Summarize with AI
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and legibility.
Welcome and Introductions
Gina Ramsey: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gina Ramsey. Most of you in the room know me, but for those who don’t, I am the president of Pink Dog Digital. We are a full-service digital marketing company located in Baltimore, and we’re here to talk to you about AI: where your brand shows up in AI, how it shows up, and why it shows up.
We will have a recording of the video, so if you need to leave, you’re not going to miss anything. If you want to share it with someone else, you’re welcome to do that, and if there are people who are going to miss it entirely, we’ll send it to them. Please drop any of your questions in the chat. None of us want to sit up here and be a talking head, so we’d like this to be very interactive. You are muted, so we can’t hear you, but the chat is available to you for any questions, and Katie will be monitoring it.
All right, now am I allowed to go, Coral?
How People Are Searching Now
GR: By a show of hands, comments, chats, whatever: when was the last time you asked any of the AI tools to find a particular business or answer a particular question? If you’re anything like me, you probably did it before you got out of bed this morning.
…we have “earlier this morning,” “yesterday,” and “this morning.” Yep, yep.
People are becoming more and more dependent on AI search every single day, oftentimes without even knowing it. We were having a conversation with my family this weekend, and I had to actually show my mother that she was using AI. She didn’t believe me because she didn’t know what it was. Everyone is using it, and they’re changing the way they search. They’re asking full questions. They’re talking to the AI platforms. They’re getting real answers back, not just a listing of links.
We have 57…
Coral Norman: Sorry, Cory, could you give a quick example of a full question versus what people might have searched in the past, just to give everyone a reference point?
Cory Wasielczyk: Say you’re looking for running shoes. In the past, you would go to Google, search for “running shoes,” and get the 10 links. You would click through, figure out what was working best for you, and then make your purchase. With AI, you can make your query a lot more detailed. You can say, “I’m searching for running shoes because I’m training to run a marathon. I have wide feet, so I need wide sizes available, and I’d like it to be under $100 or $150. Could you provide some recommendations for what would be best for me?” That’s an example of a much more detailed query that you can get good answers for from an AI search engine, which you couldn’t necessarily get in the old days of Google.
CN: Thank you. Sorry, Gina, I just wanted to give a practical example there.
GR: That’s okay. I’m going to ask him for an example within this list, too. More and more web requests are coming from bots, not people. Cory, can you give a brief explanation of what that means? Why are bots searching versus people?
CW: There have always been bots in web search. The most obvious example is Google’s search bots. That’s how Google works, through its crawlers. But these days, with the proliferation of AI tools, which all run on basically the same sort of setup, there are bots that go out and retrieve information to gather and then display in an answer. Because of the technical nature of AI systems, there are a lot more of them doing this than there were before. That’s why we’re seeing the majority of traffic nowadays coming from bots compared to human traffic.
GR: Great, thank you.
47% of adults use AI tools to find local businesses. 45% of consumers use AI for local recommendations, like “What’s the best plumber in the Baltimore area?” And 68% of US Google searches end without a click. I want to talk about this in a minute, so let’s put a pin in that.
What This Means for Your Business
GR: What does all of this mean for you? AI, GEO, AIO, SEO, AEO: there are all these terms. What it means is that people are still using tools to find your business. That’s not changing. The rules around how that works are changing, but nothing significant in terms of best practices.
With traditional SEO, the goal was for people to click through to your website. Guess what? That’s not happening as much now. More and more people are not clicking through, and we’re seeing decreases in click-through traffic. But that doesn’t matter. The goal now is the citation. It’s the answer to the question. It’s the map. It’s wherever they find your information, not necessarily clicking through to your website, because the information is already being presented in the citation in the AI platforms.
It used to be that we needed really good technical health on a website, plus backlinks and keywords. While those are still important in traditional SEO, in AEO you’re going to hear me use different terms: credibility, clarity, consistency, and answering the kinds of questions people are asking when they’re doing the queries Cory described. We used to deliver an entire page of information, and now it’s just the answer to the question. Cory’s example about the running shoes was very good. It used to be “running shoes.” Now it’s my running shoes, my size, what I’m going to do with them, and what my budget is.
