# Surfaced — SEO & AI Search Advisory SEO and AI search advisory from Andrew Riker. Improve website and brand visibility with clear priorities, practical strategy, and guidance for your team. Founder: Andrew Riker (Founder, Surfaced). Contact: andrew@getsurfaced.co. Newsletter: https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/ --- # Services ## Explorer — Find the gaps. Set the priorities. URL: https://getsurfaced.co/services/explorer For teams that need a clearer picture of their SEO and AI search opportunities. I assess your current visibility, website and content foundations, and competitive landscape, then recommend where to focus first. A useful starting point when: You need a clearer diagnosis before deciding what deserves attention and investment. Deliverables: - SEO and AI search visibility assessment - Customer questions and competitor research - Technical accessibility and content gap review - Prioritized recommendations with supporting evidence We start with what your business wants to achieve and how your customers look for information. I review the search experiences that matter in your category alongside your website, content, and available performance data. The assessment looks for meaningful gaps: where you’re missing relevant visibility, where content falls short of customer questions, and where technical foundations may be limiting discovery. You leave with a prioritized set of recommendations, the evidence behind them, and a clear explanation of the trade-offs. Outcomes: - A baseline for the agreed search surfaces and customer questions - An assessment of important visibility, content, and technical gaps - Recommendations ranked by likely value, effort, and confidence ## Architect — Build a plan your team can put to work. URL: https://getsurfaced.co/services/architect For teams ready to turn their findings into a coordinated search program. We connect business goals with content priorities, measurement, ownership, and a roadmap your team can realistically deliver. A useful starting point when: You understand the situation and need a coordinated strategy your team can realistically deliver. Deliverables: - SEO and AI search strategy - Content priorities and optimization guidance - Measurement framework and reporting recommendations - Team playbooks, workshops, and enablement We turn your business goals and available research into a search strategy. Existing audits and reporting help establish the starting point. Together, we define which opportunities deserve investment, what your content needs to accomplish, and how to measure progress. We also identify owners and dependencies so the plan fits how your organization works. Workshops and practical guidance help your team understand the decisions and apply them as new questions come up. Outcomes: - A roadmap tied to business priorities - A content and optimization plan - A measurement framework with clear limitations - Shared guidance for the people doing and approving the work ## Embedded — A forward-deployed search advisor inside your team. URL: https://getsurfaced.co/services/embedded For businesses that need ongoing guidance as priorities evolve. I work with your team to review performance, shape decisions, plan tests, and help stakeholders understand the work. A useful starting point when: You need experienced guidance as priorities, performance, and the search landscape change. Deliverables: - Regular strategy sessions and agreed support between meetings - Roadmap review and prioritization - Test planning and performance interpretation - Team coaching and leadership communication I join your planning rhythm with an agreed cadence for strategy sessions and support between meetings. We review results, work through decisions, and adjust priorities as your business and the search landscape change. That can include evaluating recommendations, planning tests, interpreting performance, or preparing the case for a new investment. The aim is to give your team experienced guidance and build its confidence in making search decisions over time. Outcomes: - Senior input into ongoing search decisions - Regular review of priorities, tests, and performance - Clearer communication between leadership and delivery teams - Stronger internal search knowledge ## The process - Understand: Assess your business goals, audience behavior, current search performance, and the team and processes responsible for the work. - Prioritize: Agree on what to tackle now, what needs testing, and what belongs further down the roadmap. - Measure: Establish a baseline and connect progress to the outcomes that matter to your business. - Align: Help the people approving and doing the work understand the priorities, evidence, and next steps. ## Common service questions Q: What do you mean by SEO and AI search visibility? A: How your website and brand appear when people look for relevant information through search engines and AI tools. We examine the search experiences that matter to your audience, including results, answers, brand mentions, and links to your content. Q: How does this relate to our existing SEO work? A: We build from your existing program. Technical accessibility, useful content, and understanding your audience remain important. We also examine how AI search presents your business and which additional research, content, or measurement your team needs. Q: How do you measure progress? A: We agree on measures that fit your goals and available data. These can include relevant search visibility, brand representation in a defined set of AI answers, qualified visits, and conversions. AI visibility tracking is directional, so we document what we’re measuring and where attribution is incomplete. Q: Do you work with our existing agency? A: Yes. I work alongside internal teams and agency partners to clarify priorities, evaluate opportunities, and connect the work to business goals. Q: Who handles implementation? A: Your internal team or delivery partners own implementation. My role covers assessment, strategy, prioritization, measurement guidance, and enablement, with responsibilities agreed in the scope. Q: Which engagement should we start with? A: That depends on what you already know and where you need support. Explorer helps establish the situation, Architect develops the plan, and Embedded provides ongoing advisory. We