An AI visibility audit measures whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews know, describe and recommend a brand, both when asked by name and on non-branded category questions. Paris Childress and John Colascione of Searchen Networks run their own audits on each other's companies and compare what each report caught and missed.
Most AI visibility reports are sold, not compared. In this episode of The GEO Show, Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, and John Colascione, founder of Searchen Networks, ran their own audits on each other's businesses and walked through both reports on screen.
The result is a practical look at what an AI visibility audit catches, what it misses, and which fixes are worth doing first.
It measures whether AI assistants know your brand, describe it accurately, and recommend it when buyers ask category questions without naming you. Paris's report for searchen.com scored visibility against competitors such as WebFX, Thrive, Seahawk Media, WP Buffs and GoWP, estimated the size of the prompt market from keyword demand, and listed root causes. John's tool generates about 10 questions from a URL: two about the brand itself and the rest about the market.
Because the model cannot tell which facts belong to which company. Searchen has operated under two legal names, moved from Long Island to Palm Beach in 2019, and for years was publicly tied to longisland.com, which John sold in 2018. Paris's report surfaced all three as a single "fragmented entity" problem.
An entity map is a single HTML page, with a matching JSON file at the site root, that lists the entities, facts, pricing and relationships for a brand. Paris picked it up from Dixon Jones at brightonSEO and had just built one for his own site.
"The best thing that you can do to make sure AI knows everything about your brand is to give everything to them on one single page." Paris Childress
Paris was candid that the evidence is early. On llms.txt, his read is that studies so far show no clear visibility lift.
Buyers ask AI what something costs, and the model needs a page it can cite. Searchen's public pricing was one of the few things its audit scored as a strength. Roundup and listicle pages matter for the same reason: AI answers synthesize from them, so being included is a citation opportunity even when the list itself is self-serving.
Branded prompts only test awareness. John's audit of GEOforge found ChatGPT described the platform accurately when asked by name, mostly from GEOforge's own pages, then left it out of broad questions such as which platforms improve visibility in ChatGPT, where established competitors appeared instead. His diagnosis: more third-party mentions and more listicle placements.
Both hosts ended with homework from their own audits, which may be the best argument for running one on yourself before a prospect does.
Paris: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the GEO Show. We are on episode 60, today I'll be speaking with John Colascione, who is from Searchen and among lots of other interesting businesses. He's been in the digital marketing and domain and search space even longer than me, and I'm excited to have him on today because we are gonna be talking about AI visibility and comparing our reports that we show to our prospects. first, let me welcome you, John, to the show. How are you doing today?
John: I'm great, Paris. Thank you very much for having me. I'm really pleased to be on the show today.
Paris: Great. Before we kick this off, do you wanna take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself and your business?
John: Sure. My name is John Colascione. As mentioned, I own a company called Searchen, which is Searchen Networks. It's spelled S-E-A-R-C-H-E-N. It was short for search engine. I started in about 2001 and the whole idea was to help businesses with search engine optimization. At that time, it was extremely primitive. Google was not really that popular, and I knew right away by building my own little website that I was... It was gonna become incredibly important to businesses to get found in search, because I had no budget, I had no way to advertise, and Google was the way I was going to dominate my industry at that time, and I was able to do that pretty well. Did take a couple years. Eventually sold that business. But that was the way the whole premise came about, is I learned that the search engine thing was gonna become very important and I just learned more and grew my agency more and more over time. And and ever since, and it involves a lot of different specialties, a lot of different talents are involved in running, maintaining, marketing, and monitoring websites and it leads into a lot of different things, but I love it. I love it. I work at it every day as much as I can.
Paris: Yeah. I, it's hard to get out of this industry once you start because really interesting. It feels like a game on a lot of days, especially with on the organic side. now there's a new game, which is the GEO game, and.
John: Oh, GEO.
Paris: Yeah there's this transition from SEO into GEO and AI search, and that's what we're gonna be talking about today. And I know that still a lot of the fundamentals are very strongly connected with SEO tactics and best practices, but what I think is really different that now you have a world where fewer and fewer people are clicking, and it's getting harder to measure. And so now the goalposts are kinda shifting from getting measurable clicks and organic traffic just getting your brand visible and getting mentioned so people can find you when they're on ChatGPT. And once they see your name, and if you, if ChatGPT recommends you, there's a good chance they're gonna... That, that customer will find their way to your business, and you have a good chance of winning the business. So I think it's the most important hottest channel that we've seen in probably 10 years in this business, I think.
John: Interestingly too, what, from what I've seen is that the people trust the recommendations extremely. They they apply a extremely high level of trust to a recommendation, and I watch them in the logs. A visitor from Google will spend a lot more time on your website evaluating things. A visitor from ChatGPT, from my own experience, basically comes in on the landing page, first thing they're looking for is the phone number or the contact page, and boom. And there's gotta be a reason for that, and it just suggests that they just trust those recommendations a whole lot more. And in a world where click clicks are declining greatly, and that's been the case for a number of years now, AI is opening up a whole new way of being found and we need these additional ways of being found because, everything's getting gobbled up.
Paris: Yep. Yep, absolutely. All right. So I think what we spoke about and what we prepped for this call, John, is that I prepared an AI visibility report for you, and this is gonna be something that I... typically, this is what I do on a first discovery call with a prospect, is I run this type of analysis. We walk through it on the call, we discuss it. Of course, I have to make some assumptions about your target market and your audience and some prompts, competitors, and things like that. And feel free to jump in and correct me and say, "Here, we could have used these different types of competitors," or, "We could have used types of prompts." But I'm gonna walk you through my report then we're gonna, they're gonna flip it, and then you are gonna walk me through your report, what you typically would use to show to a prospect on an initial sales call to try to get them and try to make them aware of a problem that they have and a need that they have for improving AI search.
John: Very good. Very good.
Paris: You want me to... I'll pull this up on the screen now. I.
John: I'm looking at it right now. Looking at it right now with you and you could.
Paris: Cool.
John: Know, just start.
Paris: I guess for the YouTube audience, they'll be able to see this, I'll try to describe as much as possible for the audio only here. but searchen.com, Searchen has been around for about 25 years. Is that right?
