March 31, 202600:57:47

The New SEO Is Happening Without You

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Show Notes

The theme of Q1 2026 is "I feel behind." Every founder — from the scrappy solo operator to the venture-backed exec — is feeling the same anxiety. Site traffic is dropping. AI chatbots are answering questions that used to send customers to your website. And the brands that wait to figure this out are not just losing clicks. They are losing the narrative.

Justin Inman spent nearly a decade at Google selling enterprise ad tech to the world's largest marketers — Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, Unilever. He watched those companies resist the digital shift, then scramble to catch up. When he left Google and noticed his own AI usage exploding — and then watched his mom casually quoting ChatGPT — he knew something bigger was coming. He got demos of the biggest players in the AI visibility space. One demo was so underwhelming, so narrow in its thinking, that he started his own company the very next day. That company is Emberos, and it is building what Justin calls the operating system for AI brand visibility.

The core insight is deceptively simple: your brand exists inside AI systems right now, and you have zero control over what those systems are saying about you. Every LLM — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok — has formed its own opinion about your pricing, your product, your genre, your identity. And those opinions are often wrong. Emberos measured 500 brands and found that 90% have factual errors across at least one major language model.

Frameworks from This Episode

These frameworks have been added to the AI for Founders Frameworks Library. Filter by Marketing, SEO, or Justin Inman to find them.

Paid, Owned, and Earned Across the AI Layer

The same three-channel framework that governed digital marketing now governs AI visibility. Most brands are ignoring all three at the AI layer — and a less credible source is filling the vacuum.

•Paid: Connected TV ads, programmatic spend, and paid placements all feed signals into AI systems. TV exposure correlates with generative AI search behavior.
•Owned: Your website, FAQs, schema markup, and YouTube captions all contribute to how LLMs read and cite your brand. If your site is not structured for LLM readability, it is invisible.
•Earned: Podcasts, PR placements, influencer content, and press all create citations inside AI systems. Podcast transcripts are among the cleanest, most credible training data available to LLMs.
•Most players in AI visibility only address owned — and even then, only through push-to-publish shortcuts that are already getting penalized.
•Emberos maps all three channels into a unified Share of Prompt score.

The Share of Prompt Framework

Share of Voice measured who talked about you. Share of Prompt measures whether AI recommends you — and it breaks into three distinct signals that each require different strategies.

•Brand Ownership: How accurately and completely does AI respond to direct brand queries? (Your name, your product, your pricing.)
•Category Dominance: When someone asks for the best tool in your category, do you appear — and do you appear correctly?
•Intent-Based Visibility: When someone asks 'what should I use for X,' does AI recommend you unprompted?
•90% of brands Emberos audited have factual errors in at least one major LLM.
•A 12–18 month window exists before Share of Prompt becomes table stakes for every major brand.

The Two Internets

There is now a human-facing web and an AI-facing web. They are diverging fast. Most brands are only optimizing for one of them.

•The human-facing web is what people navigate via browsers — still governed by traditional SEO signals.
•The AI-facing web is what LLMs retrieve and recommend — governed by LLM readability, citation quality, and training data coverage.
•Good GEO is also good SEO. The brands that conflate them or ignore the AI layer will fall behind on both.
•Push-to-publish hacks that game one layer tend to corrupt the other.
•The brands that won Search and Social early dominated those eras for a decade. The window for AI is open now.

The Five Agents Inside Emberos

•Scout: Detects and monitors how a brand shows up across all major LLMs, generating a Share of Prompt score broken into brand ownership, category dominance, and intent-based queries.

•Pilot: Forecasts outcomes and generates strategic fix packs across paid, owned, and earned channels — telling you what to fix and predicting the lift each fix will produce.

•Flow: Coordinates execution across SEO, social, content, and PR teams, turning recommendations into assigned action items.

•Merchant: Focuses on product-level and e-commerce visibility inside AI search environments.

•Echo: Acts as a governance layer, maintaining brand consistency and compliance across all AI systems.

Founder Experiment: Run Your Own AI Visibility Audit Today

Using Cursor or Replit, build a simple script that queries three to five major AI APIs with the same ten prompts about your brand. This is your baseline Share of Prompt audit — and you can start manually right now.