can tailor the scope around existing work. --- # Writing ## Taste, artistry, and judgment URL: https://getsurfaced.co/blog/taste-artistry-and-judgment Published: 2026-09-07 · Topic: Point of view · ~7 min read Taste, artistry, and judgment are becoming the most valuable things you own as AI makes output effectively infinite. "AI is going to take my job," someone in tech tells their therapist. "I'm prompting myself out of a job," someone says to a colleague while pushing Claude as far as it goes, probably ending up on LinkedIn Lunatics. "Maybe I should just get out of tech." That's where a lot of smart people land after watching the cuts roll through 2026 like butter...."go to the blue collar jobs", says boomers. But, the anxiety is earned. TrueUp counted 783 tech layoff events in 2025, nearly a QUARTER MILLION PEOPLE, or about 674 a day. In 2026 the run rate is 760 a day. Big oof. You might have heard it, but taste, artistry, and judgment are about to be the most valuable things you own (along with becoming a systems thinker). Let's get into it. ### What people are reaching for As tools multiply and output goes effectively infinite, people reach for whatever still feels human. People connect with people. AI companions and Discord servers do a decent impression of connection, and they don't replace sitting across from someone you trust. In business, the marketer in me looks for the same thing in a different wrapper: - Primary customer research / Sales calls, support tickets, surveys - Information gain / Firsthand accounts. Things that actually happened to you - Proprietary data / Zero-party and first-party data that paints a picture only you can paint Search agents and LLMs are hunting for exactly this material, and it's one of the few durable ways a business stays differentiated and authoritative. But the more interesting stuff sits underneath (or within!). ### Taste Did you ever look up to someone because of their taste in movies, music, food, clothes? You took their word over a Reddit thread with 400 upvotes. You bought what they were selling. You were subscribed to what they were about. That's the influencer economy in one sentence. Parasocial bonds aren't always good for us, and they're real: people form one-sided attachments to figures they'll never meet, and those attachments get stronger when connection is thin everywhere else. The industry understood that early and built a $32 billion market on it (Influencer Marketing Hub). Underneath the commercial version, all of us run a private ledger of good and bad experiences that makes us individuals. It's close to impossible to replicate, which is why marketers settle for lookalike audiences and call it personalization. We are all running off of synthetic this or that or emulate what people are really doing (prompts, personas, etc.). That ledger is your fingerprint as a human, a user, a creator. What someone posts is their taste, dressed up a little, but still theirs and what they've lived, seen, or survived :) Taste is the collection of experiences you draw from. ### Artistry The pull to create can't be manufactured...it feels almost supernatural. It shows up as an unhinged dinner party, an unusual angle on a blog post, when people say "the quiet part out loud". Call it creativity, ye ole' left brain or right brain... it's powerful when it hits. Sticking to business: artistry colors outside the lines sometimes. Brand guidelines, voice and tone docs, design systems, those are guardrails so nobody drives into a ditch. That makes sense for companies that need control over what goes into the world. The version I keep running into looks like this. I took a discovery call this summer with a company about to launch a marketplace in a deeply unglamorous industry. No traffic, backlinks, no brand. Every playbook, human or machine, says lead with the gap analysis and sell them the climb. I led with the thing they were embarrassed about instead. Being pre-launch is an architectural advantage. Nobody has to unwind ten years of a CMS someone else built, or renegotiate a taxonomy with four internal owners, or explain to a VP why the category page they love has to go. They get to build the machine-readable version first, while their entrenched competitors pay down debt they can't see. That angle isn't in a prompt. It came from watching enterprise teams spend eighteen months undoing decisions made before they got there. You fall on your face, or see missteps, and you bake it into how you approach things in the future. I still use lessons from 2008 when I got into marketing. The decisions you make are your artistry. They come out of experience, ideas, and the willingness to break from average. It is kinda about risk, too. Research led me to find a quote from Wolfgang Messner at the University of South Carolina, where he made the point well in his piece on AI and the cognitive revolution: real creativity takes conceptual leaps, cross-disciplinary thinking, and lived experience: "AI cannot invent the future. It can only remix the past." Deep, Wolfgang. deep. AI slop is the antithesis of artistry! ### Judgment Who decides what's "best"? A model can run across most of what humans have written down and tell you, against a defined set of criteria, what the best option probably is. But do most people give it the criteria that matter? Nope. When I use AI for anything I'm creating, I make it ask me at least 10 questions first (something I find very valuable when working with AI). "What are the best running shoes?" is a different question from "what are the best trail running shoes for British Columbia in April, packed in a carry-on?" You won't get the same answer, and that's the point. AI answers what you asked with what it has. Now ask a friend whether you look better in jeans or shorts. You get access to an emotional being's bias, perception, lived experience, relationship with you, and personal sense of style. You get a mirror back. If they're good at empathy, maybe they set themselves aside and give you something closer to objective. Let me give you a live example of judgment as a rule rather than a vibe. I built a chained research pipeline out of Claude skills that turns a full day of market monitoring into about an hour of editing. The rule I hard-coded into every one of them: every finding carries a dated source link. Not because the