In this presentation, Darrell Evans explains why many businesses remain invisible online despite active marketing efforts, attributing the problem to recent shifts driven by AI-powered search. He outlines two major changes: Google’s reliance on the E‑E‑A‑T framework (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) to assess credibility, and the emergence of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), where AI reads and answers queries directly without sending users to a website. Evans identifies three critical gaps that can cause a business to disappear from AI results: (1) unclear messaging and positioning that prevents AI from categorizing the business; (2) insufficient authority signals across the web, reflecting weak E‑E‑A‑T; and (3) technical findability issues such as missing schema markup, poor site speed, and inadequate FAQ structures. Any one of these gaps can cost businesses tens of thousands to millions of dollars. To help owners diagnose their specific problem, Evans offers a free online quiz that pinpoints the gap, urging viewers to take it before their next marketing effort.
Chapters
You could be posting, running ads, updating your website, writing blogs, and still be completely invisible today online when people are searching for what you do. That's not a guess. That's what the data shows now over the last 2 years since Google rolled out AI Overviews. And that is what we see inside of every business every single week. There are a lot of business owners today that are making an assumption that if I'm doing marketing, that I'm going to eventually get found. And that assumption has a major gap in it. And AI is making that gap wider than ever. And in the next few minutes, I'd like to show you some very specific places where visibility online is breaking down in today's AI world and what actually drives it right now. What should you be doing? Because let's be clear, the rules of the game have changed. Not once, not twice, forever. Here's what's happened. In the last 5 or so years, almost every business has made an attempt to go online for the survival of their business. Think back to that time in 2020 when the world shut down. What that did at the same time was brought more competitors, more content, more activity into a marketplace that has now more people vying for the same attention. And here's the part that frustrates most business owners that we work with in our agency, and they think that being online is enough when in fact being online is not even today the price of entry. The businesses that are getting found right now aren't necessarily better than yours. They're not necessarily doing more than you're doing. They're not even in some cases outspending you in advertising. So if that's true, then Darrell, what is making them more findable than my business? You might be asking. It could be a little bit about budget. It could be in some cases about effort, but in large part, it's them understanding how online visibility and being discovered actually works right now in an AI world. And that's what a lot of business owners are missing. We are long past the days of just building a website, writing some content, putting some product pages or service pages online in a world where everyone is today using their smartphones on tools like ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and the world of social media. So there's two major shifts that have happened that I don't think a lot of business owners are fully adapting to, and in some cases, not even taking seriously, but you need to, if you want your business to survive. Shift number one, Google, as smart as they are and as great as their technology is, has gotten even smarter. They don't need to read keywords on a webpage anymore. It's evaluating your credibility using a framework that they've published on their website for years called E-E-A-T. It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And what that means practically is Google's asking their algorithm, their AI is checking, is this a real source worth sending people to? Now, if you're on the other side of this and you're, you can argue with me and tell me that you've seen uncredible sources or less credible sources showing up above you, in front of you, in AI overviews or on the first page of Google. I hear you. I'm not here for that argument. I do understand their technology gets it wrong. But here's the thing. If your content, your website, your online authority doesn't signal those 4 things— experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust— even if your product's great, even if you've got a ton of customers, you may not rank. And you may not ever get cited in the LLMs. Those are the large language models. Shift number 2, AI search is changing the game every single day. Now, coming from a company that started in the world of search engine optimization back in 2011 at Yokel Local, then Mindshift Digital today, there's now this new layer that sits on top of SEO and it's called AEO, which is answer engine optimization. Optimization. And here's the difference. In essence, traditional Google back in the day would surface websites or web pages actually, that matched or seemed to match the query that you put in. Well, Google would then send people to your website. Well, guess what AI does? AI doesn't send people to your website. AI reads the content on the web, forms the answer, shares it with the user, and then moves on. No click, no website visit, and potentially no leads for for your business. Now, someone could be asking for exactly what you do and you would never know it because they won't come to your website like the day has gone by. So the question has shifted from how do I rank on the first page of Google to how do I become the answer that AI engines trust? And we're not talking just about Gemini, although Gemini is baked into their, their portal, but we're talking about every platform online, every one of the top 10 platforms. Have AI built in into them. So this today inherently is a totally different problem and it requires a totally different approach. And I'm not going to sit here and say that we own the approach. I will say that our experience tells us and teaches us that the approach has shifted to more of this frequently asked question, long tail schema markup is a technical term which I don't want to get into today, But really what it is is content that's written for very specific and very real questions or queries that the user is making now on Google. A lot of businesses are still trying to rank on high volume keywords, which is the old problem, and that game is coming to an end. So where does visibility then break down in the model in today's internet? There are 3 gaps that I want to break down really quick. And any one of them could make a difference in what you're doing. So let's talk about gap number 1. Gap number 1 is your messaging and positioning. So the question that we are always thinking about when it comes to converting a visitor to a lead is, can someone who arrives on your site tell within 10 seconds what you do, how you do it, and what that will actually do for them? And we always say that if we don't get clear about what we're saying we can do for our, our client, our customer, then how will Google or AI know? So if our positioning or messaging is vague, too broad, too clever, or it's based on our internal dialogue, then a search engine or AI will never be able to categorize you and put you in the right place. AI is never going to be able to cite you so that you don't even get seen in the AI result. And your ideal client, most importantly, doesn't recognize that you're the company they should trust to do business with. So the key here is unclear messaging isn't just a branding problem. It's now a visibility and customer acquisition problem. Gap number 2, your authority signals across the web. Does Google actually trust that you're the source? Does AI actually trust that you're the source for that specific query or search that the person is doing? This is really EEAT in practice, meaning your content, your depth of content, your experience, the backlinks, your online authority, any press about your business, your reviews, your consistency over time as well. In updating your content on your website. See, authority isn't something that you just claim as a one-time event. It's built over time through your repetitive actions in your marketing cadence and marketing mix. And a lot of businesses, they generally just don't know where they stand because they do marketing once and think that was enough, or they do it for a little period of time and think, well, we've done it for a year or two, so that should be enough. And that's actually a bad way to think about it. Gap number 3 is your technical findability. And I know that this can be very tough, very difficult to wrap your hands around, but this is the layer that a lot of people overlook, including some of the people who call themselves great digital marketers. We're talking about the SEO fundamentals, which have not changed, your FAQ structure on your website, which is a different structure today. I don't want to get into it, but there's a term called schema markup. Which is literally building your web architecture so that AI and algorithms can actually read your website. We're talking about site speed, mobile experience, things that have always been critical to SEO over the years are still important to this day. And so many of you never got it right then. So it's time to get it right now. These are some of the signals, not all of the signals that tell search engines and AI engines, you know, who you are, what you do, and why you're actually relevant. To that specific search in AI. So you can have strong messaging, be the authority, and still be invisible if this technical layer is broken down. And so any one of these gaps can be enough to take you off the map and cost you tens of thousands. And in some cases, some companies could be millions of dollars. And that's why the first step is that you must take is to really understand which gap you actually have, right? Now, so we have built a free quiz, an assessment, if you will, that does exactly that. And it starts the way every good marketing audit should start, and it's with visibility. Takes just a few minutes for you to, to walk through and tells you very specifically where your gaps are so that you're not guessing as you're trying to navigate this shift that all of us are going through. So the link is in the description. It's absolutely free. Take it before your next piece of content or marketing goes out, and we hope you'll come back and thank us later.