John: Yeah, 2001 I registered the domain.
Paris: Wow, okay. Yeah, it'd been around for a long time. And I took the approach of comparing... I looked at specifically the services that are website maintenance, and this could this is mainly for businesses around the Palm Beach area. I know you service clients.
John: We do. Yeah, we do nationally. All, all of United States.
Paris: Okay. All right. Yeah. We did actually benchmark this against national competitors, I think that would be interesting.
John: I noticed some of the competitors, some of the competitors are familiar to me.
Paris: Okay. All right. Yeah. We had WebFX, WP Buffs, Seahawk those are.
John: FX, that was the best one I thought because I often see them all, and they've been in the game a long time, probably as long as us.
Paris: Yeah. I noticed that brand too. They are really strong on Clutch, I think specifically, if I recall. All right, so the first thing we have this overview, and then we have some scorecards here. We have the search visibility score. It's really just something relative to, just to see where you are relative to some of these competitors. But we have your score versus the average score of competitors. There are a number of citations that we found for searchen.com, and these are pages that are appearing in AI responses. And we're trying to estimate this part here, which I'm not able to highlight it, but 21 to 31K is our best estimate of the size of the market of people that are asking ChatGPT and Gemini about these services. So this is similar to what you would think of as a, the keyword search volume, but it's not a one-to-one proxy. It's hard to estimate that, but we try to give a rough estimate for that volume. And then 71% of these keywords are already showing Google AI overviews. So the large majority of these prospects that are going to Google and looking for these services, they are getting AI overviews on top of the results. if they engage with that AI overview, then the next step is for them to go into AI mode, and then they're really in a chat experience that's just like Gemini or ChatGPT. All right. So let's look at this competitor list. We've got WebFX, Thrive, Seahawk Media, WP Buffs, and GoWP. they all have.
John: Isn't.
Paris: Is.
John: Know, Thrive is that Yelp page I think Thrive is that, I think Thrive is that local business directory, right? Isn't that like the guys that own Yelp pages, something like that?
Paris: Maybe let's actually check. I'll do a quick search on them.
John: Me too.
Paris: Thrive.
John: Thrive Market.
Paris: Maybe. yeah, okay, I found them. I'm gonna switch over to this tab. So this is Thrive. I think it's something different than there's another Thrive which is.
John: Maybe. Maybe it's a different one. It might be a different one. Yeah, they look like an agency.
Paris: This is an agency we have different services here, which is massive list of services.
John: Oh my God, yeah. They do everything. But that's like us we do almost everything as well.
Paris: Yeah.
John: If you look at my list, it's big almost, except for some of the sound stuff.
Paris: They have a they have a page now for AI SEO services. They're calling it AI SEO, but okay. Let's come back to the report. So these guys look like they're legit. They belong on the competitor list.
John: Yeah.
Paris: That this is a small sample. There probably are and dozens of legitimate competitors that are providing.
John: Totally. Internet marketing and this type of stuff is one of the most saturated businesses in the market. The only thing you could probably get that's worse would probably be website hosting. You know what I mean? With the main names. Main names would be incredibly difficult.
Paris: Yeah. All right, so we've got some relative scores here, and you all are scoring pretty low relative to these players. So there's an opportunity here to take some action to improve this visibility. And then over here on the right, we can see some of the reasons why, some of the root causes. Part of it is about content. This is... have a strong domain rating. 51 is a pretty good domain rating, and a lot of referring domains, 2,500 referring domains pointing to you. but there's only US ranking keywords and about twenty-five organic visits per month. this is being pulled from.
John: So less than 25 organic visits a month is what that's showing. I think it's a little squiggly line.
Paris: Yeah. Is that accurate? 'Cause this is coming from Ahrefs. I don't have access to your.
John: No, it's not accurate, but it's... But we don't have massive traffic because we are in a com-very competitive industry. So I would say we probably have a few true organic visits a day. So what is that saying? Less than 25 a month? Yeah, it's not right. But it's, it's not like totally completely out of the realm of possibility because we have very little organic traffic. The most of our traffic comes in really on the blog pages, which is really not what we want. 'Cause I write a lot about different things that are happening, and that most of the traffic comes, on those particular pages. The service related pages are extremely competitive. And yeah, they're found, but they're not found nearly as much as I would like them to be found.
Paris: Okay.
John: Problem here that this really pulls out to me. We'll go over it i-in, in extent. But one of the things is that Searchen's been around for a really long time, but it's changed focus a few times. For a period of time, a couple years, searchen.com was actually a search engine. Was-it wasn't even an agency website. So it's just changed a lot over the last 25 years. Another particular problem for us, I saw the tool mentions, is that although we've been around for 25 years, it has a hard time associating us with Palm Beach, and that's probably because we just got here in 2019. So for 18 years we were operating in Long Island, and where I operated longisland.com, which the tool also mentions. It was like, searching the agency or searching the guy that used to own longisland.com. So it's kinda got me confused. Which it's right I am the guy that used to own longisland.com which is, was the primary of my business, but I sold it in 2018 and all its associated web properties and customers. So yeah, I'm kinda scattered around all over the place. And the other the third nail in our coffin is we just implemented this website maintenance and marketing, and then enterprise, which is really management. Because over the years we've been focusing so much on search engine optimization. But, the company is really making the majority of its money, at least when I went through this recently and we went over our client book, is the company is making the majority on, of our money on companies that we are helping service their entire ecosystem. So we're not really just doing SEO. We're we're hosting their sites, we're marketing them, and we're maintaining them. So I just really relaunched the entire navigational structure of Searchen and eliminated almost everything that was on it, 'cause we had that other agency, we had 50 things on it. And I had to just simplify. This is what we're gonna focus on. We're just gonna focus on maintenance, marketing, and in complete backend management of their whole web business. It changed a lot of stuff with the business, which say... if we would've probably tried to see if we were researching, was related with webmaster services, that's a page we've had on the website for a very long time. We probably would've did better with that area, even though it still would be competitive. But these particular marketing, maintenance and enterprise pages are brand new pretty much.
Paris: Yeah. Okay.