model lies exactly, but because it will hand you a citation that looks right, reads well, and points to a journal that doesn't exist or it comes. I don't want that. I know because it happened in the first draft of this post. A confident, tidy citation to a publication nobody has ever published in. The pipeline is fast. The rule is judgment. And the rule only exists because clean-looking data has burned me before. In business, that's what judgment is, the thing someone builds through history and pedigree. I was Head of SEO at BrightEdge, led AI and Search at Intuit where LLM referral traffic grew 769% and converted about 4% better than other channels, and ran Market Insights at Brandlight, an AI visibility platform. When I say a product has bad UX, that statement has two enterprise search platforms standing behind it :) Your message should transmit that trust. It's how the top advisors and consultants got where they are. They have the wisdom, and they use it to call something good or bad, worth it or not, from a body of experience that took years to build. Pascal Bornet argues the same thing in Irreplaceable: AI can simulate human abilities, but those abilities rest on " our individual life experiences, our human emotions" and personalities that technology doesn't have. He's a great follow. ### Hard to write into a .skill file Taste is the closest to replicable, given how much it resembles building a knowledge graph of familiar entities. Artistry isn't, no matter how clever the prompt. It's more...poetic and can't be systemized. Judgment needs so much context that it's difficult to build at scale, especially when most of the variables never make it into the system in the first place. I say this as someone who has automated a lot of his own work. I've built a stack of custom skills that handle research, monitoring, audits, and reporting, and I hand the prototypes to internal teams so they can build the durable version themselves. I have no interest in being the guy who hoards the expertise...I want to build champion and championship programs with Surfaced. I also built a search maturity assessment and I refuse to turn it into a gated download. Everyone in growth marketing will tell you to make it a lead magnet, capture the email, run the nurture sequence. I'd rather people talk to me to find out where they land, because the interesting part was never the score. It's the ten minutes after, when someone says "yeah, but you don't know how our budget cycle works," and they're right, and that changes the answer. That's the part I won't automate. Not because I can't, but because the conversation is the product. As AI expands the space of possible outputs, the hard part becomes choosing well: what's valuable, what's feasible, what's worth doing at all. AI will make you feel like you're perpetually behind. It won't take your job if you remember how much of creating, building, and marketing happens outside the walls of a data center. ![]() Hope you enjoyed. ## The Value of Voice: A 2026 Bet for AI Search URL: https://getsurfaced.co/blog/the-value-of-voice-a-2026-bet-for-ai-search Published: 2026-08-13 · Topic: AI search · ~9 min read Audio might be the next big thing for AI search—and a durable way for brands to create original, retrievable information. I consulted my astrologist last week. She said audio is the next big play. I've been making this bet in conversations for a few months now and it's time to write it down, including the parts where the data doesn't fully cooperate (you'll see below). The short tldr; version: - most brands are pouring budget into the one format that got commoditized to zero - most treat the formats that are still expensive to fake as a brand awareness play measured in downloads. - Finding your context layer through audio and video will help you craft that moat you want That's backwards, and the citation data I’ve been seeing is starting to show it. ### The slop math is more interesting than the slop panic You already know the headline number. Graphite sampled 65,000 English-language articles and found AI-generated share went from roughly 10% in late 2022 to 52% by October 2025, then plateaued around a 50/50 split. Every LinkedIn post about the death of the internet cites it. The second Graphite finding is the one nobody quotes, and it's better. When they looked at what Google actually surfaces, 86% of the articles in search results were human-written. Only 14% were AI. This was data from October, so grain of salt now. So the slop is real, it just isn't winning. What it did was reset the floor. Machine content made publishing cost roughly nothing, and your content now has to clear a bar that used to be cleared by simply existing. Fifty pages a month used to be a moat. Now it's the price of entry, and it's an entry fee anyone can pay with a credit card and a prompt! This is also why I keep seeing the same shape in data I see. Visibility spikes for six or eight weeks, then flattens, then slides. The best folks like Lily Ray, Cyrus Shepard and others are finding this all the time. ### The closed loop does not break through I say this with love, because I've watched genuinely smart teams do it. They ask an AI tool what topics to cover. They ask an AI tool to draft the coverage. They ask an AI tool to optimize the draft for AI retrieval. Then they wonder why the output has the same density of original information as everything else in the category. No new information entered the system at any point. It's a closed loop. You put the model's understanding of the world in, and you got the model's understanding of the world back out, formatted nicely. Google has been telling us the answer to this for years and we've been treating it as a compliance checkbox. Information gain. First-hand experience. E-E-A-T. Proprietary data. All of it is one instruction wearing four outfits: publish something that wasn't already in the index. And in July, a survey of 45 GEO studies published between November 2023 and July 2026 landed on arXiv with a conclusion that should have been a bigger deal than it was: no evaluated technique consistently improved discoverability, traffic, or business outcomes across platforms. I covered it in the newsletter. Some rewrites actually REDUCED retrieval. Structure isn't the differentiator anymore, cause, well, everyone can have structure. Schema