AI assistants decide whether to name your company based mostly on what other websites say about you. This week Michael lays out the three programs Victorious runs to get more of those websites talking, and the two things that have to be in place first.

In this episode:

* The three programs, broadest to most targeted: mention building, link building, citation outreach

* Why mentions beat links for AI visibility, per Ahrefs's 75,000-brand study

* The two foundations: an in-house expertise program, and co-occurrence

* Michael's case for paid placements, and the one word in Google's guidance it rests on

* How citation outreach starts: 20 to 50 buyer prompts and a monthly list of 50 pages

Find all the sources referenced in this episode on the Victorious website: [EPISODE PAGE URL]

Chapter Headings

0:00 Intro

1:32 News: Google says to review AI content before publishing

3:45 Google is paying some publishers for AI answers

4:56 AI Overviews on most branded searches

6:32 The three programs, defined

8:24 Why mentions beat links

9:18 Foundation one: an expertise program

13:07 Foundation two: co-occurrence

15:44 Mention building: nine ways to get on other sites

18:37 Press releases

20:53 The case for paid placements

23:25 Link building: the four-level review

26:07 Citation outreach

27:28 Four kinds of citations

28:45 Working the top 50 pages every month

Sources

Google Search Central, "Guidance on using generative AI content," updated October 1, 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content

Search Engine Roundtable, "Google: Manually Factcheck & Review AI-Generated Content For Accuracy," October 1, 2026, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-ai-content-guidelines-factcheck-review-42217.html

Search Engine Roundtable, "Google Paying ~100 Publishers 0.1% Of Ad Revenue In AI Contribution Pilot" (citing The Information, September 29, 2026), September 29, 2026, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-contribution-pilot-01-percent-42188.html

DemandSphere, "AI Overviews on branded queries tripled in September," October 1, 2026, https://www.demandsphere.com/blog/branded-ai-overviews-september-2026/

Ahrefs, "AI Overviews Currently Appear for 83% of Branded Searches," October 2, 2026, https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-on-branded-searches/

Ahrefs, "An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)," https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/

Victorious, Q2 2026 Quarterly Search Report, https://victorious.com/quarterly-search-report/

BrandMentions, 2026 AI visibility study (240 brands, 410,000 mentions), https://brandmentions.com/blog/?p=4770

Octolens, "How B2B SaaS Wins on Reddit: 522M Mention Analysis," 2026, https://octolens.com/reddit-b2b-saas-study

Muck Rack, "7 FAQs about the May 2026 update of 'What Is AI Reading?'," 2026, https://muckrack.com/blog/what-is-ai-reading-new-insights-may-faqs

Google Search Central, "Optimizing your website for generative AI features in Google Search," May 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide

When marketing leaders ask whether their technical SEO covers them for AI search, Michael's answer is mostly yes. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode run on Google's regular index, and most of a standard technical audit carries over to the other platforms. This week he sorts technical work into what to keep, what to start, and the short list of things to skip, including a training-bot decision that removes your own description of your company from what the next model learns.

In this episode

* Why indexability now means two things: a search index and a model's training data

* How OpenAI and Anthropic split their crawlers by job, and why blocking the training bot still costs you in answers that don't involve a search

* Which index each platform searches: Google's for AI Overviews and AI Mode, a mix led by OpenAI's own index for ChatGPT, Brave for Claude, and Bing for Copilot

* Two Google details teams miss: Google-Extended doesn't affect AI Overviews, and old nosnippet tags can keep pages out of them

* The six areas of a technical audit that carry over, and why schema facts also belong in visible text

* Why every important page should make sense as the only page an assistant reads

* How to block training narrowly by folder, and why robots.txt is a request your server may not enforce

* Why Michael recommends skipping LLMs.txt for most sites

* What could change: less live search, paid web search, agents that read pages visually, and agentic checkout

* The order to work through it with your team

Chapters

[00:00:00] Intro

[00:02:26] This week in search: Google's September 2026 spam update, Cloudflare's AI crawler defaults, Google's Web Search Service API docs disappear

[00:05:33] Does your technical SEO cover AI search?

[00:06:04] Keep, start, stop

[00:07:33] Crawlability and the two kinds of indexability

[00:09:31] Separate bots for training and search

[00:10:32] AI Overviews and AI Mode: Google-Extended and snippet controls

[00:12:11] ChatGPT's own search index

[00:14:13] Claude, Brave, and Copilot

[00:15:04] What to do for each platform

[00:17:00] Keep: the six areas of a technical audit

[00:17:54] Site architecture and internal linking

[00:20:16] What your server logs can tell you

[00:20:42] Rendering and page speed

[00:22:00] Structured data

[00:23:47] Start: make every page make sense on its own

[00:25:42] Start: make crawler decisions on purpose

[00:28:40] Blocking training narrowly

[00:29:12] Robots.txt is a request

[00:30:58] Stop: LLMs.txt

[00:33:46] Every black hat tactic was once white hat

[00:34:38] What could change

[00:39:13] Where to start with your team

Find all the resources from this episode on our website.

