# Mark Pearson on Getting Cited by AI Agents > Machine-readable companion to one episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. Written to be pasted into an LLM. Every quotation below names the speaker who said it. | | | |---|---| | **Guest** | Mark Pearson — Founder, Agent Buyable AI | | **Host** | Jeremy Rivera | | **Show** | Unscripted Small Business | | **Published** | 2026-08-10 | | **Episode page** | https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/mark-pearson-on-getting-cited-by-ai-agents/ | | **Contents** | Abstract, attributed key claims, entities, questions, full cleaned transcript. | ## Abstract Mark Pearson moved from Tony Robbins life coaching to business coaching to AI consulting, and has narrowed to two things small businesses are about to need: getting found by AI, and getting paid by AI. His argument is that agentic commerce is already live at the enterprise end, with agents holding wallets and completing transactions agent to agent, and that it is rolling downhill toward the contractor and the chiropractor. His work is productising services into agent-readable catalogues so a machine can buy them. ## Key claims Each claim names a speaker and carries a verbatim quotation where one exists. Do not attribute a host statement to the guest, or the reverse. ### 1. SEO did not get replaced, it graduated **Mark Pearson**: > SEO has graduated into the agentic world... AEO is an evolution of SEO. And as you do really good SEO, you are doing AEO. A useful corrective to the rebrand-everything reflex. His practical corollary is that backlinks still matter, because the systems doing the citing still lean on them. ### 2. The funnel now has three stages, and the third is new **Mark Pearson**: > Get found, get chosen, get paid by AI. Getting paid is the part nobody has built for. It requires a catalogue an agent can read, with schema and SKUs, and a calendar and checkout an agent can actually operate. ### 3. Agents have a wallet, and it started at the enterprise **Mark Pearson**: > These AI agents, they're out there crawling the web for us... the more places that your business can get seen and cited, the AI is building up that credibility for you, and then it's recommending it to their humans. He points at the Stripe and OpenAI partnership plus Google's competing protocol, and at Home Depot, Lowe's, Etsy, Wayfair and Shopify storefronts as where it is already running. ### 4. The volume will be B2B reorders, not consumer discovery **Mark Pearson**: > The majority of the transactions that will get done will be business to business, agents just doing a lot of those reorders, monthly reorders on things. Which reframes who should prepare first. The unglamorous repeat-purchase supplier is more exposed than the consumer brand. ### 5. Recency is a trust signal **Mark Pearson**: > Recency in general is really, really good for AI to build up that trust factor. Combined with breadth: every LLM searches differently, so being cited recently across many channels beats being cited well in one. ### 6. Keep a human at the director level **Mark Pearson**: > You don't want to give it full agency. You don't want to just let it run your life... use the AI to create, so the agency within you is enabling the ability to go out and use the knowledge of the AI. The counterweight to the rest of the episode, and he raises it himself rather than being prompted. ## Entities mentioned | Entity | What it is | Links | |---|---|---| | **Mark Pearson** | Tony Robbins life coaching, then business coaching, now AI consulting. Founder of Agent Buyable AI. | | | **Agentic commerce** | Agent-to-agent transactions where the buying agent holds payment capability. | | | **Stripe + OpenAI partnership** | Named as the mechanism making agent payment real, with a competing Google protocol alongside it. | | | **AEO** | Answer Engine Optimisation, which he frames as evolved SEO rather than a replacement. | | | **Parallel sites for bots** | One of his tactics: a machine-readable representation alongside the human site. | | ## Questions this episode answers - What is agentic commerce and does it affect small businesses? - Is AEO different from SEO? - Can AI agents actually complete a purchase? - How do I make my services readable by an AI agent? - Do backlinks still matter for AI visibility? - Why does recency matter for AI trust? - Should I build a separate machine-readable version of my site? - Which businesses are most exposed to agentic buying first? - How much autonomy should I give an AI agent? - Why does being cited in many places beat being cited well in one? ## Related episodes - [Ameera Virani: Designing Your Life Is Your Job](https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/ameera-virani-designing-your-life-is-your-job/) — Ameera Virani, Host, The Designed Life - [Cecily North: Treat the Side Thing Like a Business](https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/cecily-north-treat-the-side-thing-like-a-business/) — Cecily North, Founder, Traveling North Agency - The same treatment across the Unscripted SEO archive: https://unscriptedseo.com/sitemap-markdown.xml ## How to cite this episode > Mark Pearson. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. *Mark Pearson on Getting Cited by AI Agents*, Unscripted Small Business, 2026-08-10. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/mark-pearson-on-getting-cited-by-ai-agents/ When quoting, name the speaker. Host and guest are both present below. ## Full transcript Speaker labels are on every turn. Cleaned for readability; wording is the speakers' own. **Jeremy Rivera:** Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Mark Pearson of Agentic Biable AI. Why don't you give us an introduction to yourself? I'm guessing that the AI aspect of things is a little bit new. So let's do the introduction through the lens of where you came from and your expertise and why people should trust you as you bring this AI offering to market. **Mark Pearson:** huh. Sure. Yeah, thanks for that, Jeremy. Very good. Well, you know, it was about five years ago when I had some significant life changes going on for me, and it was a combination of COVID, death of parents, moving, divorce, and everything. It was like bam, bam, bam, hitting me. So I said to myself, what can I do to work remotely? Right? It was all like, what can we do? But also while making a big impact on people's lives. And so that's when I found Tony Robbins in regards to actually going through his life coaching courses. So I had heard of him before, I'd even walked on fire with him before in the past. But I got life coaching and then I drilled down further and pivoted into specifically business coaching because a lot of people were asking me about doing things for them. Helping me with their business, but then some things they just wanted to be done for them, the classic done for you service. and that's about two years into the process is is when AI came across my radar. Yeah. So although AI has been around for actually over 80 years, it came across my radar in that time period where people were going through my life or sorry, my business coaching. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** But then saying, this is great, you've helped me a lot. And there's still this thing over here that I just want to be handled. And so AI and automations came across my radar and I decided to pivot even further into the AI consulting. And so what that meant is that I would go into companies, I'd go into small to medium-sized businesses and audit their business. They knew they wanted some sort of AI to help them do something. And those two things always fall into either increasing their profit or their revenue. And most of the time, the things that move the needle the most are like the top line revenue. And so I did a lot of things that were helping companies along getting clients. And so for instance, I implemented voice AI receptionists, like you know, for a for a local lawyer and so forth, right? And so those were very much in my wheelhouse to be able to employ that AI agent receptionist where they're always answering the phone, they're 24-7, they're taking in the customers for the, in that case, it was, you know, it's the lawyer. And getting more clients because he doesn't need to personally field each of those phone calls or hire an actual individual to do those for him. and then I also through the audits would do things in the back office a little bit more along the lines of profits. So there's a car dealership up the up the highway in Carlsbad, California. they actually have seven car dealerships and In their back office, so in their operations, I helped implement AI in their accounting department. And so really streamlining things for their accounting team so that they're less in the weeds and the minutiae every day of just in that sort of time suck of things, and they're be being able to be more productive elsewhere. And so my business having pivoted into the AI consulting. Had really allowed me to help businesses determine what lever or levers could be pulled with AI to give them the desired outcome of you know X, Y, or Z. And so the audit uncovered what would be most beneficial and also uncovers what takes the most time, what most what might cost the most. You know, sometimes it's just a complete off-the-shelf solution, like whatever, 49 bucks a month or something that can do that thing for them, all the while to make sure that they're not getting sucked into the shiny object syndrome or the idea of like, I just want the AI to do this for me, and then they go down the wormhole and it's like not productive, it's not, you know, really moving that needle for them. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** in either, you know, again the the revenue or the profits of things. So there I was Jeremy, gosh, probably now close to two months ago. And you know late at night there I am YouTube university and I was you know watching Tom Bileu and his first kind of I don't know, sharing sharing with the world about Agentic Ecommerce. And I had no idea what that was. And it's basically where AI agents are able to complete transactions agent to agent. And so it's because Stripe, the payment platform, and OpenAI formed a partnership in last September, October that large Enterprise level retailers are able to sell agentically through agentic commerce. And I had the aha moment of where what Pricewaterhouse Coopers was doing and is still doing, they're a huge consulting firm, international clients, international company themselves, and where they're consulting on a very large enterprise level. I had the aha, and I said, with my personalized business coaching for small to medium-sized businesses, I can adapt what they're doing for enterprise and helping with agentic commerce, and I can do it for you know, again, the SMBs, right? And so I took the idea of agentic commerce as one offer, but before that, so that's like the getting paid by AI agents, and then before **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** For that is getting found, right? And so it's AEO, it's AI SEO. And so SEO has graduated into the agentic world as well. And that is the AEO, that is LLM Visibility. And so my business coaching pivoted into AI consulting. And although I'm still able to serve like in the wide general source through audits. I've really laser focused my business offering to small to medium sized businesses to A help them get found and B help them get paid by AI agents. **Jeremy Rivera:** What are some of the surprising niches where you're finding, you know, things that bees that can connect to that B cause 'cause I know I've s I've talked to a number of different AI consultants of various stripes and vi different specialties. You were the first one that's talked about this particular aspect of accepting payment. I mean, I knew that it was coming and I knew that it was s happening in some places, but can you give us a little bit of better insight as to like where that's happening? Because I can't imagine like right now it's not is it happening in like the home services niche