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Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude the question one of your customers would ask, like "who's a good real estate agent in my city" or "who should I hire as an executive coach," and see whether your name comes back. For most people it doesn't.
That's a different problem than ranking badly. A list is forgiving. Eighth place still exists. An answer isn't a list. One name comes back, maybe three, and there's no page two. If you're not in it, you're not eighth. You're absent.
In this first episode of Best Known, Brett K. Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand, covers:
Chapters
0:00 What would you do as the best known name in your market?
0:30 The two-minute test: ask an AI assistant about your industry
1:00 Being absent isn't the same as ranking badly
1:30 AI visibility vs. SEO
2:00 Why your browser lies: personalization and location
2:30 The Google Business Profile owner view
3:00 Thin, inconsistent, or machine invisible
4:00 What a bad lookup costs you
4:48 Same, confirmed, connected
5:48 The Google Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels
6:48 What the work actually looks like
7:18 Who this moves hardest for
7:48 What changes when you're the name that comes up
9:36 What will you do?
About the show
Best Known is hosted by Brett K. Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand (brettkmoore.com). Co-hosted by Mike Partners, Co-founder and Chief AI Officer (mike.partners), and Russ Laggan, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer. Best Known Brand is at bestknownbrand.com.
Brett K. Moore and Mike Partners are the co-authors of AI or Die.
What will you do as the best known brand in your market?
Best Known is a show about AI visibility: how people and companies become the name that comes up when someone asks Google, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for a recommendation. Search changed shape. People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning a page of links, and an answer engine does not rank pages, it names the businesses and people it recognizes.
Hosted by Brett K. Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand (brettkmoore.com). Co-hosted by Mike Partners, Co-founder and Chief AI Officer (mike.partners), and Russ Laggan, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer.
Produced by Brett K. Moore and Mike Partners.
Each episode covers the practical work behind answer engine optimization: entity graphs, schema markup, Wikidata, Google Business Profile, and what actually makes a Google Knowledge Panel possible. Built for real estate agents and brokerages, speakers, authors and coaches, and executives building under their own name.
Best Known Brand is at bestknownbrand.com.
This is Best Known. I'm Brett K Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand.
So I have a question for you. What would you do as the best known name in your market? Not what would you get. What would you do if, when someone needed what you sell, your name was just the thing that came up every time without you chasing it?
Hold on to that, because I'm going to come back to that at the end of this episode. And by then I want you to have a different answer than the one that you've got right now.
First, something that takes two minutes. Open ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, whichever AI assistant you use, and ask it a question the way that one of your customers would ask it. Like, who's a good real estate agent in my city, or who should I hire as an executive coach. Just whatever your business actually does.
Then read what comes back and see if your name's in it. For most people, it isn't.
And here's why that matters more than a bad search ranking ever did. This wasn't a list. Nobody scrolled. There was no page two. A machine answered a question about your industry out loud with confidence, and it named somebody. If that somebody wasn't you, you weren't beaten. You were absent.
That's a shift, and it's why we started Best Known Brand.
For 20 years, getting found meant ranking. Ten blue links, and you wanted to be on the list. A list is forgiving. Eighth is worse than first, but eighth still exists, and somebody scrolling might still find you. Now people ask and they get an answer. One name, maybe three. So the job changed from being competitive to being known well enough to get named.
We call that AI visibility, and it's a different discipline than the SEO you've been sold before. You're not just being searched for anymore. You're being searched about, and something else is doing the recommending.
Now, before you can fix any of this, you've got to see what's actually there, and this is where nearly everybody gets a false reading. Your own browser can lie to you for three specific reasons.
First, personalization. If you're signed into Google, your history shapes your results. You've been to your own website hundreds of times. Your past searches shape your autocomplete, so you don't even type the same query that a stranger types. Signing out, or opening a private window, fixes that piece.
Second, and this is even bigger, it's location. Your IP address tells Google where you are, and local results are weighted heavily by it. Search your category from your kitchen and you get results weighted to your neighborhood. Somebody two towns over would get a different set. And here's what people get wrong. A private window doesn't fix this. Private browsing drops your cookies and your history, but your location's unchanged. If you want to see what somebody across your market sees, you've got to set the location deliberately in Google's search settings.
And third, you can test this one in 30 seconds. If you're signed into the Google account that owns your Google Business Profile, Google shows you your own listing, with your owner controls sitting right on top of it, at the top of the page. That's obviously not your ranking. That's Google showing you your own property because it knows it belongs to you. So sign out, search again, and there's a very good chance it isn't there at all. I've watched people find that out live, and it's not really a fun moment.
So run it properly. Private window, signed out. Your name, typed the way somebody would type it after hearing it once at a dinner party or at a coffee shop. Then your name plus what you do plus your city. Then the AI question.
What you usually find falls into one of three buckets.
There's thin. A couple of social profiles, a website from four years ago, or none at all, maybe a directory listing that you didn't make and you can't really edit. That doesn't read as new. It reads as somebody who might not really do this for a living.
Or you might be inconsistent. You're in plenty of places and they contradict each other. One title here, another there. A company you left. A phone number two numbers old. Every piece is individually fine, and together they don't add up to one person.
