I have spent twenty years watching people try to convince Google they are an authority by saying so on their own website. It does not work, and two recent guests on my show explained exactly why better than I could in a sales deck.
Authority Is Assigned, Not Declared
Jason Wade runs Ninja AI, and his whole practice is built around what he calls entity engineering: making sure AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini conclude that you are the answer to a relevant question. The mechanism is not your homepage copy. It is the web of references, mentions, and citations that exist about you everywhere else.
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
That reframing matters because it changes where you spend effort. You can write the best service page in your category and an AI model will still shrug if the surrounding ecosystem treats you like a stranger. The signal that counts is external, and it has to be earned in places you do not control.
The Fastest Way to Earn a Citation Right Now
Here is where the conversation got practical. Jason told a story about himself that most consultants would never admit. He had been posting daily AI news, getting traffic, feeling productive, and quietly poisoning his own positioning.
His point was that volume without topical coherence trains every engine on the internet to file you under the wrong category. He stopped chasing news cycles and started looking for signals that actually compounded his expert positioning. The channel he kept coming back to was podcasting, and the reason is speed. When he guests on a show, his name and the terms he discusses start showing up on Spotify within hours. That is a third-party citation, original audio that becomes AI training data, and a transcript that adds a textual reference, all from one recording.
I have argued this same case for a while in my breakdown of how podcast appearances function as SEO events. Most people treat a booking as a branding nicety. It is closer to a backlink with a face attached. That is a big part of why I run Unscripted SEO and a sister show at Unscripted Small Business in the first place. Every episode is a citation engine for the guest and for me at the same time.
Your Profile Is the Product
The flip side of earning mentions is having somewhere worth sending the attention. Daniel Alfon joined LinkedIn in 2004, before social media existed as a category, and he has spent two decades treating it as something almost nobody else does: a search engine with billions of queries a year that Google amplifies by ranking profiles above people’s own websites.
His most counterintuitive claim is that you do not need to post to win there.
LinkedIn is the only platform where you can be successful without posting content. What interests your reader is whether your specialty is the specialty they’re looking for — not what you posted last week.
— Daniel Alfon
The behavior that drives outcomes is people visiting other people’s profiles. So the profile is the product. Daniel’s three questions are worth taping to your monitor: who is my ideal reader, what action do I want them to take, and am I making it easy. He also pushes a one-minute tactical win most people skip, the Featured link section, where you place the single most important destination you want a visitor to reach above the fold. Update your profile and Google reflects it in roughly twenty seconds. There is no faster entity update available.
Write for the Human, Score with the Algorithm
Daniel’s other piece of advice closes the loop between the two guests. Citations get you found; vocabulary gets you understood. He tells people to interview prospects and learn the words they actually use, then weave those into the profile, even when those words are more general or technically wrong than the jargon you prefer. Tools like the ones I build over at SEO Arcade help you find that vocabulary at scale, but the human conversation is where you confirm it.
Bring Them Home or You Built Someone Else’s Audience
This is the part I will not let go of. Every citation, every profile view, every podcast listener is only worth something if you can move them to ground you own. Daniel said it plainly.
The metrics should be your real-life business metrics and not the LinkedIn metrics. Conversion happens better on your own domain.
— Daniel Alfon
LinkedIn is the discovery layer, not the destination. The same goes for Spotify, YouTube, or whatever platform you are currently renting. If a connection request or a follow is your finish line, you handed your audience to a company that can change the rules tomorrow. Send people to your site instead, and then make sure the site does not fumble the handoff. I have written before about why traditional contact forms quietly kill your conversion rate, because earning a hard-won visitor and then dropping them at a generic eleven-field form is malpractice.
None of this is theoretical for me. A lot of my own owned audience came from showing up in conversations, including a local entrepreneur community here in Cookeville through the Digital Christian Collaborative. Real relationships produce real citations, and real citations are the only authority signal that lasts.
What I Would Actually Do
Stop declaring authority and start collecting evidence of it. Book the podcast guest spots and host conversations where your name and your terms get said out loud by other people. Optimize the profile that catches the people those mentions send your way. Learn the words your buyers really type. Then route everything to a domain you control with a path to conversion that does not waste the click. Guesting and hosting are not marketing chores. They are how you get the rest of the internet to vouch for you, which is the only vouching that counts. If you want help putting this into practice, that is exactly the kind of work I take on through my SEO consulting practice.