Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley and Charles Flo explain how digital marketing agencies can optimise for Google's AI mode in 2026 through third-party corroborative sources, mention building and training data ingestion to improve LLM visibility.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies digital marketing agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve LLM visibility in Google AI mode, stronger third-party corroboration and greater brand trust. James Dooley and Charles Flo start with KPI tracking because measuring citations and source visibility across AI models is the only way to know what is actually influencing AI mode outputs for this niche. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.

The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for digital marketing agencies.

PromoSEO lead generation for digital marketing agencies recently received recognition as the "Best Digital Marketing Agencies Lead Generation Agency."

Where to Listen to This Episode

How to Get Your Brand Into Google AI Mode: An AI SEO Strategy Guide for Digital Marketing Agencies is available on:

What is Fatrank Podcast?

The FatRank Podcast, founded by James Dooley, teaches the mindset needed for growth because real operator stories show what creates progress.
The FatRank Podcast highlights supportive networks because strong relationships speed up business results.
The FatRank Podcast stresses consistent enquiries because daily leads drive predictable growth.
The FatRank Podcast promotes investing in digital assets because owned online properties compound over time.

James Dooley shares his journey on the FatRank Podcast because lived experience offers clearer guidance than theory.
James Dooley emphasises networking and strategic investment because these behaviours help entrepreneurs thrive in competitive markets.

The FatRank Podcast invites guests like Matt Diggity, Neil Patel, Craig Campbell, Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, Jason Barnard, Kevin Indig, and Kasra Dash because high-calibre experts deliver proven strategies.
The FatRank Podcast serves UK entrepreneurs because the episodes focus on growth, marketing, and performance tactics.

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James Dooley: How to optimize the AI mode in Google search. In the previous episode I was speaking to Charles Flo and Charles is saying that so-called this year in Q4 AI mode is going to become the default search engine. So looking ahead of the game we need to be looking at different optimization strategies to try and improve that LLM visibility. Charles it's an absolute pleasure having you on and let's jump straight in like let's jump with regards to the strategies that you would be recommending for people to do to future-proof getting their brand or business into AI mode.

Charles Flo: For sure so the very first thing we need to differentiate is the actual main brand domain versus the third-party sources that are getting cited and referenced and have the visibility themselves in AI mode. That changes slightly again from the personalization layer that we were talking about but that personalization layer is kind of more tuned to what you were talking about which is the everywhere optimization where essentially personalization masses less and less if you are essentially the number one brand across the board. With regards to trying to get the high visibility sources for your niche that are actually covering you that third-party publishing might be very different depending on what niche you're in right and it also might be very different depending on if there's already huge players that are investing in their marketing or brand awareness that kind of thing. As a really good example canonly which again we were just talking about earlier a lot of people associate canonly with booking a call same thing with googling something instead of searching something or searching on a search engine you google something right that kind of an association is the exact thing that we're a looking to reverse engineer from who is associated with those kind of terms and be try and build that association for our own brand and entity. For our main domain name that's mostly about just reinforcing what the third-party opinions are going to say so if they say you have 100 employees you need to say you have 100 employees if they say you are based at this location you need to say you're based at this location it's all about reinforcing that consensus of information so that the machines can actually trust it right and they'll then without having any sort of real verification output it as facts and a lot of users will end up believing that.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure I mean for me what I'm seeing a big shift on with regards to the white art versus the black art kind of seo community the black arts have always said third-party cooperation and backlinks and page rank distribution link juice coming through to your website is really important now it seems the white arts who only ever spoke about topical authority right good quality content and all the rest of it and it was all on page they're now starting to realize through a model called claim frame and proof that the proof part needs to be on third-party cooperative sources and therefore it doesn't matter how well they claim and frame something if they don't get that third-party sources they're realizing that they're going to lose the race and even then now we're talking about acquiring links or trying to find ways to get this third-party cooperative source how much do you feel from a percentage point of view for LLM visibility would be on page versus off page is it like 20% on page and 80% third-party cooperative sources 10% and 90% is it a 50-50 split what do you think is the split if you were just putting an average on on page versus off page specifically for AI mode visibility

