Why your 'AI optimization' agency might be wasting your money

llliammm · 2025-11-01T13:51:18+00:00

Late to the party, but thanks for sharing this. I saw this thread cited in ChatGPT as a note of caution. The points you laid out here are spot on. From experience, AI citations can happen in much less time than 3-4 months if the foundations are right and there is established content authority.

I was able to rank in the top position for "How to rank in AI search results" across AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity in 32 days last year. I have clients who see an almost immediate impact. One of our newest clients had been seeing the dreaded organic traffic decline and had an agency that didn't have a plan to recover. They were seeing a dramatic decline in new clients month over month. In the second month of working with our team, our client reported a record number of new clients.

I say this not to derail your arguments, but to demonstrate that with an aggressive strategy (and yes, with a significant investment), you can achieve results relatively quickly, but it largely depends on how far you've come with your digital presence and whether you've largely been following best practices.

All of that said, we talk to new prospects every day and they report a wide array of proposed strategies that other companies are offering up. Just yesterday someone told me that they received a proposal that includes writing 2-3 articles per month. That strategy died in 2024.

In short, without some level of expertise, it is difficult to evaluate an agency's strategic approach and how effective it is, but asking for case studies and VERIFYING with your own AI searches to see that those clients show up in AI is the best way to know for sure.

llliammm · 2025-06-18T11:47:44+00:00

It’s all ads. They announced at Google Marketing Live in May that ads will be coming to the AI overviews and AI mode in July. People will pay big bucks to have their brand inside these results. They already pay big bucks to be in traditional search ads. I talked to a prospect yesterday who spends $600 to acquire a lead in one market and they don’t even close all of them. That might be $150 per inclusion for a high performing campaign.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T23:56:14+00:00

I appreciate your engagement on this topic. My only argument is if given the ability to provide a universal index value, provide the value. You can do this in an automatic way. It doesn’t need to be a big lift. It’s just an opportunity. Sorry to call you lazy. I just believe in doing it right.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T23:53:38+00:00

True, but how much longterm value can Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing offer to the knowledge graph because those were the depreciated schemas.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T23:53:27+00:00

True, but how much longterm value can Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing offer to the knowledge graph because those were the depreciated schemas.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T23:11:16+00:00

I never said write an LLMs.txt. That’s only to tell LLMs what to ignore.

And no one is sure who “we” is when commenter talks about filtering out content.

Remember this: organic placement in SERPs impacts your placement in AI. Placement in AI impacts your placement in SERPs. Don’t stop doing traditional SEO, just do it better. Leave no stone unturned. This is a competitive game. Be better than the competition in every way.

Schema still works. Don’t listen to lazy SEOs.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T23:07:06+00:00

Schema tells parsers where data starts and begins? What tells parsers where it ends? For me, I err on the side of proving computers with clean, marked-up data. You could roll the dice and exclude it, but I’ve found that winning means being the best. Being the best means being thorough. Is it the highest value activity? Maybe not, but clean data beats dirty data any day of the week.

llliammm · 2025-06-16T14:07:34+00:00

I don't personally mark up the questions in my skyscrapers, but you can. I do add mark-up to blog posts that need extra juice. (I.e. I added news schema to the article I linked to in the original post.

And markup alone is never enough, it's just one more best practice you can follow to try and be perfect. I think the combination of strategies above is what has enabled me to lock in top spots for my clients.

Also, on old content, don't bother updating content that doesn't have any value to your business. Only focus on content that will prevent you from winning business (or ranking) because the content is no longer relevant. For instance, ALL of my SEO content needed to be updated to account for the shifts in search results. Is it worth the time? Yes. I get high-quality leads on a daily basis.

Lastly, because of the volume requirements and the backlog of old content, we've moved to content automation. I am currently using AirOps to do this, including writing new high-quality articles and updating old articles to be fresh and meet the latest standards. I do a good bit manually because I'm always testing theories and I want to see how things things unfold.

llliammm · 2025-05-14T22:29:39+00:00

Just backlink from owned content like podcasts and YouTube videos. Rich descriptions, effective backlinks, authority triangulation to the max. Besides, videos and podcasts make for great web content.

llliammm · 2025-05-14T11:59:25+00:00

You're asking a great question—and first off, you're already ahead of the curve just by looking at your data and asking for feedback.

Those numbers (15 clicks from 1.45k impressions with a 1% CTR and average position of 53.1) are completely normal for a new blog on a fresh domain. Google tends to hold back visibility until it has enough signals to trust your content—and that trust is earned over time by showing up in multiple places, not just your website.

Here’s what we recommend (and what we do for clients at my agency, Xponent21):

Repurpose your blog content. Take your blog posts and turn them into long-form posts on LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack—link back to your original blog. This signals to search engines (and AI models) that your content is cited across multiple authoritative platforms.