John: That's why we probably don't have...
Paris: Pages now, and I have this up on the screen just so we can see it. One quick.
John: The whole nav we just done. About Us is one page, it used to be five, and then we had all these different services, but we just eliminated all the services. Now if you wanna go to our services, there's a single page to look at every service we do, which is probably 50 to 75 services on it. But I just, I had to simplify things because I'm thinking about, people coming to Searchen and having too much hard time figuring out where to go, what to do. There's too many things to choose from. I gotta simplify things.
Paris: Yeah. What I can tell is web maintenance is the entry point for the bare bones. This is.
John: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. $295 a month.
Paris: Is about 2,500 a month, right?
John: Yeah, that's back office where we're doing everything. That's for companies that they don't wanna do anything. They want us to run the blog, they want us to do the maintenance, the server administration. If they got computer programming issues, APIs, whatever, it's all included in that package.
Paris: Okay. Yeah. All right. That's good to know. And let's come back into the report, and I'll finish this off.
John: Mhm.
Paris: And we, then we can switch it. But the authority there's, there is a lot of domain rating, there's a lot of referring domains, but the organic traffic really doesn't reflect that. I think part of the reason also, John, is that because blog posts AI search is taking away a lot of clicks anyway, and if a lot of your efforts.
John: Oh yeah.
Paris: Website have been around writing blog posts.
John: I've been seeing it, I've been seeing this across the board for a long period of time. Organic traffic is drying up because now you got the sponsored listings, you got the local service ads, you have the map listings, which are also becoming sponsored now, and all the organic results have been relegated down to the bottom of the page. And that's just been... And now you have to add on the AI answers. You know what I'm saying? That's on top.
Paris: Also.
John: Of this. You're talking about commercial terms, when you're talking about commercial terms, this is why all the businesses are getting relegated to paid search because, organic is drying up. That's why AI is a new frontier. It's creating a new opportunity.
Paris: Yeah. All right. So these are some of the... i'll just keep skimming through this report. These are some of the reasons why.
John: Fragmented entity.
Paris: Has a.
John: Look at that, fragmented entity. It says company appears as Searchen Networks. Oh, yeah, Internet Marketing Services Incorporated. That's because in New York we were Searchen Networks Incorporated, and when we came here to Florida in 2019, I registered Internet Marketing Services Incorporated, but I still own that brand, and that has been a entity issue that I have to resolve, and I've been working diligently to try to resolve that. It's very important that they understand that those are the same company. It's the same brands, the same people, but it but it recognized the fragmentation, which is pretty interesting.
Paris: Yeah. of the things that, One of the great tips that I picked up at the brightonSEO conference was this concept of a entity map. an entity map is, really just a single page, an HTML page, and you can also create a JSON file. put you put it on the root folder of the website, and you can link to them in the footer. But it's a page for AI to understand all the entities that is, that are associated with your brand. it's almost like a glossary of facts and accurate evidence and accurate claims about your brand, and it's all on one page. this is who we are. We're Searchen. We are not a Long Island entity. We're we.
John: We are no longer.
Paris: Nineteen.
John: We are no longer in Long Island. It's because being on Long Island for 19 years, or 18 years, and operating Long Island's largest independent internet site, longisland.com, there was a lot of relation between those two things, and those two things have to be separated now as far as their association today. They, yes, they were associated at one time, but unfortunately they no longer are, and it's still, a lot of my PR and a lot of my attention that I was getting back in the day was focused on the fact that, "Hey, this is the company that's running longisland.com." You know what I'm saying? So that's created an association issue that is hard to get away from. And at some points I don't wanna get away from it because, it builds to our reputation.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.
John: But I want you to know there's also a schema specifically for the organizational similarities. There's actually a JSON schema for that. I'm trying to pull it up right now so I can at least tell you what it is because it says... It's like business name, then business organization, and there's a couple different things for it. I just learned about it recently while trying to dissect this entity issue, and I implemented it in hopes that it will help.
Paris: Yeah. I can point you to another site, which this is from the Brighton Conference. It's called entitymap.org. And.
John: Wanna look at that.
Paris: Make sure that's, if.
John: I wanna look at that.
Paris: And you can point, if you're using Claude or ChatGPT, you can basically tell them to go to entitymap.org and read through these instructions and directions there about how to create a comprehensive entity map, and then go to my website, go to Searchen, and pull out the top 20 or 30 pages and use that. Use all those facts and data from those pages to create a comprehensive entity map.
John: Please send me that after the call. I'm gonna dig into that pretty deeply. The local schema, I found that the local schema is local business name, then there's local schema legal name, okay, and then there's local schema alternative name. Okay? And those three can be used collectively to pull that entity. Like mine right now, it's Searchen Networks is the name. The legal name is Internet Marketing Services Incorporated, and then the alternate name is Searchen Networks, the trademark. Searchen and Searchen Networks as a trademark. So there's three different ways, but I'm gonna check out that mapping thing because I think I wanna do that.
Paris: Yeah I just did it for our website a few days ago, and I hope it's gonna work. I, It certainly won't won't hurt, but it's a way of just getting all of the accurate claims, facts, entities clearly defined and on one single page.
John: Is that supposed to be for AI primarily, or is that supposed to be for search algorithms as well?
Paris: Well, now it's positioned more for AI crawlers so that they don't say inaccurate things or hallucinate when people are asking about your brand. They know exactly the pricing, what's included in each package.
John: What are your thoughts on this new llms.txt? It's supposed to be similar to a robots file. I don't think they're all using it, but what is your take on that?
Paris: My take is, and I've read studies about whether it works, I think the consensus is that there is no evidence yet that it really improves your visibility. It.
John: The problem is they're really so new. They're so new that there's not a lot of evidence on any of this.
Paris: Yeah. This guy that presented, he was another presenter at brightonSEO, he is the guy that created this site called entitymap.org. And he said that he's been using it for different projects, and he actually showed... correlation doesn't always imply causation, 'cause there's a lot of other factors at play, but he was able to demonstrate a lift in visibility, and he believes that a lot of it was from the entity maps because it was, First of more accurate information about the brand, and then it also started recommending the brand more, just.