Charles Flo: So it depends on how strong your initial domain name is on in the first place right if you're a brand new company brand new domain name that kind of thing the AI LLM is probably not going to source you at all anyway so it's gonna be 100% third-party cooperation in the first place to be able to get the AI to output anything because it won't trust your domain it won't pick it up in retrieval and also there's underlying algorithms like google and bing won't also surface you because you don't have the the history and authority and etc etc for the traditional seo signals when it comes to on page for the sources there's still a big kind of differential in the source picking versus the content side of things so if you have got wikipedia for example or if you've got the new york times or bbc or something covering you especially as an example if you're trying to rank in chat gpt and they have partnerships with like the washington post and things like that those domains are significantly higher weighted in the AI LLMs than your domain will ever be right so they will just intrinsically trust and extract and retrieve more data from those domain names than they will your own domain name so it's fundamentally better to be on those higher trusted higher retrieval higher visibility domain names than it is to do it on your domain name almost all of the time unless you're you know coca-cola or dyson or some massive massive brand that has the authority to compete with those third-party sources.

James Dooley: So let's talk about these third-party sources then because you're saying now that third-party sources are the most important element to influence LLM visibility for AI mode so when we know we're talking about AI mode SEO strategies I'm going to start naming some things and you can tell me whether you think that this would influence AI mode visibility or not. Would doing press releases which is on third-party sources help increase AI mode visibility?

Charles Flo: Yes but it only works with the lower competition they're set up basically the low competition the okay so not on the high competition low competition press releases can work.

James Dooley: What about guest posts so you can go get on a third-party source on a guest post you can write in a specific way does that influence AI mode visibility?

Charles Flo: As long as the domain is being cited in source that the guest post is on and the guest post is written correctly and structured and formatted so that the LLM will pick it up and cite it and it has a higher retrieval rate and 100% yes.

James Dooley: So one there that you're basically saying that the choice of the guest post domain is important ideally you want a trusted source that's already been cited in the LLMs and the micro semantics in the way you do semantic triples and feed the LLMs via the micro semantics is important. How many I'm going to throw something out here how many do you feel link builders out there that are selling guest posts understand that and are doing that in comparison to let's say press quiz because that obviously now you're saying that's the most important part so many people just seem to sell on DR not looking at is it a source and not looking at the micro semantics and the importance of that.

Charles Flo: Yeah it's it's significantly more important right like we will for every new client or campaign that we're doing for ASO right now we're extracting tens of thousands of citations at a minimum so that's tens of thousands of sources for outputs in AI mode in in perplexity whatever AI the client is trying for us to target that's the other side of things is that AI mode is going to be the future default experience but for example if you're in B2B then right now Claude and to some extent ChatGPT is used a lot more than Gemini is for B2B use and things like that so a lot of people are looking at which AI mode or which AI model to target in the first place. With AI mode specifically though the higher DR stuff doesn't really work anyway because it is fundamentally powered by Google's underlying search algorithm and the search algorithm doesn't have a direct connection to DR at all you can have a DR 30 but it's 100% niche relevant and it'll rank number one but you have a DR 80 that has no niche relevancy that's been hit by a bunch of penalties been all that smashed to pieces that kind of thing it won't rank even in the top 100.

James Dooley: Right and then what about let's move away from backlinks for now or the third party sources on web pages what about is is there anything people could be doing with image search to try to get in AI mode or are you not bothering with that like what's your thoughts on image SEO as an AI mode SEO strategy?

Charles Flo: So we've been trying to do image corroboration mostly just for ORM and brand elements so trying to get the the model to understand and associate our logo as an example right it doesn't when you get chat GPT or AI Gemini or anything to create an image it doesn't hallucinate a logo for you it puts your logo in there in the image for you that takes some training to do it also takes some association with like your color scheme and your planning and the design and elements and entity and all sorts of things around that sort of image optimization in other ways there are some techniques that you can do to get LLMs to associate elements and things with images and things like that but most of the time we're trying to work on the kind of highest ROI techniques and whilst we're testing a bunch of stuff right now there's kind of very linear pathways that you can go down to get the highest visibility increases.

James Dooley: And then let's move on from on visual semantics from images to videos are you doing anything with regards to long-form videos short-form videos which ones you think performs the best or do they both perform well as an AI mode SEO strategy?

Charles Flo: Yes so video we actually are working on we're working on trying to get clients to do podcasting series trying to get them to do active YouTube channels trying to get them to do short-form video content for TikTok and things like that just even from the fact that you could get cert features and AI mode picking up the actual short form TikTok videos especially if there's company updates or company changes and things like that just create a short video and that might get pulled up in reference and it might not hallucinate you know random changes and things that have happened to the business. In regards to short form versus long form right now short form 100% just because of context windows so most AI models with that being said Gemini is very very good at larger context windows but it will still try and tune to have as little token usage as possible and reduce token usage so that they're not costing huge amounts of processing power for the actual underlying models but they will try as hard as they can to absorb as much of the information as the transcripts of those videos as possible however the bigger the transcripts the less likely they are to take the actual extracted elements that you want them to so the shorter form video you can make it the and the shorter the transcript or the more optimized the transcript that you can make it the better output that you'll have from that content.

