Nathan Gotch
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Marketing Speak® · The New Rules of SEO, AEO & AI Search with Nathan Gotch
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Why Does a Business Rank on Google but Not Show Up in ChatGPT?
Nathan Gotch says a business can rank well on Google and still not show up in ChatGPT, because ChatGPT now has a partnership with Yelp and builds local answers from directories that are not Google's.
A business with a strong reputation on Google can miss the same queries in ChatGPT when it has no visibility on Yelp and no presence on the third-party sites those answers retrieve. Ask who the best plumber is in Chesterfield, Missouri, and ChatGPT may surface Angie's and Thumbtack, directories that are not associated with Google. Without a presence on the sites ChatGPT is pulling from, the business is out of the answer. He says the platforms differ. There is a lot of evidence that Claude uses
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How Does a Local Business Show Up in Google AI Mode?
Nathan Gotch says a local business shows up in Google AI Mode by winning the local pack. On a commercial local search, AI Mode shows local businesses nine times out of ten, and those businesses almost always match who already ranks in the local pack.
Stephan Spencer describes the local pack as the local section of a Google search, mirroring the first results on maps.google.com, and Nathan Gotch agrees they are closely linked. For Google's AI products, that pack is the lever. The address comes first, a keyword-rich business name still works, and reviews are about 95 percent of the equation. A new HVAC company in Phoenix will not catch a leader who already has about 20,000 reviews, and Four S
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Does Llms.txt Help You Show Up in ChatGPT?
Nathan Gotch says llms.txt does not help you show up in ChatGPT. It was never a standard, and the language models never implemented it. He does not mention it once across 500 webinar slides, because it does nothing.
Schema markup is the same kind of myth. He has found no evidence that schema markup changes whether AI mentions a brand, tests showed no uplift, and pages with no schema are cited and extracted just as well. He also treats answer engine optimization as the same work as search engine optimization. Advice sold as AEO content still says to put the keyword in the URL, the title, the meta description, the H1, and the first hundred words, which is what people have said for more than a
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How Does YouTube Get a Brand Into AI Answers?
Nathan Gotch says YouTube gets a brand into AI answers because YouTube is a very common source of retrieval for AI, and he has influenced a lot of answers using YouTube alone.
He builds a string of videos across the stages of customer awareness, and he publishes the chain in reverse so each video can point at the one below it. He started with an AI SEO for Dummies review and summary, then a video on the top eight best AI SEO books for 2026, and he keeps moving further up the funnel. The chain raises watch time, which he calls a big ranking factor on YouTube. The same idea covers owned assets: the website, YouTube, and LinkedIn. He publishes that kind of content on LinkedIn as well, because
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How Do You Get Mentioned in ChatGPT Answers?
Nathan Gotch says you get mentioned in ChatGPT answers when your brand is named in the citations those answers use.
He is not aiming to win a citation on his own website, though he will take one. He looks at whether the brand is covered in the citations, excluding competitors. At Rankability, a pass over thousands and thousands of AI answers and citations found a direct correlation between a brand being mentioned in those citations and the brand showing up in the answers. The work is extracting the citations and going after them. For his book launch, that was a list of citations and outreach emails, and nothing more complicated than that.
SmashNotes wrote this summary.
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How Do You Track Whether a Brand Shows Up in AI Answers?
Nathan Gotch says you track whether a brand shows up in AI answers by running prompts across one commercial category and reading the gaps, not by trying to win a single made-up prompt.
The measurement is whether the brand is mentioned for commercial queries across AI platforms. A plastic surgeon in New York City is the seed he builds prompts from. Ahrefs tracks 300 to 400 million prompts and their outputs every month across six or seven language models, and those prompts are synthetic, so it is unknown whether anyone types them. He does not chase one invented prompt. For liposuction he ran about 25 prompts, including granular ones such as banana roll, and looked at total coverage across the
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Do ChatGPT Ads Get You Mentioned in ChatGPT Answers?
Nathan Gotch says ChatGPT ads are a formal way to pay for visibility, and they do not place a brand inside the answer. The ad sits in a separate block below the answer.
Businesses also pay influencers to recommend them and pay websites and blogs to inject them into lists. His outreach almost always opens with a paid collaboration or a sponsored post, because a reply now comes with a price. Broken-link outreach and well-written guest posts used to earn a link in return for helping someone. Everyone asks for money now, especially in a zero-click world where publishers are not getting rewarded by Google. In the SaaS space, venture-backed software companies grow fast by paying for visibility ev
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Why Won't AI Cite a Research Study?
Nathan Gotch says large language models will not cite a research study that has no visibility across the internet. Turn the PDF into a webpage first. For first party data, the goal is a citation in the AI answer, where the model names the source, such as rankability, and the mention can build awareness.
Traditional search is the number one source of retrieval, so standard search engine optimization has to earn the study visibility in search. The website is only one piece of retrieval. Break the study into micro mini studies, call the original the mother asset, and distribute the micro content across other owned assets. Next, get other people to talk about the study, adding layer after layer
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How Did Codex Run Meta Ads Without Logging in?
Nathan Gotch ran an entire Meta ads campaign for a Zoom webinar from a Codex chat and never logged into Meta. The ads go straight to a webinar landing page. Cost is about $4 per registrant, and the traffic is US-based.
He stayed in the Codex chat the whole time. Codex opened the browser and handled the campaign from strategy through launch. It set the strategy, fixed attribution so results could be tracked, wrote the copy, made the ad creative and the visuals, went into Meta, built the ads, and launched the ad set. A scheduled task reviews the ads every morning, optimizes anything that needs a change, and sends a short report on how the ads are doing.
SmashNotes wrote this summary.
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What Happened to HubSpot Revenue as Traffic Fell?
Nathan Gotch says HubSpot recently lost a lot of organic traffic while revenue went up. A bunch of content on the HubSpot blog was designed to juice traffic numbers and was not designed to drive any conversions, so losing all that traffic did nothing to the bottom line at all.
Reporting to clients gets hard when traffic has dropped by 40% over the last two years. The awkward follow-up is whether they still want to keep working together. Even before AI, top of the funnel informational content is a massive waste of time. Companies liked seeing the little graph go up. The rise mattered more than focusing on the bottom of the funnel, where the actual money is made.
SmashNotes wrote this summar
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How Much Traffic Did a Number One Google Site Lose?
Nathan Gotch says a media website he audited lost 46% of its traffic since 2023 while ranking number one in Google for every keyword the site cared about. Traffic kept plummeting even though the site ranked number one for everything.
The site was doing the technical work correctly and still getting destroyed because artificial intelligence was eating the clicks. Zero-click search, the pattern Rand Fishkin talks about, is a reality for topics with informational intent, and the media site was targeting that kind of topic.
A number one Google ranking no longer brings the old flow of visits when an artificial intelligence answer satisfies an informational search before a click.
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