It also used to be that people would look at multiple sources to find answers to their questions. Now AI is serving up the answers in a very concise way, so people don’t need to look at multiple sources.
We want to talk a little bit about where AI gets its answers about your business, and Cory is going to start with some foundational local SEO information.
CN: I’m also going to interject real quick. Gina mentioned there are a lot of different names for AI visibility right now, and I just want to clarify: a lot of times you’re going to hear AIO, AEO, GEO, AI visibility. It all means the same thing. What it comes down to is that the industry has not coined a standard term yet. We have SEO for search engine optimization, and that’s been a pretty standard term for years. But since this frontier is still so new, we’re seeing a lot of different ways people are labeling it. You might see generative engine optimization, artificial intelligence optimization, answer engine optimization. There’s just a bunch out there right now, so keep that in mind when you see these terms. It’s all the same thing. A lot of times you’ll hear us say “AIO, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it,” because that’s pretty much what we’ve coined it internally at this point. Eventually, the industry will standardize the term.
GR: And like everything happening in the AI space, everything’s going to change. Everything we tell you today is going to be different in six months. If you stick with the fundamentals and don’t chase the bright, shiny objects, you’re going to be okay. So let’s let Cory address some of the basics.
Local Listings: Where AI Looks First
CW: The first thing is local listings. Let’s start with a quick question: when somebody asks ChatGPT to recommend a business near them, where do you think it goes to find it?
It goes to a lot of the same places you were already thinking of. It’s going to look at a Google listing. It’s going to look for reviews. It’s going to look for info on Bing, on Yelp, and on any directories that business might have been set up on and forgotten about. So the first thing we should say is that if you’ve put any time into your local SEO, that work is still valid and still counts, because it’s a big part of what AI reads to decide what it recommends.
We want to look at some data that bears that out, and the numbers are here on this slide. A company called Insites studied 10,000 local businesses this year to figure out how ChatGPT and Perplexity were talking about each one. Businesses that showed up in the Google Map Pack, which is the three listings with a map at the top of a search that you’ve probably seen for years, got recommended by AI about three and a half times more often than businesses that weren’t. What that means is that Google and AI are rewarding the same things: a verified listing, good reviews, and information that matches everywhere.
The really interesting part is the other two numbers. 93% of businesses were known to at least one AI platform, which is awesome. That means that without doing much of anything, you’re more likely than not known to an AI platform. But here’s the concerning thing: only 55% of those businesses had accurate information. We’re talking the wrong address, the wrong hours, services you don’t offer. In some cases, AI will just make up whatever it wants about your business. That’s what we call a “hallucination” in the industry. It’s basically when AI confidently makes something up, because its whole purpose is to present information confidently. So the real question is: is what AI is saying about you true?
Your Google Business Profile
CW: There are a few different things we should look at here. The first one is the big one: your Google Business Profile. The reason it’s so huge is because it’s Google. Google is still the big player, has gigantic market share in search, and is growing every day with its AI products as well. It’s what Google’s AI Mode and Gemini use. In the middle of this slide is a screenshot of our own Google Business Profile.
CN: To interject real quick: despite what Google will tell you, Google is always going to be biased toward its own products. As the bigger player, having your Google Business Profile filled out is critical, and so is posting to it. We post to our Google Business Profile every day, and we post to our clients’ profiles pretty regularly as well. Nobody’s ever going to see those posts, but Google is going to read them, know they’re there, and be a little bit biased toward them. So when we look at Google, the Google Business Profile is the first place you want to make sure all of your info is filled out and correct. Google has been the biggest player in the game for so long, and it continues to be pretty dominant, so using its products is always going to be one of the most important things you can do.
CW: And sporadically, ChatGPT and other AI engines use Google results in their own answers. It’s kind of sporadic, mainly because of the competition, but it’s always good to be there.
One thing we had on this slide before that we don’t anymore was the Questions and Answers section, which used to be part of the business profile and has actually gone away. There’s a new feature, introduced this year, called Ask Maps. It uses AI to answer questions your customers have about your business. That eliminates a step you would have had to do in the past, where you’d get questions from customers and then answer them. But it also means your information really does need to be completely accurate, because that’s the only source Google’s AI systems are going to use when they answer those questions on their own.