John: Is he the creator? He's the creator of entity maps?
Paris: Yeah, the guy's name is Dixon Jones.
John: Interesting.
Paris: At Majestic SEO a long time ago. He's been around for a long time, too.
John: I've been using that tool forever. I don't know if it works that reliabili- reliable anymore. I think I stopped using it, but that used to be a fantastic tool. Maybe it tanked after he left.
Paris: Yeah, I don't know what happened. I think Ahrefs took them over. this is at least 10 years ago, but it used to be Majestic and Moz SEOmoz used to be the two tools, and then Ahrefs actually went far, surpassed them, and then Semrush also.
John: Majestic.
Paris: Them.
John: Majestic used to be majesticseo.com. Then I remember, and being into domains, I recognized, I pay attention to this type of stuff. At some point they purchased Majestic, which was kinda cool. They just became majestic.com. So but I don't They faded. They probably.
Paris: Know if he was one of their founders, but he was one of the early the one of the early advocates and he I remembered meeting him at a conference probably 18 years ago actually, and we Other again at brightonSEO, and I even interviewed him among a lot of other people. But his big tip was that AI really needs to be... the best thing that you can do to make sure AI knows everything about your brand is to give everything to them on one single page, that is that really like their official page to train on all the entities associated with your brand. It could also include any proprietary methods that you have, anything.
John: So maybe based on that suggestion, I'm probably gonna.
Paris: That.
John: I'm probably gonna have to put a history of Searchen. I'm probably gonna have to put an evolution of Searchen over time. You know what I'm saying? And then hope that the LLMs will prioritize that page enough to, trust it or utilize it to understand how Searchen has evolved over the years. Could be worthwhile.
Paris: Yeah. All right. John let me finish off this report, and then we'll take a look at what you sent to me. This is another view on the competitive positioning matrix. So we're looking at those same competitors here, looking at the domain rating the traffic generally keywords, AI citations the presence in roundups, in web maintenance roundups. Apparently, there are quite a lot of those pages around the web, and that's a good strategy as well, is to try to get Searchen included in those pages. It probably means outreaching to those sites.
John: We're still gonna do that.
Paris: Yeah.
John: Gonna do that.
Paris: Yeah. And then actually, the public pricing here is called out as a positive because you do have your pricing very.
John: I thought that was very interesting because that, I only had that price available for 30 days. So it actually has got that already, and considering that a reliable source, that's amazing. It just went up.
Paris: Yeah, that's a strong factor. it also has called out above you could try to create more comparison type of content. you could... An, an easy thing you can do is to have a comparison table that shows this is the plan the enterprise plan versus your web maintenance plan, and here's what you get with.
John: That.
Paris: You get with web.
John: For some reason I have that in a...
Paris: To the competitors.
John: I have that. I didn't find it for some reason. I have a page with those. That page has been around for a long time because the idea of the packages was existing long before I launched the three navigational pages to start saying, "Hey, we're really gonna focus on these." So for some reason it didn't find that pricing comparison. It's basically a three-column checklist where there's checks that are for the things that are included in the package. Of course, the right package, which is the biggest package, winds up having the most check marks, but it didn't find it for some reason.
Paris: Okay. All right. All right, so after, let's keep moving through here. I'll scroll.
John: And I want that price to.
Paris: The size. Now, this is a really a rough estimation. We're trying to estimate the prompt volume on the basis of the keyword search demand, and it's not a one-to-one relationship. But we think that there's... The keywords are broken into tiers, the evaluation stage, and then the solution aware, where you have stronger intent. And then the problem aware is where you have the strongest intent, where people are really in market ready to buy. All that is about 26,000 searches a month, and we would estimate that there's roughly a similar amount of LLM prompt volume if we just use the keyword demand as a proxy. So there's a big, there's a big addressable market out there, clearly, and I think you're probably.
John: Interesting. That's good news because.
Paris: Of it.
John: We want them. We want... That's what I'm going for big time now. I want all that maintenance.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah, the market is still there. right, and just moving through here, just a few different similar views on the same main theme. These are some sample prompts that, Now, it doesn't have to be a Palm Beach SMB owner. It could be an SMB owner anywhere, but asking, taking.
John: So what's that partial?
Paris: And turning it into questions.
John: What's that partial? Who manages small business website in West Palm Beach? What's partial mean?
Paris: This would mean that, Let's see.
John: But thrives West Palm Beach, Paige, and Clutch, right?
Paris: Have partial visibility.
John: I've got-.
Paris: Absent, it means that you're absent for those, Your LLMs are not are not your brand or citing your brand for those questions. But partial, and I think it's because it, that term, that prompt includes West Palm Beach, so you are appearing. When people would include a local modifier like West Palm Beach in their prompt.
John: That's very good.
Paris: Business websites in.
John: Because it's very good, it's very important. But even with that, it's still very competitive.
Paris: Yeah, it even says Thrive's West Palm Beach page is also competing here, and then Clutch and BrightLocal Directory lists three other sources.
John: Honestly, even a partial visibility I'm happy to see.
Paris: Yeah. All right. What we're trying to do is see if we can get you to the national visibility level here. So these are some gaps, and now we're gonna talk about information gain opportunities. So these are ways that you can build a knowledge base which could then ground content generation, high-quality content generation. So these are, this is just some ideas, not of, not necessarily of content, but from a knowledge base which in our, to our process, we wanna build a knowledge base first and then ground all the content generation in that knowledge. So proprietary data assets are things like here South Florida small business website health report, annual figures from managed sites like uptime, plugin vulnerabilities patched, hack attempts blocked, average fix time. So this could be if you are able to.
John: Provide everything. Yeah.
Paris: You could pull in, that's basically just logs of all of your services. If you're managing a whole bunch of WordPress sites or other types of sites this data does exist, and you can have AI build these types of reports about just how much you are doing just some statistics related to what you're doing for your customers.
