks that's backwards — and after this conversation, I do too. This episode is part interview, part real-time reaction to a stretch of AI search news that hit fast and didn't slow down. In this episode: * Why starting a GEO strategy with keyword data instead of buyer language queries gets the entire approach backwards — and what query generation looks like when you build it around personas, buying stages, pain points, and features instead * Google's recently released GEO guidelines, where the framing is defensive rather than informative, and what's missing from "good SEO practices apply to GEO" as a complete strategy * Why optimizing for AI search isn't one strategy — it's a stack, because each model (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot) weighs credibility, authority, and source preference differently * The agentic browsing audit quietly released through Chrome Canary's Lighthouse tool, what it actually checks for (WebMCP protocol, llms.txt), and why Google is sending mixed signals about whether these even matter for search visibility * What a 150-query audit actually looks like in practice — and how response data turns into a content strategy, a CMS-routed publishing pipeline, and briefs for earning third-party citations * Why third-party sources often shape AI answers without ever being cited — and what that means for brands measuring their own visibility If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do. I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.  Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/ [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/] Let’s connect: LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-wilson-clark/]Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/]

"Good SEO is Good GEO." But Is That True?

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2527394/fan_mail/new] 📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter. Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe [https://cassieclarkmarketing.beehiiv.com/] If you've been seeing the phrase "good GEO is good SEO" everywhere on LinkedIn lately, you're not imagining it. It's become the comfort take of the moment — and this week, it got a very official co-sign. Brendon Kraham, Google's VP of Search and Commerce, published a piece on Think with Google making exactly that argument.  So here we are. This episode is a rant. A structured, well-reasoned rant — but a rant. Because the "good GEO is good SEO" framing isn't just lazy. It's actively giving brands permission to stop learning at exactly the wrong moment. In this episode: * Why the "good GEO is good SEO" take is part true and mostly incomplete — and why that distinction actually matters for your brand * The four ways GEO goes beyond SEO that no amount of foundational optimization covers: content extractability, entity authority, freshness for AI retrieval, and cross-platform presence * Why entity SEO and entity authority are not the same thing — and conflating them will leave you invisible outside your own domain * What Google's Think with Google article gets right, what it gets wrong, and why its advice is largely limited to Google Search specifically * Why brands that use this take as permission to stop paying attention are the ones that will be invisible in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini while their competitors get cited * The one question to ask yourself before you hit publish that tells you whether your content is actually extractable If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do. I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.  Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/ [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/] Resources: Google's Good SEO is Good GEO [https://business.google.com/us/think/search-and-video/ai-search-era-brand-authority-strategy/] Case Study: The Displacement of Legacy Authority [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-share-of-voice-legacy-displacement/] Let’s connect: LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-wilson-clark/]Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/]

Fable, Bing's New Reporting, and a Study That Should Worry Every B2B Marketer

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2527394/fan_mail/new] 📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter. Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe [https://cassieclarkmarketing.beehiiv.com/] The US government just ordered Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — for all users, not just foreign nationals. A model available to hundreds of millions of people went dark mid-afternoon on a Tuesday with no advance notice. Not because it stopped working. Because of a government directive citing a potential jailbreak. That's the story I didn't expect to be covering this week. But it's also the clearest argument yet for why model-specific optimization is a strategy built on sand. In this episode: * What actually happened with Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — and why this matters more as a strategic signal than a product update * Why building your AI visibility strategy around any specific model puts you at risk you can't control * Bing Webmaster Tools' four new AI reporting features — Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare — and how to actually use them * How to map the new Bing reporting to the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority) so the data tells you something actionable * Why AI visibility still has no click-through data, and what we're measuring instead * A new study of 20,000 ChatGPT responses found that 80% of product recommendations change when search is enabled — and why that number should reframe how you think about content freshness If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do. I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.  Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/ [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/] Let’s connect: LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-wilson-clark/]Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/]

SEO and PR Are Finally Married (And AI Search Is Why)

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2527394/fan_mail/new] 📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter. Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe [https://cassieclarkmarketing.beehiiv.com/] Brand visibility doesn't mean what it used to. For years, SEO and PR operated in completely separate lanes. One chased rankings, the other chased coverage. AI search collapsed that wall. Now, getting cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews depends on whether other people are talking about you, not just whether your own pages rank. Cassie sits down with Basha Coleman, lead program manager on HubSpot's content strategy and operations team and an SEO and AEO consultant with seven years of experience, to talk about what brand visibility actually looks like in an AI-first search environment. In this episode: * Why SEO and PR are finally operating as one function, and what that means for your strategy * The most undervalued citation channel most brands are completely ignoring * What actually counts as "news" if you're a B2B software company * How to measure success when AI answers the question and the click never happens * Why top of funnel content matters more than ever, even though you can't track it * Whether AEO and GEO are really just brand work, and Basha's "yes, and" If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do. I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.  Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/ [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/] Let’s connect: LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassie-wilson-clark/]Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com [https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/]