I have spent 20 years watching people try to declare themselves experts on their own websites, and I can tell you the search engines never bought it. The AI models don’t buy it either. After two recent conversations on the Unscripted SEO podcast, I’m more convinced than ever that the single biggest mistake businesses make right now is talking about themselves instead of getting other people to talk about them.
You Don’t Get to Vote on Your Own Authority
Jason Wade runs Ninja AI, and his whole approach to AI visibility comes down to one uncomfortable idea: authority is assigned, not claimed. You can write the most polished About page on the internet and it counts for almost nothing if no one outside your domain is reinforcing the signal.
Authority is what third parties say about you, not what you say about yourself. You can publish all the content you want, but if no one else is talking about you, the AI doesn’t care.
— Jason Wade
This is the part that trips up smart people. Traditional SEO trained us to optimize our own pages for Google’s crawlers. AI visibility is a different game. Models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini synthesize patterns across the entire web of content about you. Ten external sources treating you as an expert outweigh a thousand words of you insisting that you are one. I dug deeper into Jason’s framework in my full writeup on AI visibility, entity engineering, and the SEO you’re still not doing, but the headline never changes: build the signals other people generate about you.
The Trap of Talking Too Much About the Wrong Thing
Here’s the twist that stuck with me. More content can actually hurt you. Jason was posting daily AI news, getting traffic, feeling productive. Then his own AI analysis flagged the problem and told him to stop, because the daily posting was training every engine that he was an AI news commentator rather than an AI authority. He was actively destroying the signal he was trying to build.
Volume without topical coherence teaches the engines to classify you as the wrong entity. If you want to be the authority on a subject, every signal has to point in one direction. Scattershot publishing for clicks can undo months of careful positioning. This is why I keep telling people that generative engine optimization is not a content-volume contest. It’s an entity-clarity contest.
Podcasting Is the Fastest Citation You Can Buy (You Can’t Buy It)
Jason’s other point is one I’ve felt firsthand running Unscripted SEO. A podcast appearance is a third-party citation, a piece of original audio for the models to ingest, and a textual reference through the transcript and show notes. His name ranks on Spotify within hours of an episode going live. Most people book a podcast for the audience. The smarter play is recognizing it as an entity-building event that other platforms vouch for on your behalf.
Cite Your Sources So the Machines Cite You Back
The flip side of getting cited is doing the citing. Drew Dorenfest came to SEO from an unusual direction, as a Hollywood trailer editor who spent two decades compressing two-hour films into 90 seconds. When he pivoted into consulting and built Client Magnet CRM, he brought that condensation instinct to web copy. But his most concrete technical contribution is about verification.
The key to all of this, especially to get cited, is to cite your sources. Point to where you got the information so the crawlers can verify it.
— Drew Dorenfest
Drew’s financial services client, a small two-office tax firm in LA and Las Vegas, produces hyper-specific content: gambling taxes for service industry workers, student loan interest deductions by state. Every post links out to IRS.gov and authoritative research. When the crawlers cross-reference those claims and find them verifiable, the domain gets marked as legitimate. The result still amazes me. That tiny firm outranked IRS.gov, H&R Block, and TurboTax on specific queries within two weeks. National brands, beaten by cited content depth they never bothered to produce.
Conversions Are the Metric a Business Owner Can Actually Feel
Drew anchors all of this in something practical, which I appreciate because traffic charts make business owners’ eyes glaze over. Conversions, he says, are the only metric he cares about. Traffic is nice, but more sales is something the business owner can actually feel.
An owner cannot feel a 12% bump in sessions. They can feel a phone ringing. Entity work and citation strategy are not academic exercises; they exist to put more of the right people in front of an offer they understand in under three seconds. That mindset is exactly what I try to bring to the small business operators in the Digital Christian Collaborative here in Cookeville and to the guests on Unscripted Small Business, where most folks are running lean and need every dollar to trace back to something they can feel.
Build It Brick by Brick
None of this is fast. Drew’s philosophy is construction, not lottery. Each piece of cited content, each external mention, each technical fix is a brick, and the flywheel accelerates as the bricks pile up. I’ve watched freelancers and consultants build exactly this kind of compounding presence; Benas Leonavicius made the same case about AI search from the freelancer’s seat. The patience is the strategy. If you want a head start on the tools and tactics, I keep my recommendations current over at SEO Arcade.
What I’d Tell You to Do Monday Morning
Stop polishing the page where you praise yourself. Go earn three external mentions instead, get on a podcast, and rewrite your next article so every factual claim links to a source a crawler can verify. Authority isn’t a thing you announce. It’s a thing other people, and now the machines reading after them, decide you’ve earned. Give them the evidence and then get out of the way.