John: I do read that a lot now. Any proprietary data reports that you can put out there that are actually factually accurate and all that stuff are gonna be real good idea to do.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah. And then the next idea these are more on the proprietary data sets, what website maintenance actually costs. this would be anonymized, but you could have monthly costs by business type and by size, breakdowns of what the 295 per month covers compared with the do it yourself plugin costs. You said you had a comparison table. I think that would also that's gotta get visible. Other things, hurricane season continuity data. This is specific to.
John: I know why that came up. I know why that came up though, because I generate... I have some clients in the impact window business which happens to be very busy in Florida because impact windows are very important here because of hurricanes. And it, and I have one single page on the website that mentions impact window leads, and it looks like it's pulled it in factoring it in for some reason.
Paris: Yeah. All right, so this is one type of knowledge base. These are different types of assets that you can build. There's a few other categories like buyer journey documentation, building content, and then this one I always like the most is the subject matter expert voices, SME and subject matter expert voices. this would be even just you doing interviews, going on podcasts. This, this podcast right here is a good example.
John: To do that. I have my publicist starting to get me on podcasts and things.
Paris: Yeah. Just getting your voice out there in as many publicly recorded opportunities as possible, and then having all those transcripts go into a knowledge base and then using that to generate content. So these are some areas for knowledge base opportunities. These are high-level strategic goals now. Fixing the entity. One name, one story, one set of facts. We talked about that. the cost and what's included answers. So yeah, just be very clear about the packages or what they cost, what's included.
John: I feel we have been tremendously transparent in that particular area, 'cause I've had prices on the website for a very long time, and a lot of agencies don't like to put prices. But it did not pick it up for some reason.
Paris: Yeah. AI really likes transparent prices because consumers like transparent prices, and a lot of people, especially when they're really about buying, they're gonna they're gonna ask ChatGPT, "What does it cost?" And ChatGPT wants to be able to give an accurate answer. But it means that the websites have to make that available. Publish comparison sets before anybody else does. I know you mentioned that table, but you could also try to compare yourself against the WebFX and the other WP Buff and you, AI.
John: The.
Paris: Be really good at creating those pages.
John: I think I might be I might be doing that one because they are, they're extremely strong, extremely competitive, and I think a comparison between a smaller agency and them would be a worthwhile piece of content that I could put out there.
Paris: Yeah. All right. Yeah next strategic recommendation is get into these roundup posts that LLMs are synthesizing from. We mentioned that they're around. These are things like listicles, roundups.
John: It's soliciting me all the time. Soliciting me all the time. Some I buy, some I don't.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah. But LLMs really are pulling they're referring to that and they're pulling that into the answers.
John: I've heard.
Paris: It's.
John: I don't know if it's accurate, but I heard Gemini does it the most. That was what the one of the latest reports I read said, but I don't know if that's true.
Paris: Oh, okay. They probably do. I know that ChatGPT cites listicles a whole lot, too. Even though a lot of listicles are manipulative, they're self-serving, most people a listicle and put themselves number one on the list. but unfortunately, for better or worse, they are still getting cited a lot.
John: One.
Paris: It is... if your industry, and I know 'cause we're in the same space really there are a lot of listicles and it's good to.
John: You know how I think about it? If you get into 10 listicles and eight wind up being junk, but two are good, hey, that's two good listicles. You know what I mean? 'Cause you're gonna have to go through some garbage to get some good stuff. It's like with anything else in life.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah, Absolutely. And then the turning all of the 25 years of being in business, turning these experiences with client sites into proprietary data, that's a big one. Just to try to pull out much data as you can from those websites by keeping them anonymous, of course, but then just pulling out any statistics that really highlight the website health work that you're doing.
John: I wish Google Analytics allowed us to see all of our data like they used to. We used to be able to go back into analytics and view like 10, 15 years. I'm pretty sure they've limited it to three years now. I don't know why in the world they did that. I don't know why in the world they did that.
Paris: All right, and the last two are repoint existing authority at the core service. Let's see. Yeah.
John: So this gives us a lot of stuff to go over, a lot of stuff to read about what items we wanna work on and which ones we're gonna pass on.
Paris: Yeah. Yeah. So that's it for this report. Any overall thoughts, John, before we switch over?
John: Specifically, no. I have recognized some areas where I don't think it... Some things it picked up it probably shouldn't have, and some things I wish it would've found that I think it should've, but it didn't. But that's the nature of the reports, and you're gonna see when we go over my report. It's just that they're just not gonna catch everything. You know what I mean? This is why, I'm not even so sure. We may need to look at, let me ask you your, is What, what technology is your using? Is it your, is it using just ChatGPT, or is it using a combination of Perplexity, Gemini? Is it trying to combine all that information together? What is it doing exactly? How many sources is this report being based on?
Paris: This report was done with Claude, with the, the latest Opus model 5.5. And so it is, it isn't, it's built with Claude, but it's trying to do its best to estimate. It goes out and it conducts these not searches, but it does these prompts, and it's looking at primarily ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. I think Perplexity is now very small in market share, not.
John: They are, but they're up and coming, and I really like them, and I have a paid subscription there. So my tool does a similar thing. It uses primarily ChatGPT. Now, it would be better if it used a variety of all the AI models, but honestly, I just didn't... It's really an internal tool. I didn't really wanna code up four different API. I didn't wanna make a nightmare out of it. I just wanted to get a general assessment idea, is that when a client comes to me and I wanna, I don't wanna have to run a manual audit every time. I wanna be able to utilize, ChatGPT, which is my favorite because it's the busiest and the most popular AI engine right now, and still got the most market share. So I like that one. That one is the one I use the most. But Claude, I don't use all those so much. I stay away from Claude and Gemini. I told you earlier, or another time, I know we talked, I told you I don't like Google knowing too much information, so I try not to use Gemini because they know enough already. And I heavily on Perplexity AI and ChatGPT. So even my tool was gonna primarily utilize ChatGPT. It's gonna base most of its decisions based on that. And in the event I was using four different ones, it probably would pull in different answers. But it's just right now it's focused on one source, one that I like the most, and it gives me a decent quick assessment and we'll go over it briefly just to see what the heck it says. See what I mean?
Paris: Okay. Yeah. Hey, could you could you share your screen and let's pull it up?
John: Okay, so this is my report. Okay, so I took this get... How do you print it? What is that? getgeoforge.com. That's what it is, right?