1Write ten prompts covering: your product name, a competitor comparison, a pricing question, a category recommendation, and an intent-based query like 'what is the best tool for X.'
2Query OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity with each prompt. Log every response into a spreadsheet.
3Compare answers across models. Flag inconsistencies, factual errors, and omissions. Note where AI is wrong about your pricing, positioning, or category.
4Use Claude Code to automate the scoring rubric and generate a side-by-side comparison report.
5Make changes to your owned content — FAQs, schema markup, YouTube captions, About page. Run the audit again in 30 days and measure whether the narrative shifted.

This is the first inning of what Emberos does at scale. You can start manually right now — and what you find will almost certainly surprise you.

Key Terms

These terms have been added to the AI for Founders Glossary. Search by Justin Inman to filter them.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): The practice of optimizing content to appear accurately and prominently inside AI-generated answers, as opposed to traditional search result pages.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Similar to AEO, with emphasis on optimizing for generative AI systems that synthesize and recommend rather than simply index. Good GEO is also good SEO.

Share of Prompt: Emberos's proprietary metric measuring how frequently a brand appears inside AI-generated answers across direct, competitive, and intent-based prompt categories. The AI visibility equivalent of Share of Voice.

TAVI (Tiered AI Visibility Index): Emberos's standardized scoring system quantifying brand presence across AI platforms at multiple layers of specificity.

Brand Knowledge Graph: Emberos's proprietary mapping of how a brand's entities, products, narratives, and digital assets relate to each other across the internet, enabling predictive visibility modeling.

Fix Packs: Emberos's term for the specific, strategic recommendations it generates to correct AI misrepresentation — ranging from FAQ creation to PR placements to YouTube video production.

Push to Publish: The practice of using AI to generate and syndicate mass content for the purpose of influencing LLMs. Widely considered a black-hat approach with long-term delisting risks as AI systems get smarter at detecting low-quality sources.

LLM Readability: Whether a website or piece of content is structured in a way that AI systems can accurately parse, interpret, and cite — encompassing schema markup, FAQ structure, and content clarity.

The Two Internets: Justin Inman's framework describing the emerging split between the human-facing web (governed by traditional SEO) and an AI-facing web (governed by LLM readability and citation quality), where LLMs retrieve and recommend information independent of traditional browsing behavior.

Tools from This Episode

Emberos

The operating system for AI brand visibility. Five AI agents — Scout, Pilot, Flow, Merchant, and Echo — monitor how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, generate fix packs, and measure lift across paid, owned, and earned channels.

View in Resources Visit Emberos

Q&A

What is Emberos and what does it do?

Emberos is an AI brand visibility operating system that helps companies monitor, fix, and prove how they appear inside major AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. It maps brand presence across paid, owned, and earned channels and uses five AI agents to detect problems, generate strategic fixes, and measure lift.

What is Share of Prompt?

Share of Prompt is Emberos's core metric for measuring how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers. It breaks into three weighted scores: brand ownership (direct brand queries), category dominance (versus competitors), and intent-based visibility (recommendation-style prompts).

Why is push to publish dangerous for brands?

AI systems are getting smarter at detecting AI-generated content spam. Brands that flood syndicated publishers with AI-generated articles risk being associated with low-quality sources and, in some cases, getting delisted from search entirely. Good GEO is also good SEO, and shortcuts that harm one will harm the other.

How do podcasts help AI visibility?

Podcast transcripts are among the cleanest, most credible sources available to LLMs for training and citation. They are categorized, timestamped, associated with real people and companies, and distributed through RSS at scale. Justin notes that podcast appearances are now recommended as strategic fix packs inside the Emberos platform.

What should brands be feeding to LLMs that they currently are not?

Scientific research, proprietary studies, clinical data, and any high-credibility owned content that has been gated or formatted in ways LLMs cannot easily read. If you sit on authoritative knowledge and it is not LLM-readable, a less credible source is filling that vacuum.

What is the window to get ahead of AI visibility?

Justin estimates a 12 to 18 month window before AI visibility becomes table stakes for every major brand. Early movers in search and social dominated those eras. The same pattern is playing out now with AI.