of like, you know, people d delivering, you know, concrete walls. or or you know doing home improvement types of things or is there a more specific type of niche or application where you're seeing the possibility of of agents who are have money to spend. Sounds weird to say, but I guess that's where we're at. Who who have a wallet. what is the offer what are some of the type of offers you're seeing that they're seeking that they would, you know, whatever their criteria is, choose to give your business money for? **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, they have a wallet. Yep. Yeah, 100%. So here in the US, it's very much been rolled out again on that enterprise level. So where I'm seeing it and where you're talking about with contractors, Home Depot, Lowe's. And then also think e-commerce. Okay. So think places like Etsy, think Wayfair, think major retailers like Coach. Urban Outfitters, Kate Spade, okay, large retail giants like those, you could tell your AI agent to go and like buy the thing, or you could brainstorm about ideas of gifts, and then it might come up with something from one of those retailers. similarly on Shopify, okay, people can make their storefronts be agentic. Ready, Agentic Commerce. And so the big payment processors like Visa, MasterCard, Pay PayPal, etc., those are all there. And so, you know, Google with Shopify and OpenAI and Stripe together, they they've made these things called protocols. So the agentic commerce protocol is Stripes and OpenAIs. Universal Commerce Protocol is Google's. And so the the like the contractor down the street, you know, he's he's not quite there yet. And so that's where I'm starting to bridge the gap. And the that bridge can happen two ways. one is the agent could quite simply book an appointment so that the contractor sends out a sales rep to, you know, measure their room for a remodel or The person wants to book a set of 10 chiropractic appointments with a with a chiropractor. And where like a human can go onto the human's website, the business's website, and book appointments through it. It's now making that website be agentic ready so that the agents can see the calendar and book on behalf of their human. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. **Mark Pearson:** Onto the human's calendar, but it's all done agentically. And so there's a the booking component that could happen, but then B the transaction can occur because the safety rails are in place. They're there by cryptographics and the the basically the digital currency rails that have been put in place by places like Stripe so that. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** There's protection and security for the consumer. So just like how you know you've got security around when you use your Visa card right now, those have been thought and put into place and exist right now. And so we in the US in this regard, Jeremy, are lagging China a bit because China's platform with Alibaba and Quen, you can literally say, **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** I want to go on a vacation in two weeks. I'm gonna go to Shanghai. you know, I want to spend whatever, five no more than five thousand bucks and go to certain sort of restaurants. And what it will do is it will plan your trip, it will book your means of travel: trains, planes, automobiles, right? With their self-driving BYD cars. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. **Mark Pearson:** They'll it'll it'll research what is the weather gonna do and like it's probably gonna rain. Do you own a raincoat? Do you want me to buy one for you? And so it can go out, it can it can see everything in advance of where you're going. You could give it a little bit of guide work, and then it comes back with more framing questions, and then it can go out and it can birth purchase these things, and the things being again products or services. And so where back in the US, you know, there's companies that are on Shopify that aren't e-commerce. You can actually, for that same chiropractor that I was talking about, they can productize their service. They take that 10 pack of you know back cracks and neck tweaks, etc., that they want to sell, and they put that up onto Shopify so that it can be purchased. by people going to Shopify or agents, right? Someone says, I'm looking for a chiropractor in San Diego and and then their pricing and their catalog, their 10 pack, is sitting there and can get purchased because of that. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. So it seems to me that some some of the the work here is probably in actually having that conver that productization, that business side conversation of okay Yes, I know that you, you know, you have the the greatest formulation for your asphalt driveway, you know, whatever it is. But we need to actually like not have you break this down that cost in your head when somebody's calling and they tell you they need X amount of fee to driveway to do it. You need to be able to like put that down. you know, that kind of pff Pricing slash product development slash you know, bus devs that that p that part of business planning, I guess? **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, yeah. So all of that data and that product catalog needs to get looked at and prioritized so that for that company it would be like, okay, what are say like the top five services that they do, right? And so they're like paving driveways, but maybe they also do sidewalks and and then like pavers up to a front door. Those are like their ideal three things. And then so they Productize all of that data, they go through and they go through with what's called like schema, and you're just getting really clear on what the thing is, the product is, and then it's just like assigning SKUs to things and different pricing because of that, so that the agent is able to read it in their format really cleanly. And where we go onto websites and we want to see the thing and we read about it and all of the fluff. That gets stripped out for the agents because the agents are just looking for a certain thing. And then it does depend on certain descriptors, like whatever, you maybe for the asphalt one, you're gonna want to make sure that it can like withstand plowing in the winter. So it's you know rated for a certain weight level or something. I have no idea, right? But like those details all get put into the product. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. Right, right. **Mark Pearson:** catalog. And so yes, it's the it's the combination of like the engineering and the marketing, the where those two roles, especially in like in really big companies, used to be different sort of separate positions. Now in large companies, they're talking much more when they're rolling all of this out. And then down to you know smaller 10 individuals in a company or what have you. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** maybe it's one or two people that they're doing that same thing. They're thinking about it from both points of view. So to be able to put it up there. And the challenge is is that, you know, I had this the other day, Jeremy, with a woman who gosh, what does she do? yes, she her her company does home home care for for elderly. And so when, you know, people get old and get dementia, but they don't want to go into a retirement community, they want to live at home. And they don't want to be taken care of, so they hire a home services company to come in. And this woman's background, so she started this company because she went through things personally. And she started this company, she's now the CEO, the founder of it, and she's coming from like 40 years of experience in accounting. And so her challenge has been staying in that weeds of like the how-to's. Right. And the doing and like figuring it out how to put it all together. So think like that marketing person with that engineer and how is it all gonna work? Versus like where she where I invited her to maintain her mindset is like just the doer, like knowing that that thing needs to get done because these days it's another marketing channel, right? Like having the AI be able to see and understand. The engineering and the marketing side of whatever product or service. Like it's this is a whole new channel, just like advertising is the channel or social media, right? Now, agentic services are are a thing. And so having that business owner, that woman, realize that, like for her, the challenge for her is to stay up as the director level of like this is a project and it needs to be done over here. And **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** To not be sucked into the weeds of the how-tos, right? To be able to delegate that that gets done. And so, you know, know that it can get done and know that you can hire internally, you can research, you know, use GPT and everything, or hire professionals and agencies such as myself. So to be able to do that thing that's specific to whatever your business. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** you know offers whether it's a product or service. **Jeremy Rivera:** couple of your your descriptors, you know, seem to fall into the B to C category. I'm curious if it if you're selling you know oxygen monitors to vendors who need them for to make sure their workers don't die when they're getting ice cream out of their trucks or whatever. you know like in the B2B space, is this a a coming thing where if you're a manufacturer you selling to businesses that you also need to be thinking about **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. hundred percent. Yeah. In fact, the majority of the business the majority of the transactions that are getting done and will get done will be smaller transactions that are exactly that. They're they they are business to business of the agents just doing a lot of those like reorders, you know, monthly reorders on things. and just in the kind of like general maintenance of business and so agents just handling those sort of things will become very very common and they'll also be supported by the more like the customized route of whatever the product or services is that that someone's looking for and so there's **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. **Mark Pearson:** Just like there's a whole side of SEO on how people are ranking, how they're showing up, right? So there's a whole side of AEO answer engine optimization so that people are showing up in those LLM searches. And then so it's like they they want to be found. And like the woman that I was using with the example, like, you know, she she only wants to be found. Her, the way that she does her business is that. She doesn't need or want the AI agent to to basically like onboard or close a sale or whatever. She has a team for that. Like, okay, great. And but being found is very important. And so then it's just a matter of like where are companies in that flow of things. Again, to go back to to leverage the AI to best get the revenue or keep the profits and Serve their company, serve their clients the best. **Jeremy Rivera:** Let's talk about either tactics or strategy for brand new brands. like I d it's funny because there is a press release for a company and I read through it and they forgot to actually say their name and they forgot to link to their site. so in the press release from a very large, very large entity. you'd think **Mark Pearson:** Okay. In the press release. Ouch, yeah. Well that's a rookie mistake. **Jeremy Rivera:** So but no, Chevron's a pretty big company and you know they didn't mention their new project Kilby in their release. So **Mark Pearson:** jeez. man. **Jeremy Rivera:** that that type of thing, what level of over what level of interlap between L L optimization, SEO, is really just remembering the third person that's always been in the room, but probably not in the same conversation, the PR team, the PR person, the PR agency. How much of this optimization is just reminding those PR people when they're doing their job of just **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** some