is a solved problem you can buy with your dev team cycles. What's left is whether you know something that your competitors don’t. ### Your brain is the last proprietary database Every team I work with has a first-party data problem, and almost none of them have a first-party data shortage. They just are not using it, most likely. They have sales calls where the same objection surfaces for the eleventh time. Support tickets nobody has read as a corpus. A VP who can explain exactly why the standard approach in their category fails at scale, and has never written it down because writing it down would take four hours and she doesn't have four hours. Try to get that out of her as a blog post and you'll get a calendar invite that slips three times. Put her on a mic for forty minutes with someone asking good questions and you'll get more original thinking than her last six months of content calendar produced. Talking is the cheapest extraction method we have for the stuff only you know. It's not a new observation, journalists have run on it forever. What's new is that the extraction now compounds into a machine-readable asset instead of dying in a Google Doc. ### The transcript is the asset This is the part people miss when they hear "invest in video." AI engines aren't watching your webinar. With the partial exception of Google's own ecosystem, they're reading whatever text sits on the page: transcript, show notes, metadata, schema. Audio and video are the capture method. Text is what gets retrieved. The Podcast Citation Index study out of Everything-PR made this brutally clear, too. They tracked 5,214 citations across 187 shows from December 2025 through May 2026, and the finding buried in their methodology matters more than the rankings did. Most shows that missed the top ten missed on transcript access, not content quality. If the engines can't crawl the words, the show doesn't exist to them. Two decades of SEO people have been saying transcripts matter. They were right for the wrong reason, and now they're right for a much better one: a one-hour conversation transcribed and published on a page you own becomes a permanent retrieval anchor. Which also means the podcast you host on Spotify and Apple only, with no episode page and no transcript, is invisible. You built the asset and then rented it to platforms that don't share it to help build that a sweet, sweet search equity. ### What the citation data says, and where it argues with itself Now the fun part, because the numbers here are genuinely messy. ![YouTube leads in Google AI Overview mentions in June 2026, securing 20.9% of the share out of nearly 3 million prompts analyzed in the U.S.]() YouTube leads in Google AI Overview mentions in June 2026, securing 20.9% of the share out of nearly 3 million prompts analyzed in the U.S. The bullish case: Ahrefs' Brand Radar looked at 1.9 million citations across a million AI Overviews in July 2026 and found youtube.com as the single most-cited domain at 21.1% mention share. Other studies put it between 20.9% and 29.5% depending on the window and sample. BrightEdge has it at 16.6% in AI Mode. Adweek's January investigation across 6.1 million citations found YouTube had overtaken Reddit as the most-cited social platform, appearing in around 16% of LLM answers, generating 18x the citations of Instagram and 50x TikTok. The bearish case: from the same body of research: ChatGPT cites YouTube at roughly 0.2%. Otterly's analysis of 100 million-plus citations found only 5.54% of all citations came from social and video platforms at all, with YouTube taking about a third of that slice. And Otterly reports Gemini's chat surface barely touches YouTube, even as Google's search-integrated surfaces lean on it heavily. ![Otterly AI Looking at Gemini's YouTube Citation Share]() Otterly AI Looking at Gemini's YouTube Citation Share Both things are true because they're measuring different denominators on different products. "YouTube is the most-cited domain" and "video is 5% of citations" are not in conflict. One is share within AI Overviews, the other is share of everything. So be precise about what you're buying. This is a Google-surface bet first, a Perplexity bet second, and close to a non-bet on ChatGPT today. If your buyers live in ChatGPT (it’s hard to even know that unless you’re doing self-reported attribution cause referral is so low, video is a slower play. I'd still make it. Google is where the volume is, Google owns the video platform, and Google's models process the visual, the spoken audio, and the metadata as one input. Nobody else has that integration and nobody else can buy what they’ve curated over a couple decades. ### You need an audience AND you need to be retrievable The stat that changed how I talk about this: in Otterly's 2026 study, 40.8% of AI-cited videos had fewer than 1,000 views at the time they were cited. Read that again if you run a brand channel with 400 subscribers and have been told it isn't worth the effort. Citation is uncorrelated with popularity. The engine isn't looking for the video everyone watched, it's looking for the passage that answers the question cleanly, from a source it has reason to trust. Your 300-view customer-education video with a clean transcript and a real answer in it can beat a creator with a million subscribers who never published theirs. So, it’s about the retrieval, but also distribution is the moat that some companies have over others, and having an engaged audience is obviously very important. ### The attention argument, which is the one I actually believe most Set the citation data aside for a second. Audio is the only content format people consume while doing something else. Driving, running, weeding the garden, walking the dog (My Scout & Tilly are good girls). ![Scout likes being slept on.]