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This week on Found in AI, Cassie is going solo today. There are a few things that happened in the last week that make a lot more sense for your AI search visibility strategy together than apart.

On June 3rd, Cloudflare's CEO posted that bot traffic has officially crossed 57% of all web traffic — the first time in internet history that automated systems outnumber humans online. He'd predicted it wouldn't happen until 2027. It arrived more than a year early, driven almost entirely by agentic AI.

Two days later, Google published new guidance asserting itself as the authoritative source on SEO, AEO, and GEO — telling businesses to evaluate all third-party advice against their official documentation.

And in January and April, Microsoft had already published a GEO playbook and a framework for the agentic web... with matching tooling.

Cassie breaks down what each of those moves means, why the timing matters, and where Google's GEO guidance specifically diverges from what independent practitioner testing has shown works.

In This Episode:

• What the Cloudflare bot traffic crossover actually means for content — and why the five vs. five thousand ratio explains everything
• Why bot traffic hitting 57% arrived more than a year ahead of the Cloudflare CEO's own prediction
• Microsoft's "three eras of the web" framework — and why all three are live right now, not sequential
• Why Microsoft's January GEO guide said "SEO got you here, but it won't get you there" four months before Google weighed in
• What Google's new guidance actually says — and the specific line in their SEO hiring doc that Cassie takes issue with
• Where Google's GEO advice breaks down when applied outside of Google's own systems
• The chunking disagreement: what Google says to avoid, what Cassie's December Perplexity experiment showed, and why the distinction matters
• Three things you can do this week to optimize for the multi-engine reality

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

This week, two updates landed that look like product news but are really a maturity moment for AI search. Google launched its long-awaited Generative AI performance reports in Search Console — a dedicated view of how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. And Microsoft announced Web IQ, a grounding system built not for people, but for AI agents. One shows you the scoreboard. The other rebuilt the engine room. Cassie breaks down what each one actually does, where the catch is, and why Web IQ independently confirms everything the FSA framework has been saying.

What we cover:

• Google's new AI performance reports — and why it's impressions-only (no clicks, CTR, position, or query data)
• The new opt-out toggle that lets you leave AI features without hurting your rankings, and why the UK is first
• A callback to Episode 34: Google catches up to Bing roughly four months later
• Microsoft Web IQ explained for people who'll never touch an API
• How Web IQ maps cleanly onto Freshness, Structure, and Authority
• The one action to take this week

Resources:

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Everyone's asking whether to block AI bots from their site. AJ Ghergich thinks that's the wrong question.

When AJ and I recorded this conversation, most companies were still treating AI bot governance as an IT problem — something to handle quietly at the server level. But the bots hitting your site aren't just an infrastructure cost. They're shaping what AI tells the world about your brand. And right now, most companies — including some of the biggest in the world — can't say what data of theirs is being used, whether it's accurate, or whether they have any plan at all.

AJ leads the consulting and AI team at Botify and has these conversations with global brands every week. His take is clear: AI bot governance isn't a "block or allow" switch. It's a set of decisions that requires marketing, IT, and legal to be at the same table. Because the moment your product data, your positioning, or your facts show up wrong in an AI answer, it stops being a technical problem and becomes a brand one.

In this episode:

• Why AI bot governance falls through the cracks — and the case for why it's a marketing, IT, and legal problem, not any one team's job
• The three questions every brand should be able to answer about their AI data — and why even some of the world's biggest brands can't
• Training data vs. live retrieval — the distinction most brands miss, and why retailers need to win at the moment of retrieval, not just "get into ChatGPT"
• The llms.txt question, settled: why it's an 11th-priority shiny object for 95% of brands — and what Google's new Lighthouse check does and doesn't actually change
• What a good governance plan looks like versus a bad, binary one — including AJ's idea of "user testing, but for AI agents"
• How to fix it when AI is telling the wrong story about you — like the cosmetics brand that got falsely labeled as not animal-friendly, and how to hunt down the source
• Why your old, deprecated brand data — three-CMOs-ago mission statements, retired colors, and positioning — might be quietly confusing AI right now
• Who actually needs to be at the table — and why "that's IT's problem" is the answer that gets brands in trouble

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Three AI search updates this week — and the one that got the least coverage might matter most for your content strategy.

In this episode:

• Bing's redesigned image search groups results into AI-labeled categories — and why your alt text and image context just got more important
• Google's new "Highly Cited" badge makes source authority visible to everyday users — not just AI engines
• Ask YouTube brings conversational search to video, and why your content now needs to be queryable, not just watchable

The throughline: AI search is shifting from returning results to attributing answers. Being the source is the strategy.

Resources mentioned:

• Bing's new image search experience
• Google's new ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search
• 100 things Google announced at I/O (Ask YouTube is at the very bottom)

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Google just announced Information Agents and Universal Cart at I/O. The timing of this episode couldn't be better.