Quickly, here’s what a complete profile looks like. Your name, address, and phone number have to be exactly as they are on your site. Make sure your hours are correct, including any holiday hours. Choose the proper primary category, or the closest one to your business, plus any secondary categories that fit. Use your logo and about 10 or more real photos of your business or your work. List out your services along with a short description. Have a plain-language description, a general summary of what you do and where you do it. And as Coral mentioned, make sure you post every so often, because even though most people aren’t going to read the posts, Google’s AI systems will, and it shows your profile is active.
Beyond Google: Bing, Apple, Facebook, and Yelp
CW: Google is very important, but it’s not the only place you should focus your attention, because, as we’ve alluded to, different AI tools pull from different places. We’re seeing that Microsoft Copilot takes from Bing, and there’s a lot of evidence that ChatGPT does as well. Again, this is kind of sporadic and based on where that model is at the moment, but at least for right now, we’re seeing it. The new Apple Intelligence in Siri is going to draw heavily from Apple Maps, and you’ll want to use a tool called Apple Business Connect to get your information right there. Then of course you have Facebook, which feeds Meta AI and the new Muse tool.
One other thing that isn’t mentioned here is Yelp, which is another big one. In July, Yelp signed a deal with OpenAI to put Yelp reviews, photos, and business info into ChatGPT, so Yelp is definitely important right now.
Why Consistency Matters
CW: Consistency matters as much as presence. AI checks your information across sources. Think about it: if you were the AI, and you went to a bunch of different sources, and Google says Business A closes at 5:00, Yelp says it closes at 6:00, and the website says it closes at 5:30, which one do you tell the customer? It gets confused and doesn’t know. Sometimes it will say something like, “I can’t confirm directly, but it looks like these are the different times it says it opens and closes.” Other times it will just confidently give the wrong answer.
Katie Meixner-Croft: To piggyback off of that, what I find can also happen sometimes is that if you have a business name that’s similar to another business’s name, AI will take the information from that other business if it can find it. One of my closest friends has a therapy practice with a relatively common name, and we found that for a couple of questions he wasn’t answering on his website, Google’s AI Overview was pulling the answer from a practice in a different state. You can get yourself into sticky situations, because if Google, ChatGPT, or one of these services can’t find the answer, like Cory said, it might make it up, it might say it can’t answer, or it might pull it from somewhere else. Then that person might come to you looking for a service or product you don’t offer, because the AI guessed that you might, since a similar business does.
CW: Yeah. One last thing before I move on from this slide: there’s another layer called data aggregators. These are companies like Data Axle, Foursquare, and Neustar Localeze that supply a lot of information to smaller directories. It’s worth a look just to make sure your information is okay there. I think Localeze is run by TransUnion. It’s something to think about, more of an advanced tip.
Here’s a homework assignment before I hand it over to Coral: search your business on Google, on Apple Maps, and on Bing. Write down your hours, address, phone number, and services for each one, and find out where things don’t match. You want all of that to match up across all of those platforms, and that gives you a good starting point for figuring out where to put your efforts. These are all platforms you can update without much effort, and they’re free. That’s where I would start. Now we can move on to your website.
A Word of Caution on Yelp
CN: Awesome, thank you, Cory. A quick note on Yelp, too, because I know Gina would also have this note. Yelp reviews are important to have, but be very careful about how you ask people for them. If Yelp notices you’re specifically trying to get reviews on your Yelp profile, they will shut you down with the quickness, and you’ll end up getting a bad rating with them. We don’t love Yelp here, but Yelp does directly feed ChatGPT right now. So if you do have a Yelp account and you have friendly people who will give reviews, it’s worth a personal ask, but do it in a staggered way that doesn’t seem spammy. I do not recommend ever going out and soliciting Yelp reviews en masse, because you will end up with a problem.
That being said, I’m going to hand it over to Gina, who will probably have a little bit to add, and then we’ll talk about why your website is the most important place to make sure your information is correct.