Sources

Search Engine Journal, "Google Rolls Out September 2026 Spam Update Globally," Sept. 2026, searchenginejournal.com/google-september-2026-spam-update/590828/

The Next Web, "Cloudflare gives AI crawlers a September deadline: pay publishers or get blocked," July 2, 2026, thenextweb.com/news/cloudflare-block-ai-crawlers-pay-publishers

Google Search Central, "AI features and your website," developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features

OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI Crawlers," platform.openai.com/docs/bots

Peec AI, "ChatGPT built its own search index," Sept. 2026, peec.ai/blog/chatgpt-built-its-own-search-index

HasData, "AI Crawler Block Index," hasdata.com/blog/ai-crawler-block-index

Forrester, "What It Means That The Leader In 'Agentic Commerce' Just Pulled Back," March 2026, forrester.com/blogs/what-it-means-that-the-leader-in-agentic-commerce-just-pulled-back

For most of the last decade, brand was the marketing line item hardest to defend, because there's no click to track when a buyer arrives already knowing who you are. AI search changes that math. An assistant reads your website, your listings, your reviews, and every page that mentions you in passing, hands the buyer one summary, and decides whether to name you at all. This week Michael connects brand entity work to the brand building marketers already know how to do, then gets practical: settle what your company is best at, make every page you control say it, cut the content that says something else, and get other sites to repeat it.

In this episode:

* What a brand entity is: your company as a thing AI systems can identify, the facts attached to it, and the link between your brand and your subjects that gets you named
* Why brand work is easier to defend now, with Airbnb's 2020 marketing cut as the example
* How AI systems compress weeks of buyer research into one description, and what happens when a forgotten directory listing or a passing newspaper mention gets it wrong
* Using Jim Collins' hedgehog concept to pick the handful of subjects you want to be known for
* Why publishing outside those subjects confuses AI systems about what you do, and what happened to HubSpot's and ClickUp's off-subject traffic
* How to audit your site with Search Console and GA data, and why a human should tag every page on or off subject before anything gets deleted
* What the homepage, about page, case studies, and team page need to say, plus a brand block at the end of every post
* Organization schema, sameAs, and Wikidata, and why schema won't fix a page that doesn't say who you are
* Mention building versus link building, and the order Michael recommends: fix the profiles you own, claim the ones you don't have, then go after earned coverage
* How long changes take to show up on each platform, and why tracking should start the day the work does

Find all the sources referenced in this episode at http://victorious.com/podcast/brand-entity/

Chapters:
[00:00:00] This week in search: Comscore's AI assistant share data, Google tests AI Mode links in AI Overviews and Dive Deeper in Discover, GBP spam review alerts
[00:00:00] Brand was the hardest line item to defend
[00:00:00] Airbnb's 2020 marketing cut
[00:00:00] What a brand entity is: the who and the what
[00:00:00] Buyers now start with a chatbot
[00:00:00] How AI systems assemble one description of your company
[00:00:00] Wolf River Electric vs. Google
[00:00:00] The hedgehog concept and your short list of subjects
[00:00:00] The stop-doing list
[00:00:00] Off-subject content confuses AI systems: HubSpot and ClickUp
[00:00:00] Auditing your site: keep, combine, remove, improve
[00:00:00] Pruning risks: IBM and CNET
[00:00:00] Homepage, about page, case studies, team page
[00:00:00] A brand block on every post
[00:00:00] Organization schema, sameAs, and Wikidata
[00:00:00] Mention building and co-occurrence
[00:00:00] Fix what's wrong, claim what's missing, then earn coverage
[00:00:00] How long changes take to show up
[00:00:00] Pulling it together

Sources:
Ahrefs, "An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)," ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/
Semrush, "How We Are Using Semrush to Drive LLM Visibility," Oct. 2025, semrush.com/blog/how-we-are-using-semrush-to-drive-llm-visibility/
Reason, "Large Libel Models: Small Business Sues Google, Claiming AI Overview in Searches Hallucinated Attorney General Lawsuit," June 11, 2025, reason.com/volokh/2025/06/11/large-libel-models-small-business-sues-google-claiming-ai-overview-in-searches-hallucinated-attorney-general-lawsuit/
Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001)