Paris: Yeah. The brand is GEOforge, and it's, this is not the agency. This is the tool that we built for AI visibility. So this is a product, the website is getgeoforge.com.
John: All right, so what my tool does is my tool gives you the opportunity to put up a lot of information in, but it also has a default feature, which is basically "Give me the URL. I'm gonna pull up the URL. I'm gonna figure out if I can understand what this business is and what it does." So basically it pulled it up. It's the site summary is basically it's a generative engine optimization platform that tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT and Google AI Search, creates and publishes grounded content, and supports off-site citation building. So does that seem fairly accurate to what your tool is all about?
Paris: It does. Spot.
John: Okay.
Paris: In.
John: That's what I thought. That's what I thought. It said the primary service is Generative Engine Optimization Platform, and the primary market is for marketing teams and agencies like you and I. So that was the first thing it tried to do. The scoring system is not the best. I really should have green, red... I might work on that a little bit. So basically, it was just giving us numerical values on certain things. Okay, so the first thing it's gonna do, it's gonna, My tool asks 10 questions. Okay, the first two questions are service specific. So what does GEOforge do for brand visibility in AI answers? Okay, and the good news is it was mentioned. Okay, that's the key to everything. And it mentioned that it knows what it is. Helps brands become more visible in AI answers, okay? And this is a more simple tool than your tool. This is very simple.
Paris: Can I ask John, this is basically the prompt that you put into ChatGPT, is what does GEOforge do Vis-.
John: What the tool is gonna come up with, the tool is gonna... Excuse me, let me get rid of that. The tool is gonna come up with eight to 10 questions it thinks it should ask based on what this what this company or service is and what it does. Okay? Now, the two questions are usually very specific to the service itself, but the eight other questions it's gonna ask are gonna be just market questions. And it's gonna say, "Hey, if I search out what this company does, but I don't include who they are or what their name is, will they be mentioned enough that they're going to be included in my data that I return?"
Paris: Yeah.
John: Okay.
Paris: Thing is, does AI know about my brand and are they saying the right things about my brand when I ask about my brand? then the.
John: Yeah.
Paris: If I just ask a non-branded category-related question.
John: Does it know what it is? So basic-.
Paris: Me in the answer?
John: Second question was, how does GEOforge compare with measurement-only AI visibility platforms? And it knows. It knows because again, you're being asked specifically, so it's pulling up any information it has about... So this, the first two items are basically saying, the good news is that the tool is known about. It's aware of the tool. It knows the tool. It's seen the tool somewhere or read the tool about it somewhere, and those are really good, okay? And then it gives you an idea of exactly what it knew about it, what it, cited about it and all that stuff. But most of the information it knows is self-gotten. So in other words, it's citing the site itself, getgeoforge.com. You, so it knows that it did read that information, but it read it on that site. You know what I'm saying? So when it went into more complex questions like, "What platforms can improve a brand's visibility in ChatGPT and AI search?" So in other words, when it said, "Hey who can help me with this problem I have?" Then that's in the...
Paris: This is.
John: Mentioned.
Paris: Yeah, I drop off, right?
John: This is where you drop off, and that's because it's probably immensely saturated already. You know what I mean? So in other words, you're gonna have to wind up being in like... You're gonna have to get in some listicles where you're probably like the second or third guy to get mentioned. You're gonna have to start getting mentioned outside some of these other... And now some of these other things, I haven't even heard of these things, you may have heard of them. I haven't heard of them.
Paris: I do. I do, I recognize most of these brands, and they're direct competitors, almost all of them. Scrunch, Peak, Profound Otterly, and they're all, Yeah, these are all competitive tools.
John: Are in your wheelhouse.
Paris: Are doing a lot of the.
John: These are the guys you're up against. So yeah, came up with that question, what platforms can improve their brand's visibility? The next question, how can I find out why AI agents are not mentioning my brand or AI assistants? It's going through a round of questions. Which tools... And these are all tool-generated. I did not come up with these questions. These are the questions that it says, "Hey, these are the things I'm probably gonna wanna research to see if this guy's gonna get mentioned." Which tools track AI share of voice? Okay. Yeah, of course the bad news, it's not being mentioned in almost any of these scenarios. Which I'm telling you, don't get upset. This is typical. This is typical. Unless you're a tremendous brand, it's gonna get hard, it's gonna get hard getting in my... I might get in one in my own tool. You know what I mean? I'd probably get in the first two, maybe one of the other ones, and that's only if it says something about website management specifically in West Palm Beach. You know what I'm saying? It's gotta be a little specific because the number of competitors is so high.
Paris: You had a, you had some partial matches when it became local. But on a national level, yeah it's.
John: And I'm fine with that. You wanna know what I learned? What I learned by running regional forums and regional websites and stuff is if you can dominate locally, if you can dominate in your target market, in your regional area, you don't necessarily have to target and compete nationally. You don't need it. You could dominate a local industry. Sometimes it's better to dominate a niche than it is to dominate something that's too broad.
Paris: Yeah. If there's a big enough.
John: So-.
Paris: Especially when you were in Long Island, if you could get the whole... If you could get New York or even the tri-state area, that's plenty big enough for...
John: There was a time where I dominated. th-there was a time where I dominated Long Island. It's absolutely dominated. Man I was running a competing site called the longislandexchange.com, and longisland.com was the regional portal. And they just like, "You know what? Let's buy this guy at Long Island Exchange because I'm tired of seeing him outrank us. Let's get him and come, he can come over here and run this." And we just dominated, took over everything. Eventually I sold the business. We would... That's exactly what we were doing. If you put in something with Long Island, anything, we came up. So let's see what the key findings and opportunities are. Similar to your report, is it's giving us, all right what's working and what can we do? So clearly differentiated from measurement only tools through content creation, CMS publishing, citation, outreach, and measurement. Recognized for repeated pro-.
Paris: By the way, that is, it definitely, That first bullet point is nailing our competitive positioning because most of the in the space are really just reporting tools, and they're showing you your visibility, your share of voice, but they're, they lack the execution layer. So they don't.
John: Suggestions.