() Scout likes being slept on. Nothing else in your mix gets to borrow time from an activity that isn't content consumption. Every article you publish is competing for the scarcest resource on earth, time. And the supply side is asymmetric in a way that I don't think is priced in yet. An affiliate operator can push 100 pages a week without breaking a sweat. Nobody has figured out how to fake being in a room with someone for an hour, taking hard questions, unscripted, with a recognizable voice and a name attached. If provenance and authorship signals get any weight in future models, and I'd put decent odds on it given where the publisher fights are heading, the archive of you talking is worth more than the archive of you publishing. ### Where this breaks In 4 areas: You make video slop. Same closed loop, new format. AI-scripted talking head reading an AI-generated outline into a webcam is not first-hand experience, it's the same commodity content with worse production values and a longer production cycle. If the person on camera isn't saying something they'd defend in an argument, don't record it. You publish to platforms you don't own. Spotify, Apple, and YouTube are distribution. The episode page on your domain, with the full transcript, speaker attribution, headings that mirror how buyers actually phrase questions, and PodcastEpisode plus AudioObject schema, that's the asset. Platform-only is a bet on the platform's continued cooperation with each AI surface, and that cooperation is being renegotiated constantly. Ask Reddit and Google how their deal is going. You measure it with the wrong scoreboard. Downloads and watch time are attention metrics. Fine for the social team, useless for this. The scoreboard is whether the transcript gets retrieved and cited, and whether you show up when your buyer asks the question. Nobody owns it. This is the one that actually kinda kills it. It lands between brand, content, social, and demand gen, which means it lands nowhere. 61% of companies still haven't assigned AI search ownership to anyone. Adding an unowned podcast to that is just adding another orphan. ### If I were standing this up on Monday It would not be just a content project…more like a new system. Pick one recurring internal conversation that already happens and already contains original thinking. The monthly customer call review. The post-mortem. Whatever. The thing your sharpest SME explains to every new hire. Record it. You're not adding a meeting, you want to record the whole damn thing. Then build the pipeline once and stop thinking about it: record, transcribe, publish to an owned page with the transcript in HTML rather than a PDF, mark it up, cut the clips for distribution afterward. Clips are the byproduct that you share on the socials. The page is the point you need for search. Two mediocre conversations a month beat one beautifully produced quarterly thing, because you're building a corpus. And give it a name on someone's goals. Their personal goals. Give them a bonus if they do it! The diagnostic question I'd ask your team this week: what did we publish last quarter that literally no other company in our category could have published? If it takes more than ten seconds to answer, you already have your content strategy for the rest of the year, and it starts with turning a microphone on, and understanding the VALUE of VOICE. ## When technology allows creation to outpace distribution URL: https://getsurfaced.co/blog/when-technology-allows-creation-to-outpace-distribution Published: 2026-07-09 · Topic: Point of view · ~4 min read When creation becomes frictionless, distribution, community, and first-party relationships become the durable advantage. I've been chewing on something Greg Isenberg wrote, something he called "The Great Flip." It's been rattling around in my head for weeks, and I want to build on it with what I'm seeing in AI search. A decade ago, developers were the kings. Tech was booming, products were moats, and the best engineering minds got golden handcuffs at companies building the next big platform. Engineers ran the show. Product was just whatever those engineers could pull off. Marketing and distribution were an afterthought, because the thing itself was rare enough to sell on its own (Isenberg, "Marketers are the New Engineers"). ![]() I remember trying to figure out app development back in 2012. It felt like witchcraft. Not something you picked up in a weekend, the platforms were arcane, and the whole thing sat comfortably outside anything I understood. I was a search and data guy at the time, watching keyword traffic and conversion data tell me exactly how people found what they needed. Attribution felt solved back then in a way it doesn't now. Now it's 2026, and the buyer journey looks nothing like that. Google's Zero Moment of Truth research puts the average buyer at 7 to 11 touchpoints across at least four channels before they decide anything. That number keeps climbing every year brands find a new surface to show up on. B2B deals now run 25-plus touchpoints over ten months with 11-plus stakeholders weighing in, according to Gartner. A lot of that research happens where you can't see it: word of mouth, dark social, gated communities, consultants people trust. When someone's about to spend real money on software, they want a person to vouch for it, because comparison content gets manufactured constantly and buyers have caught on. GrowthSpree found buyers work through 20 to 30 pieces of content, review sites, peer groups, podcasts, analyst reports, before they ever talk to a vendor, and almost none of it happens where you can track it. Now ChatGPT recommends the vendor because it trained on that same content. Is that actually different, or just a new coat of paint on the same problem? That's been the arc of the last fifteen years. Now look at where we actually are. Tools like Canva and Lovable handed creation to people who were never trained for it. Canva's whole pitch was pulling the entire design stack into one page anyone could use.. The skills that used to gatekeep an entire industry got commoditized because the tools got that intuitive. Hand my 70-year-old mother a copy of Lovable or Wix's MCP tools and she could build something real. If she wanted to sell off everything sitting in her basement, I could snap photos with Google Lens, catalog the lot, and she'd have a working storefront by dinner. A plumber can photograph every job he does this week and turn it into how-to content for local search. None of that required an engineering degree five years ago. The moat around building digital products, sites, apps, tools, is gone. So what happens when the thing that made Silicon Valley powerful gets handed to everyone? The people who used to be untouchable get a little less untouchable. What replaces them? Distribution does. You've heard the line, it's not what you know, it's