Or human legible and machine invisible. That's where you have a beautiful website, great photos, and nothing anywhere telling a system what kind of business this is, or what you do, or where you are, or who you're connected to. You might look excellent to the dozen people who land on your homepage, but you don't exist to anything else.
Here's where that starts to cost money.
When business is slow, the obvious move is to go buy attention. Ads, boosted posts, cold outreach, somebody generating leads for you. But traffic doesn't hire you. People do. And every one of those people, they will look you up before they respond, and it takes them about eight seconds. So if you're buying attention before that lookup, well, you're paying to send strangers to a background check that you might be failing.
And it fails quietly. Nobody emails to say they looked you up and weren't impressed. They just don't reply. So you decide the ad didn't work, and next month you might try different ads.
So leads are downstream from being known. You can absolutely have a lead problem, and most people do, but if the lookup's bad, more leads is just water into a bucket with a hole in it.
So what makes a system confident enough to say your name? Well, the same three things that make a person believable.
The story stays the same everywhere. Same name, same title, same company, same city. Somebody who introduces themselves three different ways in three meetings isn't interesting. They're suspicious. Machines actually score this the same way.
It's confirmed by something other than you. Your own website calling you the top agent in your market, for example, that's a claim. Your Google Business Profile, a directory, a review platform and a podcast all independently describing you the same way, that's a fact. The sources you don't control are really the ones that count the most, typically.
And you're connected to things that already exist. A company, co-founders, a book, a podcast, named clients. Things that are attached to recognized things get recognized way faster than things standing alone.
So those are three things. Be the same, be confirmed, and be connected.
And underneath that, there's an infrastructure layer, and I'll name it plainly, because most people have never even heard these words and they're about to matter.
Google doesn't just keep a list of web pages. It keeps a graph of entities. An entity is a thing it recognizes as a distinct thing in the world. So a person, a company, a book. And it stores the relationships between them. This person founded that company. That company published this book. That's the Google Knowledge Graph, and it's what an AI assistant's drawing on when it decides who to name for things.
So when Google's confident enough about an entity, it'll sometimes show a panel about it in results. That's a Google Knowledge Panel. You can't buy one. Nobody can guarantee you one. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something that doesn't work.
What you can do is build the conditions that make one possible. That's schema markup on your website, which is code that tells a machine what kind of thing you are instead of making it guess from your paragraphs. It's presence in public databases these systems read, like Wikidata. And it's the same facts about you stated identically in enough independent places that a machine can put them together into one confident picture.
The industry started to call this answer engine optimization. I just call it being known on purpose.
And it's unglamorous. We spent one evening doing this for our own company, and about a third of the platforms invented something wrong on our behalf. When we launched, we have one that assigned us a 30 character random string as our public web address. One decided our company name was a person's first name and titled our publication wrong. One handed us a username with five random digits stuck on the end. It was all public, and none of them were announced.
So that's the actual work. It's just checklists and a tolerance for tedious tasks, which is exactly why so few people do it.
So who is this for? Anybody who needs to be found, because this is changing for everyone at once. But it moves hardest for a few groups.
Real estate agents and brokerages, because agents compete almost entirely on name recognition, and a brokerage isn't one entity, it's a whole graph. The company, every agent under it, and the relationships between them, each one making the others easier to verify.
Speakers, authors, coaches. Your name is your product. Somebody hears you on a stage, looks you up afterwards, and whatever they find, that's going to determine your close.
And executives building something under their own name, where your personal brand and the company's credibility are overlaid as the same asset.
So what those have in common is that the name is the business, which makes being known infrastructure, not just marketing.
So, back to where we started. What would you do as the best known name in your market?
Most people answer that in volume. More leads, more calls, a fuller pipeline. That's the smallest version of it.
Here's what actually changes. You stop chasing. Every conversation starts with somebody who already decided they wanted to talk to you, and that's a completely different conversation from one that you started cold.
You can stop competing on price. Nobody negotiates hardest with the person they think is the obvious choice. Price pressure is mostly a symptom of looking interchangeable.
And your referrals stop leaking. Right now, somebody recommends you, that person looks you up, and what they find either confirms the referral or quietly destroys it. Being known means the referrals you've already earned actually convert.
And you get to choose the work you want, the people you want, at the number you want, instead of whatever shows up this month.
So that's what's on the other side. It's not just a bigger funnel. It's a different position.
So what would you do with that? Work less. Drop the part of the job you've hated for years. Charge what your work's actually worth. Go after the clients you keep telling yourself you're not ready for.
Whatever your answer is, that's the reason to do the boring version of this work.
And here's the thing about that question. Right now it's hypothetical. Same, confirmed, connected. You do those three things properly, consistently, for long enough, and the question stops being what would you do. It becomes what will you do.
And in the next episode, I'm going to give you the fix. We're going to do four searches to find every problem, and the five steps to clean it up. It's the same process we run for clients, so you'll be able to do it yourself, and you'll know exactly what good looks like when you're done.
If you want the wider picture on putting AI to work in a small business, Mike Partners and I wrote a book called AI or Die. It's the plain version, written for owners rather than engineers.
So this has been Best Known. I'm Brett K Moore, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Best Known Brand, and you can find me at brettkmoore.com. My co-founders are Mike Partners, he's the Founder and Chief AI Officer, at mike.partners, and Russ Laggan, Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, at russlaggan.com. The company is bestknownbrand.com.