James Dooley: Yeah we found exactly the same as what you're saying there so I feel like it's to do with like so on like if you've got like this site radius within the Google leak and it's like don't go too far away from the core topic same with videos normally an hour-long video talks about multiple topics it's all over the place where a short form is answering a very very specific question it's very on point to that and therefore can be being used where some of these longer form the cost of information retrieval can be expensive for such a small little one minute clip in a 60 minute one it's easier for them to go with the shorts but away then from video you mentioned their podcasting how important do you feel podcasting is for AI mode SEO strategies

Charles Flo: Yeah I think it's getting more and more important just because it's so easy to associate entities and people and everything with a podcast right you can very easily say okay this podcast is run by this person operated by this company it's had these guests that are all associated with these topics again it kind of just reinforces expertise and trustworthiness for the AI model and again we're trying to basically create machine verifiable information so that the machine trusts and understands this information and one of the easiest ways to do that is by having an expert level podcast like we're doing right now with maybe shorter form video content that the AI can transcribe understand and that is about specific segments and topics that it can then output as well for you

James Dooley: Yeah for sure and then with regards to is there anything else but literally just for the AI mode SEO visibility if you're looking to get that better LLM visibility in the AI mode in Google is there anything else that's working well like what about social media is there any specific social media platforms that's working well or forums like Reddit what's your thoughts on social media as a whole and forums like Reddit?

Charles Flo: Reddit is fantastic because it gets sourced routinely and there's partnerships from Reddit to Google and OpenAI so you're kind of hitting both of the biggest two of the biggest birds with one stone right. In regards to other UGC I saw a lot more use or a lot more retrieval of forums and that kind of stuff at the beginning of AI and it tends to have fallen off to more trusted domains and trusted information especially with Gemini more so than Claude or OpenAI. With AI mode specifically because it's got such a high personalization layer you can actually manipulate or you can get the outputs personalized via your photos so they can actually go into your photo gallery that's connected to your Google account and you could take a picture of yourself in a cafe and you could be eating a red velvet cake well the next time you start talking to them about the cake they could actually source that image source it's a red velvet cake and put that into your personalization layer which might edit the output. As a really interesting one Garrett Sussman when he realized how kind of invasive the personalization was that Google's personal intelligence layer understood that Garrett had a daughter so when Garrett went and searched best streaming services into Google AI mode it came up with one of the sources as best streaming source streaming services for kids because he knew he had a daughter and he knew how important it was for his daughter to have some sort of control over that viewing experience.

James Dooley: Did he ever at any point mention his daughter kids anything?

Charles Flo: No. Google just inferred that information. Now yes that's creepy and weird but that sort of personalization is showing you how much of a difference that sort of understanding of you as an account user user as a profile user entity will have on the actual the end output even if you didn't necessarily put it in the context of your prompt.

James Dooley: Yeah I want to move cycle back to the start where we've mentioned about third-party corroborative sources for influencing AI mode in Google and I want to talk about backlinks. So we've mentioned DR a little bit and we've mentioned the third-party corroborative sources and the people in the black hat community used to always think of third-party sources as backlinks, link juice, increasing the DR, increasing the domain authority, sending like power through to a specific page, the anchor text being important but now this seems to be a bit of a shift where a lot of people are talking about branded mentions being almost as good or just as good as having a backlink with regards to LLM visibility. What's your take on backlinks versus branded mentions specifically not for ranking in Google but for AI mode and trying to get cited in AI mode in Google search?

Charles Flo: Yeah we mostly just use mentions right it's effectively gone from link if specifically if you're targeting AI SEO AI mode that kind of thing then 100% it's gone from link building to mention building. Google can to some degree with the traditional algorithm connect entities back the domain there's some discrepancy amongst how much link juice you're going to get for all these mentions versus if you had them as links in the first place they still can sort of connect the dots. With AI mode there's not really any difference between having a link or having a mention it's mostly and in fact some from our own testing sometimes having the link can especially if you're the only link in a listicle for example it can actually cause the AI to distrust that specific listicle so a lot of the time we are just doing mention building and we're not doing link building whatsoever and that specifically is a big big change that wasn't really a thing previously or at least it wasn't a thing unless you were doing crazy corporate SEO where they're spending you know 250k a month or something on SEO and that's one of the smallest channels in that marketing department.