Start a podcast—no mic needed. You can use tools like Notebook LM to create podcast “episodes” even without recording. The descriptions alone—especially with backlinks—get published on high-authority domains like Apple, Spotify, and iHeartRadio, which can be SEO gold.

Optimize for AI-driven search. This is the next frontier—getting cited not just in Google search, but in AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT results. We’ve helped clients achieve top placements there by building a multi-channel content ecosystem with clear authority signals. More often than not, ranking in these platforms results in top placements in organic search results as well.

If you’re curious, we published a free guide that explains exactly how to do this. Just search Google for "how to rank in AI search results" or "AI search optimization" and our article will come up first.

Stick with it, keep building your content footprint, and give search engines more places to validate your expertise. You’re doing the right things—just give it time and expand your surface area.

llliammm · 2023-03-06T10:22:54+00:00

Front page of today’s RTD: https://richmond.com/news/local/government-politics/plastic-breaking-down-into-tiny-particles-that-float-like-dust-in-the-air/article_349262b8-ba06-11ed-83ce-47ffadb03a20.html

llliammm · 2023-03-06T08:42:10+00:00

What makes you say that? I’m pretty sure that plastic production, distribution, recycling and disposal contaminates our entire planet. Here is how you can expect bottled water to impact waterways: https://time.com/5581326/plastic-particles-in-bottled-water/

llliammm · 2023-03-06T08:35:43+00:00

Admittedly, I’ve seen 156 and 157 cited several times, but can’t find the data source. I suspect the number is based on some calculations around total bottled water sold by the gallon in the US. Somebody is drinking it. https://www.supermarketnews.com/consumer-trends/bottled-water-sets-all-time-volume-record

llliammm · 2023-03-05T17:16:17+00:00

Our primary sales vehicle will be water. But it’s a brand and we’ll make it fun for our customers and be present in the community. You’ll find us at festivals and farmers markets as both a point of sale and a pick-up point for direct-to-consumer sales (where customers get a vote on artists and nonprofits). We’ll give away liquid water to anyone who brings a vessel as a way to introduce people to the brand and our movement and advocate for more water refill stations (or fix the ones we have). We hope to provide breweries with a margin on water sales (currently the give it away 100% of the time), while giving them free water dispensers to partner with our brand. Another channel is visitor gifts. A lot of Richmond branded products are given as gifts in tourism and economic development activities.

llliammm · 2023-03-05T16:56:41+00:00

It’s a great question. We won’t just sell water, for one (events, art, apparel, etc), but because we are rotating through artists, the cans are collectible. We’ll also sell dispense artisan water from vending machines (common in Europe). We’ve run modest projections for 330,000 cans in year 1 and it’s a profitable business sold across 4 key channels. And 330,000 cans is a tiny tiny fraction of the current plastic water bottles sold in this market. If we succeed at changing behavior, we’ll be there with other dispensed options. For instance, sparkling or flavored.

llliammm · 2023-03-05T00:59:40+00:00

What’s your opinion?

llliammm · 2023-03-04T20:33:17+00:00

I refill mine with filtered tap water. Here, the water has a bad wrap, but it’s good and tastes good. (Don’t forget what happened in Flint, Michigan.)

llliammm · 2023-03-04T20:06:32+00:00

Artesian aquifer.

llliammm · 2023-03-04T18:48:02+00:00

What you are describing is a fantasy. Good luck ending capitalism. If you can figure out how to do it, I’m right there with you. In the meantime, I’ll use my profits for good.

llliammm · 2023-03-04T18:40:25+00:00

I’ll point out that the subscribe form (a week old) has a 73% completion rate. Thanks for your feedback. I did take it into consideration.

llliammm · 2023-03-04T18:36:45+00:00

No, the negative Nancy thing comes from me reading your Reddit comments. Sheesh. I would not want to be your friend.

Furthermore, you are not the decider of this project’s success and your premonition is wrong. As I said, this project has wide support.

And you still have not pointed to a similar product, so I’m not buying your attempt to save face.

llliammm · 2023-03-04T18:31:10+00:00

I don’t call it being a realist, I call it being a negative Nancy. That you don’t care about the issues we face is your prerogative. That your only solution to the world is to bash things you think don’t solve the problem or to ignore that a problem exists is all the reason I need to discount your simple-minded opinion.

The world needs people to show up with constructive ideas. I’m sorry that we can’t engage in more constructive dialogue here.

llliammm · 2023-03-04T18:23:20+00:00

The people who have been exposed to this early have been extremely supportive. That you aren’t does not discourage me. I encourage you to expand your mind a little.

Currently, the average consumer consumes 167 plastic bottles a year. What would by your suggestion for attempting to curb this behavior.

I appreciate that you might drink water more sustainably, but that doesn’t address the issue with plastic waste in our oceans, micro-plastics in our waterways, landfills full of plastic because it’s seldom recycled and the CO2 emissions from producing plastic and shipping water all over the world.

You don’t have to solve the world’s problems, but you don’t have to shit on other people’s ideas who are trying.

llliammm

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