who you know. When making content is basically frictionless thanks to decent phones and generative AI, the audience holds the power now, not the creator. Community is the one advantage that compounds and can't be copied (AdAge, "Brand Community Strategy"). ### What's next? I see three things happening because of it: Gatekeepers are losing their grip. Platforms and studios used to decide what got seen. Now, audiences decide through merit and algorithmic sharing. If you're not building directly with your audience, you're not staying relevant. Niche beats demographic. Age and gender bands don't predict behavior the way they used to. People organize around shared passions and values now, and reaching them means finding where your specific tribe actually hangs out, not blasting a generic message at a broad segment. First-party data is the whole game. Renting attention from someone else's platform is a losing bet long-term. Watch how influence actually moves now: a colleague mentions a brand in Slack, someone asks ChatGPT about it, the AI backs it up, they Google the brand name, and land on the site. Gartner says 75% of B2B marketers are already shifting to first-party data strategies to protect their pipeline. The companies getting this right are building owned channels so they control the message and own the data, instead of borrowing both. Nobody's talking about what this actually means for marketers. While people panic about AI taking their jobs, the job itself is about to matter more, not less. What's actually scarce now is artistry, storytelling, judgment, and taste. The person who can look at a human being and know exactly what they need to hear before they click buy or tell a friend. Cowork automating your workflow or Codex shipping your code, that's table stakes soon. The marketer becomes the orchestrator, the one person stitching together zero, first, and third-party data into copy and campaigns that actually move people. So if the product isn't the moat anymore, ask yourself who's actually vouching for you right now, in the group chats and Slack threads and ChatGPT answers you'll never see. If you don't know, that's the whole game you're not playing. The Great Flip. Spot on, Greg. ## David vs. Goliath: why Google isn't going anywhere URL: https://getsurfaced.co/blog/david-vs-goliath-why-google-isn-t-going-anywhere Published: 2026-06-16 · Topic: AI search · ~6 min read Google's search data, Gmail, commerce infrastructure, business profiles, and YouTube create an advantage AI-native challengers cannot easily copy. Lots of companies are cashing in on this AI wave, and we'll see which platforms are left standing when the dust settles. You'd be led to believe OpenAI and Anthropic are accelerating faster than Google (true) and are destined to dominate (are they, or is there a glass ceiling?). Acceleration tells one story. But rather than get misdirected by hype, let's look at what Google has that the others don't: - 20+ years of search data - Gmail - Universal Cart and shopping - Business profiles - YouTube ### SEARCH First, those 20+ years of search data. I remember when Google Webmaster Tools gave marketers insight into how people were searching. Fast forward 20 years, and it hasn't changed all that much. We recently got AI Search impressions added - cool- but attribution to what actually drives revenue still feels like a Rube Goldberg machine at times. Google likely has more personal data than any company on earth, down to a profile of who people are and what they're interested in. They literally know if someone Googles "how to hide a body." Despite the acceleration of other channels over the last two years, none of this can be built without users filtering through your platform first. Claude and Anthropic have an identity crisis, positioning themselves as tools for businesses while also being conversational search engines for consumers. It took Google decades to build its ecosystem, and the acceleration of these new platforms is rapid, but time will tell how they manage explosive growth and turn it into real momentum. ### GMAIL Now, your inbox. The thing you hold sacred and meticulously curate, the one that's representative of your interests, your shopping, your life. 22% of the global population uses it, about 1.8B monthly users. Google knows what kind of coffee I like because of my Trade subscription. It knows what music I like from the tickets I buy. It knows I'm purchasing video equipment. It knows which newsletters I'm subscribed to, and it reminds me of the meetings I have with my family. This becomes massive with Personal Intelligence, which Google announced earlier this year and again at I/O. It uses your Google apps to provide suggestions and context in results. ChatGPT has integrations in its 5.5 release to leverage your inbox, but it's not native the way it is with Google. This is a huge growth lever, and it's what will make Google feel more personal. Garrett Sussman from iPullRank ran a whole study on Personal Intelligence faster and better than I ever could. Props to this gentleman. The TL;DR: brand appearance rose from 23.9% to 66.8% in the Personal Intelligence account, and brands introduced through email appeared in 53.6% of responses, making inbox content a major AI Search variable. ### COMMERCE Now shopping. With a massive amount of conversion data from Google Ads and Google Pay, they're on the front foot in the agentic commerce era. Between the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), they're outfitting the largest retailers in the world with the technology to integrate with Google and be considered in this new era. Google came for your wallet in 2018 when Google Pay was introduced, because they wanted to own the transaction layer. The pieces are starting to fall into place: find what you're looking for using our search, organize your life using our apps, discover products through clean integrations, and buy using our rails. AI commerce is absolutely a thing and will continue to grow. People have used Google and trust them, so that's why they are throwing their credit card into Google Pay. Are they confident enough in OpenAI yet? Time will tell whether the adoption of commerce will fully make it's way to the AI-native search engines. Just over Q1 2026 Walmart and Amazon tested it, then sort of walked it back. The trust and