Paris: And they don't.
John: They're not giving enough suggestions of what to do. They're not giving enough suggestions of what to do.
Paris: Yeah.
John: Good.
Paris: Just read through these.
John: Brand focused. I got you.
Paris: Repeated prompt sampling and confidence intervals, that's definitely true. And then brand-focused answers described in monitoring, knowledge grounding. And that's another big thing for us too, is that we, Remember we talked about the knowledge base when we were talking about Searchen, and all of our content is generated from a knowledge base, which means that it's, contains information gain for the models, and it, that helps to eliminate any kind of inaccuracies and hallucinations and AI slop. So that's really guaranteeing a much higher level of quality content. But you've got to invest in building that knowledge base. So that's a core aspect of our product, and it did, that third point is picking up on that. It says knowledge grounding, then citation building capabilities is really just helping organize opportunities to outreach to people, and then even writing those emails and sending those emails and tracking the replies to those emails, all from within our platform. So they, It got the report is really pinpointing our differentiation, but we're still not improving. We're still not appearing in those prompts for the for those broad prompts. let's see. The.
John: If you could only guess, I would only guess that is based on some level of authoritativeness. So for some reason, the engines, the LLMs are just thinking that the other ones are either more established, maybe they've been around a longer time, period of time, maybe they get mentioned, maybe they get cited more often. So basically, you just got to work on general popularity of your particular tool in general. You know what I'm saying?
Paris: Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying. I'm a one-man marketing army here trying to.
John: This.
Paris: Possible.
John: A better overall. We gotta continue at this and always adapt and continue to be mentioned. Sources cited in ChatGPT test responses. But basically, this is just, giving us the ba, the, Just like yours does on the bottom, it's giving us references to what it did read to make these decisions.
Paris: Okay. So these are the, Wait, that last section, are these gonna be the citations? Can you s-.
John: Maybe going.
Paris: A little.
John: To... every time we asked a question, you'll notice that it gave us the information that went on and where it read it. Okay, and this is basically a summary of everything it used and everything it read to tell us about what it found. So there may be some-.
Paris: You s-.
John: There may be a company.
Paris: Show the top of that page just so that... There's a title above it. I just wanna see.
John: Yeah.
Paris: Sources.
John: May be, it may be a brand that was cited, but it's not actually here, and that's because that brand was cited, but they did not rely on the own brand to give it that information. They relied on the information found.
Paris: I wanna point out a few things that I see here. We have a mix of... We have direct competitors here. We have definitely we have Otterly and Profound Peak. These are direct competitors. We also have, actually, we have the OpenAI help section, which is interesting. We have developers.google.com. We have bing.com from Bing's blog, and so there's also the LLMs themselves or the large search engines or AI tools themselves are delivering these.
John: No one.
Paris: Their own.
John: Probably because they're factoring those is it's so related to what we're researching that it's figuring that the best information may be found on those types of sources. And I'll give you an idea. I recently ran a report for a business that was in the medical industry, and I started seeing a lot of very high authoritative like Mayo Clinic and.
Paris: Yeah.
John: Psychology Today.com. It was resourcing to not only the business' competitors in the market, but it was some of the sources it was using was very highly cited medical literature. So it's doing a mix here as well. If for some reason it's thinking that some of the best information it could probably find are AI services themselves. You know what I mean?
Paris: Yeah Cool. All right. And then what do we have at the, I think there's another part at, after co-.
John: Let.
Paris: This.
John: Just similar to your.
Paris: Help center claims, current ID and coverage. Yeah. We do have a, we do have a help center that's connected with the product itself, and I do think AI has access to that. I'm pretty.
John: They admitted it. They admitted it 'cause I had that price list and that comparison that the other thing missed. They just don't... You know what I'm saying? They have a limited amount of time. In other words, this tool is gonna spend, a reasonable amount of tokens and asking 10 questions. But it could probably, if I allowed it to, could probably ask 30 questions. You know what I mean? But, and it would probably get a more well-rounded idea, but it just doesn't go that far. It's a snapshot idea.
Paris: Yeah. And then create dedicated callable pages. Actually have voice citation tracking. Okay. Yeah do we have thought about an integrations page in point number two. That's interesting. verifiable product evidence, methodology, computing sampling. Yeah. case studies so far, but we need more. We need to accumulate more and then publish them. And then comparison category pages that position GEOforge against... we actually have about, think we have about 25 head-to-head comparison pages in our, in the footer of our website, and they're all linked in the footer of the website.
John: Why.
Paris: I don't know, I don't know how much that's doing for us, but if a competitor, if somebody's searching for a competitor and they say, "What are some alternatives to this competitor?" Or competitor A versus competitor B I'm hoping that compare... The Pages would.
John: If you want you can just for the heck of it later on, you could go to the tool and you could, Let me just show you what the tool looks like really quick. In case you wanted to try it, you just go to searchen.com/ai.
John: So this is the tool itself, okay? So it's at searchen.com/ai. Now, if there's something specific that you wanted to know, when I ran this report, I put your URL here, and I let the tool do the rest. You could probably, in this primary service box, you could probably put something specific about what you wanted it to see specifically, maybe about that comparison table. You know what I'm saying? Hey, is it if you were, comparisons with other AI tools, and maybe it would pick it up. But I just use the tool as is. I let it... because most of the time when I'm doing a business, I don't have to put the primary market. It figures it out. You know what I mean? But there's an opportunity to put some... You could always just run one, see what.
Paris: Yeah.
John: Know, and.
Paris: Tool is trying to also just from the website alone it's trying to estimate who are the competitors, what are the, what does the business do, what would be the keywords, the prompts.
John: It'll probably change over time, because.
Paris: Field here is the website, and then if.
John: That's it.
Paris: Else blank if I want to.
John: You could. That is exactly what I did when I ran it. I, in fact, I figured everything out by just putting in the URL.
Paris: Yeah. So this has been great, John. How, what sort of success have you had with this? Have you, how many clients or prospects have you taken through this audit, and has that, has it been a good lead generation tool for you, or.
John: No.
Paris: Going?