GR: Yep. Yelp is the devil, in my humble opinion. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. You can get great reviews, and if they even think you’re trying to solicit them, they will filter those reviews, and the only thing people will see are your negative ones. I used to have a client who had hundreds of great reviews, and Yelp filtered every single one of the good ones and only surfaced the bad ones. So if you’re going to incorporate Yelp into your strategy, do so with caution, as Coral said.
In general, you should not be paying people for reviews or giving gift cards for reviews. Your review strategy should be very, very authentic and real and, as Coral said, not spammy at all. But with Yelp you have to be super careful, because you can be doing all the right things and they can still think you’re not, and that’s a problem.
Your Website Is Still Your Most Important Asset
GR: I want to talk a little bit about your website, because this has been a constant challenge for us this year. Your website is still the most important digital asset for your business. In a study of over 14,000 local AI citations, Gemini cited business websites almost 60% of the time, and ChatGPT did 72% of the time. The AI-visible businesses had more than double the pages.
So if you’re looking at your Google Analytics right now and seeing your numbers fall off, don’t panic. It’s okay. As Cory has told us multiple times, while your traffic may be off, your conversions are likely up. You need to employ some strategies to make sure the AI engines are finding you, and some of that is a little different than old school. In fact, I’m going to mention one thing in particular that, if you’ve been with me for any period of time, I have also called the devil, and now it’s the standard.
I’ve been preaching it from the rooftops: content is king. That is still true. Content is still king on your website… the more content you have that points back to your website, the better off you are. All of the things Cory was talking about should point back to your website.
On your website, people should be able to find location pages. FAQ pages. Service pages: if you do HVAC work, you used to be able to put all of that on one page. Now you can’t. Now it’s a heating page, an air conditioning page, a ventilation page.
Blog articles: we write blog articles for many of our clients all the time. Testimonials: get them from your existing clients. User-generated content is huge, and it works.
Please use real photos. Do not use AI slop on your website. We had a client that built a website entirely with AI photos, and it failed miserably. We tried everything we could, and there was just nothing we could do.
One of our most visited pages, if not the most visited page, is our FAQ section. It answers real questions we hear regularly from our clients, and it answers them in concise, specific ways. It’s not “blah, blah, blah,” lots of words, all the things. It answers the questions. The AI engines are looking to give people time back by providing answers, not a bunch of stuff to read. They’re looking for clear, concise, standalone answers. Do not put “we offer quality service.” Nobody cares. But they do care if you answer how to fix a specific problem.
Show your personality in your content. Cory is championing some things on our website where each one of us will be cited for our own content, so our website isn’t going to sound exactly the same from article to article. It’s going to have a different flavor depending on whether Cory, Katie, or Coral wrote it. And we’d all be lying if we said I’m writing anything, but if I did…
Put your personality and your business out there in the way you want to be represented. Your team is a knowledge bank. If you’re a law firm, each lawyer should write something about their individual specialty or practice area. AI really favors that firsthand account, so take advantage of the knowledge on your team.
Website Checks, Recency, and Location Pages
GR: Here are some things to check. Some of these can be a bit technical, and we’ll address that a little later. Make sure your site isn’t blocking AI crawlers. There’s a tool called Cloudflare that a lot of people have on their websites, and it can automatically block AI. Certain ways your website is built can also be an issue. For example, older websites with accordion content, where you click a button and the content opens up, many times can’t be seen, so check that.
As Cory mentioned, make sure your name, address, and phone number, otherwise called NAP, are identical to your business profile, and make sure your NAP is consistent across all of your citations: your website, directory listings, whatever you have.
There’s something called schema markup. It’s great. It’s not magic, and it’s not going to automatically get you found on all the AI platforms, but it is a help. What you can do that isn’t technical is make sure your content is robust. I hate that word, but I don’t know what else to use right now. Make sure it’s accurate, and make sure it answers questions.
One of the simplest ways to do this is your top five. When people call your business, what are the top five things they ask you? How much is a website? What is SEO? How do I get cited in ChatGPT? Make sure the questions people are asking are on your website, visible, and easy for the AI platforms to read. What have I missed?
Cool. So your website is what you say about you. Reviews are what other people say about you, and AI listens very closely to those signals.