confidence aren't there yet for consumers, but it will eventually get there with more familiarity. ### BUSINESS PROFILES Google is KING of local businesses and has been the leader in taking brick-and-mortar awareness digital. There are over 200M business profiles globally, and 76% of those are verified. Google Business Profiles was a huge infrastructure play that made sense for a consumer economy, another layer in Google's brilliance of owning the entire digital ecosystem for search and discovery. Google Maps ties it all together, giving consumers the tools to find businesses locally as they navigate from A to B. When people look locally, 87% of them use Google to find a business, smashing alternatives like Yelp, Facebook, or Apple Maps. Google even empowers businesses to add more and more information to their profiles, furthering its user-generated-content engine. ### YOUTUBE Lastly, YouTube has about 2.72B monthly users, with 1B hours of content watched every single day. Google I/O this year announced Ask YouTube, which basically turns the consumer platform into a new discovery channel by using transcripts to build a closed-loop ecosystem of information. Reddit is big, yeah, but YouTube is where content creators go. It's where influencers go. It's where people discover hobbies or products that are physical, or talk about ideas where people like to learn through media and not through text. The addition of YouTube content fueling Gemini is such a game-changer and something that the new players can't compete with. Nobody is creating content in the Anthropic ecosystem; OpenAI is not adding user-generated content. It's such a stark difference, you wonder how they will keep up with Google beyond leaning on partnership deals, crawling, and scraping to keep afloat. Google is in the driver's seat. ### WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The reason it's not just the sum of its parts, it's more, is that it's forming habitual dominance. YouTube's daily active user base combined with Gmail's daily usage creates a "habit loop." Users aren't just visiting Google for specific, one-off searches; they're living inside the environment. The AI multiplier: the rapid adoption of AI Mode (reaching 1 billion users in its first year, if you trust that) shows Google is successfully transitioning its massive existing user base into conversational commerce. Because these users are already logged into Gmail and YouTube, the AI has a 360-degree view of their preferences, enabling the kind of highly personalized "agentic" shopping assistance that a standalone search engine or chatbot can't match. And lastly, monetization efficiency. Because Google captures the user from the inspiration phase (YouTube) through the research phase (Search) to the transaction phase (Gmail and Google Pay), it can offer advertisers a more complete view of the customer journey than any other platform. It's not that they own one part of what people do online, they own practically all of it. Not using a Google product as part of your daily online activity feels crazy. Whether it's paying for something with GPay, checking your email, or searching for something, they're part of modern world infrastructure. So when entrants like the headline-grabbing OpenAIs and Anthropics come onto the scene without these decades of data and experience, you start to wonder what the underlying value is beyond the models themselves. ChatGPT used Google search to fuel its training data. Claude reportedly leans on Brave for search. When you see headlines about "AI exploding," think about the underlying economy these platforms sit on, and you'll quickly realize it's David vs. Goliath. I've mapped out the advantage Google has over today's headliners, hopefully painted a picture of why Google isn't going anywhere (short of getting broken up), and made you a little smarter the next time you hear about exploding numbers in the grand scheme of things. ## Enterprise AI Search Challenges URL: https://getsurfaced.co/blog/enterprise-ai-search-challenges Published: 2026-05-27 · Topic: Enterprise strategy · ~5 min read Five challenges enterprises face in AI search: executive buy-in, performance, budgets, strategy, and organizational friction. I have worked with agencies for 7 years, seeing all sorts of organizations from MIT to Pew Trusts, and worked at organizations like Intuit, the Royal Bank of Canada, and been in SEO/AEO platforms that cater to enterprise like BrightEdge and Brandlight. I’ve seen a lot of scenarios play out, and I want to share some learnings. And not all of this is purely a search problem. Let’s jump into it. First, enterprise organizations have a ton of challenges moving with technology. From procurement to enablement to execution, large organizations generally move slower because of red tape. Legal. Compliance. Sign-off. So much. Here is how I would bucket the (non-exhaustive) list: - ###### Executive buy-in — Internal positioning - ###### Proving performance — Attribution, measurement - ###### Securing budget (tech) — To help with efficiency & scale - ###### Strategy — Opportunity x goals - ###### Organizational friction — Siloed, horizontal alignment To win, it's about integration and human alignment. Let's break down these challenges I've witnessed. ### Executive buy-in How far up (to the board) and down the ladder do people understand the shift that's happening? How prepared are any of them to talk about the titanic shifts happening in search? Do they think this is just SEO 2.0, or do they understand the speed at which this is happening? Ask yourselves questions like this, and then think about how it ladders to organizational goals, and if it's even a priority this week, this quarter, this year. Disruption is happening all around us, but it's time we put a price tag on inaction. Education is extremely important, as executives have far too many things on their plate and conciseness is key, so you learn to be extremely succinct when creating plans, documentations, or strategy for senior leadership. ### Performance The attribution of AI is difficult; there's no sugarcoating it. There are proxies you can use, like Google's Monthly Search Volume for your brand, but there are a lot of factors that influence that. There's referral traffic and revenue associated, but that's only a small piece of the puzzle because the value