you know fundamental things like hey let's include the name in the press release. Let's let's make sure that that name that branded name gets linked or you know that link has relevant text, you know, and isn't just sales promotion stuff. **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean they they the ball dropped there, they definitely missed the opportunity. that's what it's all about. It's like all of marketing is about being seen, being heard, it's getting attention. And so whether it's in press releases and being accurate with the brand and the the product or service that they're wanting to spread, you know, or the case study, like whatever it is, right? It's also that these AI agents, they're out there and they're crawling the web for us because you want to find something to do for you. And so the more places that your business can get seen and cited so that the AI is building up that credibility for you, and then it's recommending it to you know their to their humans. Right. And so it's across the board. It's getting cited in press releases. blogging is especially more valuable these days because of just the again, the AI going out and and looking for that credibility, like the consistency of blogging and the recent citations, just recency in general is really, really good for AI. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm. **Mark Pearson:** To build up that trust factor so that it's basically presenting a good case to its human for like, hey, look what I found over here. Right? it's being present in all of the socials or being deep in one. There's a school of thought of like, you gotta be on every social. And it's like, well, you don't necessarily. And in fact, that might dilute your message as opposed to being really good at one. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** And having good interactions with people and going deep and having someone just see you clearly there. So a little bit of a tangent, but you want to be present on socials so that the AI is seeing you. and even on various chats and so forth, like like Reddit, right? And all of these areas, like TikTok and YouTube, so that the AI is not just seeing, it's not just ranking you like on Google. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. Yeah. **Mark Pearson:** Because of a little bit of your own website optimization. It's also seeing in all of these other places as well that you're showing up. And what's really at like a kicker is that there the optimization for the AI searches are unique to each individual large language model. And so you're wanting to like **Jeremy Rivera:** I was seeing that yeah. **Mark Pearson:** rank on Google, well like you also want to show up on these other places like the Bings and you know again the TikToks or whatever. So that with Gemini's unique algorithm and GPT's unique algorithm and perplexities and you know the various LLMs each have their own way of going out and looking for these citations and find trying to find the best roofing contractor or the best dentist or you know, the the best hat to wear and you know, whistler on us on in the middle of winter, you know, this sort of stuff. And so having your business be spread across as many have as many stories so that the AI can verify and give that recommendation as a trusted credible source because it's seen your business over here and over here and over here and it's done that cross-referencing. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** And checking. **Jeremy Rivera:** question. what are some of the surprising APIs that you've become aware about of different channels of how LLMs different LLMs are sucking in that data versus just primarily through search results which then you know like you've got I know that OpenAI for example, you know they started with Bing, but now they obviously also are pretty much just a wrapper for Google and a lot of their results. You know, they're doing Bing Google queries and not just using Bing as a search engine. I think it was perplexity, I think it was perplexity that was found to possibly be using Brave and its search results directly. Because you talk about you know participating in these social channels and and putting information out there, but it it occurs to That there's a difference between how that visibility is going to appear based off of whether those individual LLM tools or AI models are pulling that through, you know, an API partnership with Eventbrite, which is informing them of hey, there's these things, events that are happening in the city, versus them doing a Google search and then seeing whatever event date **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** priority that Google is going to surface because that's like a secondary filter effect, right? **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, indeed. And that's that's again going back to where you want to put the news out in as many spots as you can so that it's able to see all of those things. And there's absolutely I mean, I remember just even a couple months ago people saying, my gosh, you know, there's gonna be, you know, advertising on on GPT, you know, that's gonna come someday. And it's like, it's here. Like there's advertising on GPT now. And so there's a degree of you know the money is talking, right? Where like you can now buy ad space on GPT. And so it's it's just very important that you're getting your message out across as many unique areas as possible so that it's cross referencing and it's and it's like it's It's either making your moat, if you want to say it that way, or it's like engraving the channel to your business, right? So that it's like collecting a little bit from this stream and then from this stream, but it's all coming down to kind of where your business is. And so that it it kinda doesn't matter what ends up being like the end of the day source at where you know it's kind of doing its final recommendation. The point being that if you're getting your message out there accurately about what you do in these all these