Before I kick it to Coral, I want to say one thing I forgot. AI has recency bias. If you posted an FAQ five years ago and haven’t touched it, it’s going to be less impactful than something you posted three days ago. A lot of people feel like if they write their website content, add a blog once a year, never get new reviews, never answer any FAQs, and don’t add location pages, it’s okay. Well, it’s not. Recency bias is a real thing.
And I glided over location pages. I used to tell clients never to do location pages. Now we’re telling people to do location pages every single time. However, they must be done in a very specific way. You can’t just write an article about your plumbing company, swap out Towson, Baltimore City, and Roland Park, and have the same content page to page to page. Each one has to be written with a specific area in mind, about that area and the services you provide within it. Old school, 15 years ago, was writing 100 pages and just changing the location name. That is not what location pages are today, and I want to be very clear that I’m not suggesting you do old-school location pages. Sorry, I just needed to get that in, and now I will shut up and give it to Coral.
Why the Advice Keeps Changing
CN: You’re good. I was actually talking to a client recently about location pages and the fact that even two years ago, we were saying do not do location pages. Ten years ago, we were saying absolutely do location pages, you need them. Two to three years from now, we may look at your site and say we need to take all these location pages down. That’s the crazy part about SEO, AIO, AEO, whatever: it changes all the time, and what’s working now may not work later.
If you work with us, you know that we do quarterly plans right now rather than saying “we’re going to do this for the next 12 months,” because there’s no 12-month plan that’s definitely going to work with how quickly everything is changing. A big part of what we’re doing internally is staying up to date with what’s working right now and what’s going to work for the next couple of months, and then when it stops working, asking “Okay, what’s next?” and pivoting pretty quickly. That’s where we have to be right now.
So you’ll see things we used to say “never do,” and now we’re looking at them and saying, “Actually, we might need to do this for a little bit,” and then maybe it changes again down the road. That’s the nature of this industry. It’s fun for us, and it’s also challenging and chaotic. So when we tell you these things, it’s not us going back on our word. It’s “Six months ago this didn’t work at all, and now it’s working for everybody.”
GR: I think that’s a really valid tip for anybody. Whoever you’re working with, whether it’s an internal marketing person or an external firm, if they’re doing the same thing they were doing a year ago, you’re missing the boat. Whoever is doing your marketing should be reevaluating what’s working and what’s not on a regular basis and pivoting to make sure they’re in line with right-now best practices, not best practices from a year ago.
CN: That said, there are some foundational things that aren’t going to change. As Cory was talking about, making sure your profiles are up to date, your local listings, having your basic SEO needs met: those are always going to be important. But some things will change.
GR: Yep.
Online Reviews
CN: All right… moving on to reviews, because if you’ve talked to me at all, you know I have been beating this horse for months now about making sure your online reputation management is handled and that you’re getting reviews.
One of the biggest things we’re seeing, in a study of over 800,000 companies, is that brands without any reviews are basically not getting cited at all. That means reviews on Google, on Yelp, on any of the local listing sites, and also on the really niche review sites. For us, we need to be on places like DesignRush, Clutch, and a couple of other agency-specific sites. When you’re not showing up with reviews in those types of places, AI doesn’t have anywhere on the web to go to see what people think of you, and if it doesn’t, it’s not going to cite you.
A lot of what people are asking are questions like “What is the best digital marketing company in Baltimore?” We can tell them about our digital marketing company all day long, but the word “best” assumes that at some point somebody else has called us the best digital marketing company in Baltimore, or given us enough five-star reviews for AI to infer that we are. So it’s a matter of getting those reviews, and getting them from people who, number one, have had good experiences with your business and, number two, are willing to leave reviews with quite a bit of detail. But having reviews at all is number one.
When brands have even 1 to 13 reviews as opposed to none, their AI citations jump to about 53%. With 80-plus reviews, it goes even higher, to about 75%. So it’s super important to make sure you’re getting reviews, specifically from the people who are happiest with your business.
What we’re seeing is that Google review volume has the strongest link to visibility. That’s especially true in Gemini, but it also includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, which are also pulling from Google. And as I mentioned before, you want to show up in different places, whether that’s your niche sites or Bing. As Cory mentioned, setting up that profile also allows you to get reviews there. The more places you have profiles set up, the more places you can typically get reviews, and having reviews in those different places is really helpful.