John: Really nobody knows about the tool right now. It's not linked on my website. I really created the tool as an internal tool for myself. I am letting people know on podcasts and things like that they can try the tool. You can only use the tool two or three times before it'll start prompting you for an email address and all kinds of stuff like that. It's a free tool, you don't have to pay. But I'm not really promoting the tool right now because for me, I needed a solution to my, for myself. When a business comes to me and says, "Hey, I am interested in this AI stuff. Do I, Am I found?" I'm not gonna sit there for a half hour or an hour and run a report. I have to have this tool. You know what I'm saying? So I will, this tool will evolve over time based on how it will help me evaluate potential client business. That's what it's for right now. I'm not using it as a promotional tool. I probably should be, but hey, you know what? The tool's not perfect. There's probably 10 guys that got 20 other tools out there that they're charging fees, that the tool is better than my tool, because they're gonna build a business around their tool. I'm not really building a business around my tool. I already have the business. I'm using the tool to make my life easier. So how what I'm gonna do with this tool going forward, I'm not sure. I'll probably improve it some based on what I need it to do for myself. But, and that depends. But as far as I've had a lot of success in visibility overall, because I have clients that are getting lots of traffic from ChatGPT and stuff like that. But success from this tool as it is, moderate.
Paris: Okay.
John: Moderate to.
Paris: 'cause.
John: Do that.
Paris: Tool is really we built it... yours is a standalone tool. What I showed you is actually a Claude skill that we built inside of Claude.
John: Is it subscription-based? Can someone sign up for your tool and pay to use it and all that stuff.
Paris: The report that my Claude skill generated is just a lead gen report, but the actual tool, the GEOforge tool, it's a product and we're selling it. So yeah, you can go to getgeoforge.com. You can sign up for a free trial. You get 14 days and what we're trying to, what we're trying to do is even pivot from a primarily service-based business, our agency business, into more of a product.
John: That would be so, that's the SaaS business. That would be so fantastic. I should do the same thing. If we could only focus on our tools and keep our tools up to date and let the tool run the business, that would be fantastic. I have so many other things going on that I just don't feel I have the time to dedicate specifically to this tool to feel confident that it's perfect enough that I'm gonna start sending it out there as a service. Because if that's where I wanna go, a couple other businesses I have are gonna get shut down, and I'm gonna have to focus on this. Yeah, I can't just.
Paris: With that. I'm.
John: I can't really live.
Paris: Dilemma, John, right now, is that I have to really make a decision if I'm gonna go all in on this. I'm gonna have.
John: Opposition.
Paris: Separate the agency from this and not just treat this as a project within the agency, but really spin it out as a standalone business, dedicate my whole time to it. And I'm.
John: You'll have.
Paris: Now because I think I think the opportunity's there.
John: You'll have to, you'll have to start measuring that by subscription level and subscription signup frequency. And don't put your eggs all in one basket because I just feel like no matter how good anything is in this business get ready to be wiped out in a minute. You gotta have your, you gotta have your hands in a lot of different, pockets. I got a lot of different things and a lot of different industries and.
Paris: And.
John: You know-.
Paris: What the thing is that in this category is already so saturated. When we started building the tool in January of this year I could only find maybe about 10 or 20 other competitors. And now, and if you go to G2, which has all the software, it basically has all the... It's a big directory for software. This category, which they call [the other label] software, has 650 something listings, there probably are even more that haven't even been discovered yet. And because these tools are now relatively easy to build, and you don't need, you don't need a team of developers, it doesn't take a whole lot of time and money. You can go and vibe code it on lots of different platforms. That just means the barrier to entry is so low that a lot of people are jumping in, including agencies that are doing the same thing as us.
John: So true. I built this tool, I probably built it in four to five hours. I probably had to spend a couple hours a day over a couple days of a week, and I got it perfected to the point where I could reliably use it for myself. It would've took me a lot more time and effort if I knew I had the public continually using it, especially if they were paying me to use it. You know what I mean? But I that's not my objective, to be honest with you.
Paris: Yeah no. This is just, this is a door opener for lead generation and something that you can show and get a good discussion with a.
John: It's highly requested because the people wanna know. They want some kind of a idea, and if you could give them a report, like I'm doing three reports right now. I have an outreach tool going on right now, and I offer people three different reports. I don't know if I've mentioned this in the past, but you get an AI visibility report, you get an SEO fundamentals report as far as your architecture, and you get a third report called Searchen Vision. And Searchen Vision actually builds, you put the, just, works just like this. You put the URL in there, and it scans the business, it figures out what their best paid search angle is, and it builds the ad for them, and it shows them what the ad would like, "Hey, this is what your ad would look like if you were doing sponsored search." And I think that's incredibly valuable for people to see, because a lot of people wanna do paid search. They don't know anything about it. They just see all those ads out there by their competitors. They don't know how to get them. And from my experience, when I show it to them, they say, "Hey, how do I do that? I want that ad for my business." You know what I mean?
Paris: That's a great, that's a great idea actually, when they can visualize it. Great stuff. All right. John, this has been great, and I think this worked out well comparing our different approaches here.
John: We both got homework. We both got homework to do based on our own auditing.
Paris: We absolutely do, yeah. Yeah. We're both in pretty saturated spaces with crowded, lots of competitors, also huge spaces too. I think even despite that in my space of GEO platforms, AI visibility platforms, yeah, there's hundreds of players, but I think that everybody is gonna be in this marketing channel. Not everybody's in this channel yet, but give it another year or so, and I think everybody's gonna be.
John: Yeah.
Paris: Channel.
John: Saw it with search engine.
Paris: Market.
John: We saw it with search engine optimization 12 years ago when all of a sudden the Superpages and Yellow Pages and Yellow Book and all the, all of a sudden they were SEO companies. You know what I'm saying? It's just they came out of nowhere. Everybody, they just, there's a lot of companies out there that just change with whatever the market requires. And I guess, hey, that's what you gotta do to stay relevant.
Paris: Yeah. Great.
John: So anyway, Art, thank For having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I think we got some good information going. And listen, you wanna do something in the future, you let me know.
Paris: Absolutely. Thanks for coming on, John.
John: No problem. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye.