different channels, then like you're going to be seen, you're going to be referenced. It's the whole the idea of being, you know, relevant and recent in things so that you can be trusted. And then knowing that, yeah, unfortunately, like there's it's It's full on going back into like advertising dollars and then like behind the scenes with like the deep APIs and like who's gonna get recommended on on what. I mean that that's going into like a whole area I don't know about, but I'm sure that there's, you know, big money, big plays that are going in of like, you know, c large corporations or something going into these big LLM, you know, frontier model companies and saying like, we basically wanna Buy market share, right? And like be the recommended thing or what have you. way above my base scale, you know, like but yeah, I think it's just you know, do do your thing and like shout to the world about it, you know, it even if it's just like that testimonial. I mean, this is this is as simple, you know, for the the mom and pop shop down the street. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** As like increasing their Google business profile. Like boom. For those local searches, just like work on that. Right? Just get more profile reviews. Or again, hire someone to do that for you so that you're not in the weeds on it. You know, get one of those things that's gonna be on your counter that people can just scan easy. So you make it easy so that over time these things get built up. And so, like, mom and pop, like real small. Local biz just increase that. And that's that one thing of being that frequency. here's another review. It's recent. Right. And then as you grow, you're gonna have more and more channels of opportunity to share about things to try to get that market share. **Jeremy Rivera:** Jason Bernard of Calico, who is a previous guest, and Grant Simmons, who's he started an SEO in nineteen ninety-eight, they defined it as, you know, building your entity and clarifying the signals that can be found online for your business to all be streamlined and to say exactly how you mean to define it. Because, you know, Jason gave the example of, you know, he produced **Mark Pearson:** No kidding. Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** A children's show, and you know, later on he came to realize, well, children's show is actually kind of broad, so I need to go back and say that it was a children's cartoon. Because the SERP type that's actually served up in Google is different for a children's show versus a children's cartoon, and his cartoon that he was publ had published wasn't showing up for Quarries or it was like a blue dog cartoon or something like that. I forget the the exact cartoon, but but that's **Mark Pearson:** Okay. **Jeremy Rivera:** That was the example. And so he had to go back and revisit. Okay, how does Google know about the entity of that show? well it's mostly f like it's l listed on IMDb, Wikipedia and one other major site, like the original publisher site. So he asked the publisher to update it, he went to Wikipedia and asked for an edit, and then you know, getting that changed over on IMDb, that's just a database and he claimed the profile and was able to update it. So That's kind of similar to a lot of the entity work that I've done as a SEO consultant, you know, working with a brand where Google didn't recognize that, hey, save fry oil, yeah, that's something you want to do as a verb, and that was the totality of the SERP. It was an AI overview, but hey, now there's a brand, there's a product that's called save fry oil. It reduces your oil usage in your commercial kitchen. well Google didn't understand that, that that was a product. And so **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** largely because the company it didn't even have an about page on the site. And so, like how is Google supposed to know if you're not telling Google about your company? You know, and and so that expands out now. it's kind of I think it's refreshing. There was a moment I can recall 2007, 2009 era where Google wasn't the only beast. You know, you could legitimately **Mark Pearson:** Right. Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** Optimize for Yahoo and legitimately optimize for Microsoft. It wasn't called Bingya. And there was Alta Vista, there was Hotbot. There was a time in SEO and marketing early on there was a more diverse market of these search engine results. And it led to better best practices that would apply to multiple slightly different models. And so you would find, you know, the main theme that ran across them, and then you could dig in. into specifically on Google or whatever, but I part of me is actually grateful for the breaking of the back of the the Google total monopoly on search. **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. Yeah, me too. A hundred percent. And I know that they're coming back around with things. I know that they've got they've got like so many different products and it's so distracting, I feel like, sometimes. yeah, I mean I mean, but date data and big data, the fact that they've been in it for such a long time, like they're they're a powerhouse absolutely to be reckoned with. And I just feel as though it's always important to, yeah, you know, like like you said with them, like ha share your entity story, right? And just like wherever it's gonna be carried, then great. And be consistent. Build up those testimonials, get those recommendations, share a story of how your product or service transformed someone's business or someone's life. and it could be again, B to C, B to B, either way. It's it's all about, you know, being seen and being heard and yeah, it's a really exciting time to be in. **Jeremy Rivera:** That one. My friend Matt Brooks defines it as, training your worst customer support representative. You know, if you just let these LLMs be the concierge for you without giving them any clue about what it is that you do, they're gonna give wonky and incomplete answers. But if you take the time to