GR: Bringing this whole slide back to real people, I think, is important. This is great for AI, and it gets people’s eyes on it. But the other thing about reviews is that I read somewhere that real people are more inclined to go with a business that has a couple of bad reviews and a couple of good reviews than one that has no reviews at all. The bias for user-generated content is strong with people, not just with the AI platforms.
CN: I want to say last year we did a webinar on online reputation management specifically, and we covered that fact, because people are much more likely to visit your business or purchase from you if you have reviews. I especially see it on Amazon. I’m looking for clothes on Amazon a lot right now, some in-between pieces, and I’m much more likely to buy something if it has not only a review but a review with a picture of what it looks like on somebody with a similar build to me. That’s the case for a lot of things. If people are willing to leave photos or rich reviews for you, those are super helpful, too, because more people see them and actually engage with them. So it’s important not only for AI but for the human element as well, and I appreciate that clarification, Gina.
One other thing that’s important is how highly your business is rated. You want to be around a 4.75-star rating, and at least a 4.0. That’s tough, but it’s also important.
Whether you can solicit reviews is going to depend on your industry. For instance, we’ve spoken to a property management company, and it’s difficult for them to solicit reviews because of fair housing rules. If they ask one tenant, they have to ask all of the tenants, and in that case they’ll find they get a lot of negative reviews. So if you’re soliciting reviews, first make sure you’re following any rules that are part of your industry. Second, if you’re able to solicit from specific groups, make sure you’re going to the people you know are going to give you favorable reviews and write something with some detail.
You also want diverse reviews across the types of services you offer. For instance, we don’t just want reviews on web design. We want reviews from our SEO clients, our social media clients, and at this point our AI visibility clients, so that when people ask questions, AI can surface, “Oh yeah, Pink Dog Digital has done AI visibility for people, and they have favorable reviews on it, as well as SEO and this other thing.”
Responding to and Requesting Reviews
CN: The other thing I want to mention is that how you handle reviews matters. We talk about this a lot, too. If you get a negative review, you want to respond to it. It’s very important to respond, and to respond fairly quickly. But you don’t want to have a trigger finger and respond immediately, especially if it’s a very negative review and it’s upsetting to you. Take a step back, breathe, ask your marketing company, “Do you know how I should respond to this?” and then work on a response.
You want it to be clear and concise and to give a next step. Something like: “We recognize that you are upset about this situation, and we’re sorry to hear that this happened. Please reach out to us at XYZ immediately, and we will work on getting this solved.” Once you move the conversation private, you can sometimes ask them to change the review, depending on whether the situation is favorably fixed, or at least to edit it from two stars to three or four, whatever that looks like. But you want to take it offline as quickly as you can while also responding in a favorable way.
And as Gina mentioned with recency bias for websites, the same thing applies to reviews. 74% of customers only care about reviews written in the last three months, which means you need to consistently ask for reviews. To do that, you need to build it into your workflow. For instance, whenever I finish with a website design client, we get the website launched, everything’s ready to go, and the SEO and AI optimization portion is done. At that point, I reach out and say, “If you had a good experience with us, would you mind leaving us a review on Google?” and I’ll link directly to Google. I’ll check in with them after a week or two if I haven’t heard back and see if I can get a review that way.
There are also automated platforms that do this, and I highly recommend looking into them. A lot of them hook up to your CRM, so when you close a deal or finish something, you can tag the client a certain way, and it’ll drop them directly into an email and SMS text cadence that asks for the review specifically. That way you’re not manually going out at the end of a project and saying, “Hey, can you review me?”
So double-check that you’re replying to all of your reviews and that you’re requesting reviews from people, so you can build those profiles out as quickly as possible while doing it organically. As Gina mentioned, you don’t want to pay for reviews, offer gift cards for them, or offer collateral for them. You want organic reviews from people who have had really good experiences with your business.
All right, that being said, I need to wrap up because I’m going over time. I’m going to hand it over to Katie, who’s going to talk about social media and how it influences AI answers as well.