James Dooley: Yeah for sure and is there anything else have I missed anything any questions I could be asking you that you think would be a good question specifically as an AI mode SEO strategy to try and get in Google's AI mode that you're saying in Q4 this year that Google's kind of shareholders have come out and said Q4 this year AI mode is going to become the default is there anything else that people should be doing who's watching this or listening to this should be doing to increase LLM visibility in AI mode in Google search?

Charles Flo: I think that the first thing is play around with it right a lot of the SEOs that I'm speaking to who are worried about AI overviews AI mode etc of replacing Google search have done very little actually inside AI mode or AI overviews to understand what it's like what the experience is like what everybody knows a Google search everybody understands that everybody knows what it's like what the what to expect when you put this a query in not many people actually know what to expect when they put a query into AI mode so far nobody knows what the underlying system is doing to create that output and how you can tune to that and what it likes what it doesn't like what it prefers what it doesn't prefer etc etc so the number one thing was just go and spend 20 hours actually using it and see what is different how you think it changes what changes for the queries that you're putting in make sure when you're using it use it on a logged in account use it on a non-logged VPN account use it on a brand new device use it on a smartphone use it on your partner's phone use it on a different person's phone try and have different types of personas engaging and see what the outputs are and register all that data and understand that data in terms of just any other techniques and things like that there's a bunch of stuff to try and get in Gemini grounding so actually get the underlying Gemini flash model inside of its training data as an example with Coca-Cola there's probably thousands of mentions in the training corpus of Gemini mentioning Coca-Cola we would try and at least get a dozen mentions inside the training corpus for our own brand right those kinds of things getting training data ingestion so getting your actual data to be ingested by the models is itself a bit of a tricky thing but Common Crawl there's a bunch of file sharing websites that they use routinely there's a bunch of like open source PDF websites there's all of these things that end up kind of actually forcing the adoption from the training model ingestion and that is the number one thing that will future-proof everybody is actually having the underlying model not even having to search for you but the underlying model itself know what to know what to say about your brand.

James Dooley: Yeah and then the last question is so AI mode powered by Gemini AI overviews powered by Gemini and then you've got the Gemini app is there anything different that you're seeing come back if I was to go and do a search in the Gemini LLM app and if I was to go and do a search just in normal web search and the AI overview shows up in Google versus AI mode so the tab of AI mode are they bringing back the same I know they're always different like per things but are they if you was on the same history and stuff like that are they bringing back similar results to the Gemini app to the AI overview versus AI mode are all them different answers that's coming back with?

Charles Flo: They're all different so specifically AI overviews use a custom tuned model of Gemini flash right Gemini 3 flash AI mode uses a different Gemini model and then the AI the app uses a different one that's specifically designed for apps and mobile usage so just the underlying model itself and the architecture is slightly different depending on the app and the experience and they're all tuned for their specific use cases so that in itself ends up creating the outputs are slightly different now with AI overviews they use a set query and then query fan out underneath and it's usually like three four five query fan out so it might be like you know best CRM tools it might also think that HubSpot versus Salesforce or something like that might be one of the subset queries with AI mode the subset queries are normally 14 to 16 so they do 14 to 16 fan out instead of a 4 to 5 one for AI overviews so you get a lot broader information a lot more citations a lot more sources that kind of thing and then the mobile app uses a completely different sourcing methodology but still uses grounding and the query fan out itself I don't think they even do query fan out it's just the one query for mobile so it's all very different across the board and I'm sure that it will continue to change as these specific underlying models get more reinforced to their experiences and especially where they get more data this is the big thing Google has got so much data so many users that as you've said earlier if they know that users are clicking on that tab every time that you load this experience then that tab will become the default right like these things will change over time as we as users force the adoption and force the change

James Dooley: Yeah for sure anyone who's watching this are you excited for AI mode is AI mode going to become the default search engine if you don't think it is make sure you check out the link in the description where me and Charles are speaking about AI mode becoming the default search engine make sure you also check out the next one where how to future-proof yourself to get in AI mode to get in Gemini mentions and to also get in them AI overviews that's powered by Gemini. Charles it's been an absolute pleasure thank you very much.

Charles Flo: Thanks everybody.