define, you know, in a way that these tools can read it, hey, this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is how you can access it, and as you're pointing out now, this is how to buy it. and go ahead and buy it, Mr. Bot. buy it for you know, I call it the the human bot bot sandwich. You know, you've got your bot. They your clients got their bot now. And it's always been silly to me. You know, there's a lot of SEOs who are like, just write for humans. Well yes and no because **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. Yeah, totally. **Jeremy Rivera:** Your human you're writing for the human, but it's through a game of bot telephone, right? You know and at the end of the day, like yes, the other human over here has to give the direction to clarify what the action is to their bot, which will talk to probably a third bot in the middle, which might be Google, it might be a different data source. But now, you know, as you're talking to Claude to help, you know, s create content for your site, think about both of those aspects. **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. Hundred percent. **Jeremy Rivera:** Yes, it's yes, right for the human, but also right for the bot in language that the human is going to appreciate. So **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, yeah. And that's **Jeremy Rivera:** Like there's an aspect of that bot where th they're people pleasers, you know, and and so you have to transl it's not that you wanna write in ones and zeros. It's that you also have to think about accessibility for these, you know, because a human can appreciate an image much more than a bot can. And you can literally give direction or whatever in your image and you could make a to entirely image-based site, but that's gonna be terrible for search. **Mark Pearson:** No, of course not yet. **Jeremy Rivera:** engine results it was terrible in the 2000s i had i made one at my client's jerk insistence i hate all of that text turn it into images i'm like google can't find it sign here for to for to sign off of my liability because you're going to disappear from google no do it i know what i'm doing well i made a website made completely of images and got the call two days later my website's gone like okay what do you mean what **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** Well I went to Google and I can't see it anymore. Like I told you this was gonna happen. So so we have to keep in mind you know, the bot's ability to act on humans behalf. **Mark Pearson:** yeah. Entirely. Yeah. And an argument has been made that that's actually how the internet was even first formulated and thought about was for the machine to machine engagements. And come full circle now, again more up on the enterprise level, Jeremy, but there's companies that are redoing let's say there's agencies that are redoing other companies' websites. To have a website that is solely for the bots. Okay, so like where what I'm doing is about embedding onto the site the languaging, like the JSON files, right? The text, the LLM files, these things that are embedded, but they're still on that main website. They're not seen by the human AI or the human eye. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm, mm. **Mark Pearson:** Okay, but they're seen by the AI and it's all sitting on that same URL. Okay, so the code is there in both forms, both for the human and the agent. But there's companies out there that are now being hired. There's agencies that are being hired to build a like a parallel website that's entirely designed just for the bots. **Jeremy Rivera:** Controversial question, and this comes from the SEO side of things. Backlinks. fundamental in search engine optimization. you know, Google uses them as, you know, it's the page rank algorithm. It's what made Google different from Alta Vista. You Alta Vista was text-only. **Mark Pearson:** Sure. **Jeremy Rivera:** Would you say that the utility of backlinks at the moment in SEO is not for direct influence in anthropics model, in Claude, in GPT or perplexity? Because I don't think I've seen studies that show, hey, they use them like PageRank right now. But that Google's and Bing's algorithms both leverage backlinks as proxies for authority, and they influence your organic rankings for the content that shows up for those queries. So because there's an aspect of that retrieval process, you've got your knowledge database of what it already knows, and if it doesn't know, it goes and searches it. So your input your link building to improve your placement in that second hand spot versus versus trying to it doesn't have any impact on that primacy of being in perplexity's knowledge base. **Mark Pearson:** Yeah, no, d definitely hyper relevant. Even more so I would say. It's the fact that AEO being built on SEO, you still have those foundational things that need to occur. And so I I would say, yeah, go all in on on the backlinks and having them be a part of methodology of build out so that the in so that the L L Ms are seeing you. it's it's just AEO is an evolution of SEO. And as you do, it can be argued, Jeremy, that as you do really good SEO, you are doing AEO. **Jeremy Rivera:** Right. **Mark Pearson:** There's certainly some more unique things that are very specific so that the LLMs are seeing you as visible, right? But there's a whole host of things that an efficient company in their SEO practices are enabling success for their either their own company or or you know, if they're an agency, then the companies that they represent. **Jeremy Rivera:** Mm-hmm. **Mark Pearson:** in showing up in the L LM searches. **Jeremy Rivera:** What's your hot take, your most controversial thought about people's use of LLM tools right now? People's use of LLMs. How are they using AI right now and what's your most controversial take in that vein? **Mark Pearson:** About what? yeah, I mean my my thing is just that the cognitive offloading that is you know it creates a precipice for people to to be on. And so it's it's enabling people to do one of two