Social Media and AI Visibility
KM: So far we’ve covered local listings, your website, and online reviews. The last piece of the puzzle is social media. While I put Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram icons there, social media can go beyond that and include platforms like Reddit as well.
First things first: businesses that post on social media are more likely to be found. We have a couple of statistics here. Of Google AI Overviews, 67.66% include social links. You probably can’t see it very well, but on the desktop monitor you can see the AI Overview I got when I googled “Pink Dog Digital GEO,” which is one of our services. On the third bullet point, one of the sources cited is actually our Instagram page, and that’s because we made an Instagram post about it. Google especially loves Instagram captions, and there’s another stat on here about that. That shows Google is paying attention to what you post on social media, and it might use what you post to answer the questions people have. So it’s definitely worth writing captions for things like FAQs. That’s another way to get those answers out there beyond posting them on your website.
The second statistic: LinkedIn ranks number two in citations, appearing in 11% of AI responses on average. That’s based on a survey of about 325,000 different ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI prompts, and LinkedIn was the number two most cited website, which is pretty wild when you think about it. That’s great news for small businesses and for individual entrepreneurs with their own personal profiles. The things you post are visible to these platforms, they can be used in AI answers, and when people ask questions, your LinkedIn posts might be consulted.
Interestingly, it doesn’t say it on this slide, but for ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode specifically, most of the LinkedIn content that gets cited comes from personal pages, not company pages. If you do social with us, you’ve heard this recommendation a million times: personal pages are worth their weight in gold. We always recommend posting on your personal page, not just your company page. That shows these AI search engines are looking at what you specifically are posting on LinkedIn, not just your company. So don’t be afraid to share things about your products, your services, or even customer reviews on your personal page as well.
And then there’s Instagram. A citation is kind of like a footnote when you’re writing a paper in college, saying “This is where I got the information.” And 97.6% of citations pointing to Instagram come from Google’s AI answers, meaning AI Overviews or Gemini. So Google is reading your Instagram captions and your Instagram profile. It’s paying attention even if you don’t think it is, which is great news, because if you have accurate information there, you’re feeding more accurate information into Google. Coral, if you want to go to the next slide.
What AI Looks for on Your Social Profiles
KM: All right, perfect. Next: what is AI actually looking at on your profiles? I included a screenshot of our Instagram just for reference.
First is activity. Are you posting? When was your last post? If you haven’t posted since 2023, unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you’re in business anymore. Customers are going to go to your page and ask, “Are they closed? Are they still open? Are they still doing the same stuff?” Even if you have a website, if somebody searches for you on Instagram or Facebook and sees that you’re not active, they’re going to assume you’re probably no longer in business, just to be blunt.
Just like Gina was saying about web content, specific always beats generic. Anybody can go on and post “Happy Monday,” but that’s not giving any information to AI or to your customers. I’d really encourage everyone to think about making posts that include valuable information you want feeding into these platforms. On our own social, we’re not just saying “Happy Monday” or “Good morning.” If you look at our feed, we’re posting “Personal Branding 101” with an informative caption, or “Five Ways We Filled an Apartment Complex with Digital Ads,” which focuses on a case study we did, and we’re able to get some of that information out through our Instagram posts and captions. I’d say two or three posts a week will always do more than posting a bunch for one month, taking a couple of months off, getting back into it for a couple of months, and then taking a couple more months off.
The next big thing, which Cory was talking about, is accuracy. Is your name correct? Is your address correct? Is your phone number correct? If you have hours listed, especially on your Facebook page, do they match everything else? If you have your website linked, is it the correct website, or is it your old one at whatever.weebly.com? That’s really important as well.
Then specificity. What does your bio say? What do you do? Can people tell what you do when they pull up your LinkedIn page or your Instagram bio? And where do you work? If you have a service area, is it listed? If I go to your page, can I tell you work in Maryland so I can give you a call? Do you work in Pennsylvania? Can I use you?
The last thing is to link back to your website. That gives you a through line from your website to all of your social platforms, and it makes it easy for people to make sure they have the right business. Earlier I mentioned businesses with similar names. This is another way to make sure everybody knows you are you.