When AJ Ghergich and I recorded this conversation, agentic commerce was still something most marketers were treating as a future problem. After last week's Google I/O announcements, it's a this-quarter problem — at least for brands paying attention.

AJ leads the consulting and AI team at Botify and works with some of the largest retailers in the world. His take is clear: the AI agent doing research on behalf of your buyer isn't a bot to optimize for. It's a customer to serve. And the brands that understand that now are the ones that will be visible when the transaction layer fully arrives.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 covered why your dashboards are lying to you and what bot traffic is actually doing to your analytics. This conversation picks up with what comes next — and what your brand needs to do before agentic commerce goes mainstream.

In this episode:

• What agentic commerce actually is — and why visibility is the prerequisite that most brands are skipping
• Why this Black Friday could be the first one where agentic commerce affects your revenue numbers (even if it's only 5%)
• AJ's reframe: AI is not a technology layer, it's a customer type — and why that changes everything about how you organize your content
• Attributes vs. intent — why "14-inch wheels" loses to "can this stroller handle the subway and the park" when an agent is making the recommendation
• How to think about AI agent personas the same way you'd build buyer personas (yes, really)
• What smaller brands on Shopify should focus on right now versus what large retailers need to be doing with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol
• Why specificity is the content strategy for agentic commerce — and what that looks like in practice

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Google I/O was Tuesday. There's a lot to sort through — and most of it isn't the hardware story. It's the search story. This week, Cassie breaks down the I/O announcements that actually matter for visibility strategy, unpacks the llms.txt drama that played out in a LinkedIn comment section yesterday, and covers Perplexity updates that got buried under all of it.

In this episode:

• Google I/O: the Search box redesign, AI Mode at 1 billion users, Search agents, and Universal Cart
• Why Search agents change what "being discoverable" actually means
• Google's GEO guide said stop using llms.txt — then Lily Ray pointed out Google uses it on their own docs. John Mueller's response draws a distinction the guide never made.
• Why GEO isn't just an SEO conversation — it's the infrastructure that makes agentic commerce work
• Bing on trust as infrastructure in AI-powered search
• Perplexity: GPT-5.5 as the new default in Computer, Teams integration, and Personal Computer at $20/month

Google is building toward a world where your website is the backend. This episode is about what that means for your strategy right now.

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Your analytics look broken. Impressions are up. Clicks are down. Conversion rates are off. And your leadership team wants answers.

AJ Ghergich, who leads the consulting and AI team at Botify, says this isn't a performance problem — it's a data model problem. And once you understand what's actually causing it, the numbers start to make a lot more sense.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, AJ breaks down what's happening inside brand dashboards right now, why bot traffic is up 4.5x in 2025, and what the 1:198 impression-to-visit ratio from AI crawlers actually means for how you report performance.

In this episode:

• Why the impressions-up, clicks-down pattern is showing up across brands right now — and what's driving it
• The difference between how Google crawls versus how AI engines like ChatGPT crawl your site (the ratio will surprise you)
• Why AJ says CMOs need to move from a clicks mindset to a visibility mindset — and how to make that case to leadership
• What JavaScript rendering has to do with AI visibility (and how to check your own site in under five minutes)
• Why AJ compares this moment in AI search to the early days of social media — and what the smart brands did then that's worth repeating now

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.

Send us Fan Mail

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

After two-plus years of the GEO conversation happening without them, Google finally showed up.

This week Google Search Central published their first official guide to optimizing for generative AI features in Search — covering AI Overviews, AI Mode, and a list of tactics you can finally stop wasting time on.

In this surprise Friday episode, Cassie walks through the guide in real time: what it gets right, what it confirms about the FSA Framework, and — more importantly — where it quietly leaves the harder questions unanswered.

In this episode:

• Why RAG and query fan-out change how you should think about content
• The GEO "hacks" Google officially says don't work (LLMS.txt, content chunking, inauthentic mentions)
• The ranking-vs-citation gap the guide doesn't explain
• What AI Mode changes that AI Overviews guidance doesn't cover
• What to actually prioritize coming out of this

The floor is clearer now. Getting above the floor is still the work.

Resources:

Google's Guide to Optimizing for GEO

The Visibility Report: Google Finally Published a GEO Guide

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Fractional Content Strategist
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Download Freshness, Structure, Authority: The Framework for AI Search Visibility:

Amazon

P.S. Is your brand losing its "Answer Authority"?

Most series A/B and enterprise brands are being "nudged" out of AI search results because of entity gaps and "stale" content. I am opening a limited number of specialized audit slots to help you reclaim your Share of Voice using the FSA Framework (Freshness, Structure, Authority).

Request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com.