of AI search is visibility to be in the consideration set, not the subset that transacted during that exact interaction. Due to the constant evolution of the space, the best we can get is directional at the moment. You can find your share of voice and share of citation — how often you are mentioned in the answers — and see how that changes over time and how much of certain markets you represent. There are new metrics that are important to AI search, and they are absolutely different from traditional search. Some have a big price tag, which brings us to... ### Budgets Most organizations will evolve their current SEO strategy. They will use the same technologies that have stapled on new "GEO features." Some will chase new solutions that crawl and query what's happening for their brand using prompts, a big market (that I was part of). Some might look for headcount, hiring people who are AI-fluent and can help build skills and infrastructure to produce content at scale or implement SEO recommendations for better eligibility and accessibility. Budgets should be looked at as scaler or optimization investments. Does this help from 0 to 1, or 1 to many? Does it help unburden the team and free them up to do things they want to do, or is it a build vs. buy conversation? Is it better to hire in-house or get an agency? Soon, AI surfaces will do what SEOs have been doing for a decade: integrate paid and organic into a holistic approach, because the channels and surfaces are the same and they are competing for attention. Paid shores up weak organic, and good organic reduces the need for paid. As ad placements are introduced, teams that have become "holistic search" will be advantaged. ### Strategy Strategy should not be a list of tactics. It should incorporate your organizational and digital goals. You need to understand how you are going to win in the context of your industry, your market, your product, or your business strategy. Slapping together a list of best practices based on a ChatGPT ask is not a strategy. Putting together a list of "stuff to do" is not moving toward a goal; it's actually fracturing your focus. I've seen 100-slide decks from agencies, and I've seen a tight 5 slides that cover strategy. It's not about the count; it's about the substance. Ultimately, strategy does not live in a PowerPoint — that's just for stakeholders — it lives in the micro-decisions you made to get there and the ones you'll be making after: - ###### WHO are the people or brands we should connect with to create value-added content? Saying "content marketing opportunities" is vague. - WHAT are the websites that our consumers are using to discover us? Just saying sites like Reddit or YouTube isn't enough. - WHEN are we measuring success? What does the timetable look like for understanding incremental gains? Saying "traffic" isn't the right metric. - WHERE are we strong or weak, and what is our advantage from a business perspective? Doing "playbooks" isn't one-size-fits-all. - HOW are we aligning across teams to get this done? Usually there's a driver and a RACI; ownership is flattened with AI. ### Industry and organizational friction I've worked at Intuit, I've worked at RBC, I've worked at BrightEdge serving enterprise customers, and I've led accounts at agencies with Fortune 500 clients. Friction is everywhere; you can't ignore it, and time-to-action is often one of the biggest hurdles. Different industries have different issues they need to face: some can't scale content, some have complex supply chains, and others have nothing stopping them but a plan. A few frictions I've seen: - ###### Financial services? Compliance and regulation. - Ecommerce? Scale and funnel optimization. - NGO? Internal politics and membership. Beyond even the industry-specific challenges, there's organizational friction. Getting an at-bat for a project, getting alignment for your annual OKRs, getting in front of ELTs to propose new headcount or budget — this stuff takes time, and ultimately it's about building trust. Navigating these waters can be challenging, and hopefully some of the wisdom and headaches I've endured can help you in your journey. --- # Newsletter issues - Google plays defense, Reddit takes a tumble (2026-09-01) — Goto redirects, an 86% citation collapse, and where the maturity matrix stops short. https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/p/surfaced-ai-search-intelligence-september-1st - Cloudflare enters the arena, and who owns AEO (2026-08-17) — The company that can see the traffic is now scoring the visibility everyone else infers. https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/p/surfaced-ai-search-intelligence-august-17th - Publisher deals unravel, 45 studies say nothing works (2026-08-03) — Reddit's Google deal winds down, and whether you should hire a Head of AEO. https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/p/surfaced-ai-search-intelligence-august-3rd - Exposure up, clicks down, trust wobbly (2026-07-15) — AI Overviews in 48% of searches, referrals converting at 5x, and trust down 28 points. https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/p/surfaced-ai-search-intelligence-july-15th - Last-touch is hiding most of your AI conversions (2026-07-01) — Last-touch showed 0.9% of conversions from AEO. Self-reported showed 9%. https://newsletter.getsurfaced.co/p/surfaced-search-intelligence-july-1st # Apps and artifacts - SEO + AEO reporting dashboard — Search and AI performance tied to business outcomes, with goals, input metrics, and owners in one view. https://claude.ai/code/artifact/c50f695a-e430-40d1-aabc-33d5cb3f202a - AI search intelligence agent — An automated research workflow that crawls industry news, research, and social threads through Andrew's context layer. https://d9e457cc-f179-4944-9923-b5a737f40096.usrfiles.com/ugd/d9e457_6963237597014420992af3b9ad7eecc1.pdf - Lightweight AI search audit — A prototype that reads a page like a crawler and answer engine, then returns ranked fixes. https://d9e457cc-f179-4944-9923-b5a737f40096.usrfiles.com/ugd/d9e457_786458993ad541b1ac34a96cc8fc9919.pdf - Global LLM Usage Atlas — How LLM usage breaks down across 25 countries and eight platforms using first- and third-party sources. https://surfaced-global-llm-usage.lovable.app/ Total articles: 5. 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