All right, and one last slide, I think, Coral. Okay, perfect. Here’s what I would recommend: check your profiles. I find so many businesses get excited when they first start on social media. They make their Facebook page, their Instagram page, all these things, and then they set it and forget it. Is the information currently on your profiles accurate? Are you still doing those things? Is that still your service area? Are there different services you might want to emphasize more now? Make sure all of those places accurately state what you do and where you do it.
Make sure your name matches, and that includes your handle if possible. You can find us at Pink Dog Digital on Instagram, and you can find us at Pink Dog Digital on Facebook. Are your handles similar? I know that’s not always possible, but if it is, try to use the same one. And again: same phone number, same hours, and the same link to your website. Just close the loop and make sure everything matches.
Okay, so the last piece of the puzzle is how you know any of this is working, and I’ll hand it back off.
Measuring What’s Working
GR: I mentioned it before: we’ve got a lot of people whose traffic is actually going down, not even just staying the same. It’s okay. We don’t care about traffic. It’s a vanity number. We want visibility, and we want conversions.
Ask people how they found you. Add it to your forms. Go to the AI platforms, put yourself in, and ask about your business once a month. Check these things out. Claim your Google, Apple Maps, Bing, and Facebook profiles. Fix any inconsistencies. Answer your questions. Respond to your reviews. Post consistently. Repurpose what you’ve got.
It doesn’t matter how many people hit your website. It matters how many people hit the content that answers the questions they have.
One thing I want to point out, and it is a shameless plug: we do have an AI visibility audit that we offer to our clients and the friendlies in the room. If you’re interested in finding out where you show up in AI, we have a tool we’ve built that can show you that information.
We’ve gone over our allotted time, which normally happens when I’m in the room. Are there any questions from people in the room that they’d like us to answer in the remaining five minutes?
Q&A: How Long Does This Take to Work?
CN: I’m watching the chat, and I’m not seeing a lot. Someone is typing. I’m also not surprised you went over on this one, because we’re all pretty passionate about and interested in how this works. We could probably have broken this up into four different webinars, but this is a very good foundational place to start. One of the most common questions I see for things like this is: how long does it take for some of this to work?
GR: Yeah, the answer is kind of twofold. Things like listings and citations are impactful immediately. They show up as soon as you hit send. Content and review momentum can take a long time. It’s ongoing work, not a one-stop shop. As I mentioned, there’s a recency bias you’re battling, so you have to keep it up.
Long ago I used a liposuction reference. Coral has brought it into 2026 with the difference between Ozempic and the gym. Ozempic is great. It’s fast. But the minute you stop doing it, it goes away. Taking care of your website, taking care of your citations, getting reviews, nurturing your FAQ page and your location pages: that’s like going to the gym. That’s where you get the real rewards.
If you don’t have the time to do all of this work, I encourage you to either hire someone internally or bring in someone from outside, like us, to help you. And once again, I want to offer that AI visibility tool we have. If you’d like to see where you’re at, please email one of us. It’s simple: Coral, Cory, Katie, or Gina at Pink Dog Digital. You can find us through the website or on social media, or you can text me. Most of you have my cell phone number.
Final thoughts, team?
Final Thoughts
CN: As a final thought, the main takeaways here are that the more places you pop up, and the more broadly you’re getting your name and your information out there right now, the better you’re going to do. It’s time-consuming and it’s a lot of work, but it is going to help.
CW: I know a lot of this seems very confusing and changes by the day, and for those of us in the industry, it can also be very confusing and change by the day. But if you’re looking for an excellent way to start, just use ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool and ask it what it thinks about your business. That’s usually a good place to get some jumping-off points.
GR: Yep, that’s great, Katie.
KM: The last thing I would say is that we have your back. I know things are changing really quickly, but we’re doing our best to change with them and to keep everyone ahead of the curve, not behind it. If you ever have questions, or you’re ever concerned about whether your strategy is the right strategy, we’re always here to help and offer our perspective, so you’re not flying blind. You have us. That’s what I would say.
GR: Right. And I just want to thank my team. They do a wonderful job each and every day, and I am very fortunate to have each and every one of them. With that, we wish you well on the rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing everybody again in a month. Thanks, everyone!