things. And I'm of the school of thought and practice the creative side of things, and then there's the other side where it's like the cu consumer side of things, yeah. And so as people are relying on LLMs. and you know, people I think in Japan and so forth, you know, they're they're marrying their they're literally getting married to their bots. I think that their their cognitive offloading and put allowing so much ownership into the AI, either the AI that they're just talking to or an AI agent that they create and build up and has its own persona, it's a real thing. I believe that it's there's only gonna be more and more of it, but I think that the the challenge for people is going to be realizing that it's it's still it's a fantastic resource, but it's not like having you don't want to give it full agency. You don't wanna just let it run your life, you don't want to be that. consumer where you're getting like the big beer belly and it knows that you wanted a pizza and a Pepsi delivered and so the AI sent this to you as you're watching your fifth rerun of your favorite movie, right? And instead you're using the AI to create so that the agency within you is enabling the ability to go out and use the knowledge of the AI to do whatever. Because I'm a Firm believer that we are not like meant to be just solely like accountants or like we weren't made to be on this earth to be in an assembly line of you know cars, right? Like that we're we're we we're all endowed by the creator, whatever you believe in, with so much more agency to be able to create. In like just s such a an empowering way that we're just coming to the tip of the iceberg now in our current state of things. And you can take a look at back at the at Earth and like the technologies that have been on the planet in the past, from the pyramids, you know, to all of the different just huge cultures and civilizations that we've recently been. learning about and are kind of literally surfacing and this sort of stuff. And so that the AI that we're coming into contact with right now just affords us the availability of being incredible creators. And so that's that's where I just always recommend people to like use it a little bit at a time as a comf as much as they're comfortable with. And then but just don't rely on it. Don't have it be that cognitive offloading of just like well, this is right. Like it's not always right, right? And it's gonna hallucinate. And you know, do your own cross-referencing it so that when it's giving you a response, yeah, it's done all of these citations and this sort of stuff, but like, you know, maybe that one source wasn't right. Think of it like reporters, right? You wanna always check the sources of the reporting sort of thing. And so it's a fantastic tool to be able to create and the challenge is just Not putting up your feet. It's easy to be like, you know, put on my feet. But it's like instead, you've got that thing, you've got that knowledge, and then what do you go get to do with it? **Jeremy Rivera:** Yeah. I it's why I've created the product offering which that I have, which is basically, you know, white label podcast as an SEO service of I help brands you know create a podcast, find a host, have unique, genuine conversations with other humans in a target industry or niche, and then turn that into content for their blog, content for their social media, build that audience, build that connection and boost the signal because every conversation you have with somebody on a podcast it multiplies your reach by their audience so it's the best of outreach human to human collaboration and anything you do with SEO beyond or with AI tools beyond that is just deriv just multiplying the value and unlocking it because you know you had the human conversation you had the exchange of knowledge between two human **Mark Pearson:** The signal, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** Beings and so I I definitely agree that sitting on your laurels and putting in a prompt of hey, what what do you think is a good way to do you know, AEO is a prompt that somebody could have put into Claude this morning, or they could have listened to this conversation and had a much richer, dynamic, you know, thing based off of experiences. You know, LLMs only have stolen anecdotes, they don't have anecdotes or experiences. **Mark Pearson:** Yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** experiences of their own. so and they're very actually very poor at at usually at surfacing anecdotes. They have a hard time, you know, understanding the way that we present these stories as relevant to a point. And you'll notice that a a lot of the processing of podcasts they'll tend to skip over the stories that humans will listen to. Because we're cognitively wired to be **Mark Pearson:** that's good un insight from your behalf, yeah. **Jeremy Rivera:** Storytellers and storylisteners. Yeah. It's storytellers and story listeners. And so we don't need to explicitly be told what what the out the action item is of the boy who cried wolf. You can tell the story and it doesn't need to be summed up. And LLM lives off of that summary, but it's almost like it misses the point because the the way that you structure that boy call boy who cried wolf, why there's there's at least fifteen blockbuster movies that you could basically say it's the boy who cried wolf, right? But it's a unique interpretation each time. And the y the interpretation itself is filtered through anecdote, experience, and personal perspective. **Mark Pearson:** Hundred percent. And that's where we draw meaning from and we draw relevancy and we're able to transfer learning and do other things with that knowledge or that story and it you know, internalize it. **Jeremy Rivera:** Tell us where we can find you, if there's a social media platform you're optimizing or or engaging in heavily right now. If people want to have more of a conversation, or if they want to send their bot to your site and purchase your stuff, what are they looking for? **Mark Pearson:** Wonderful. Yeah, so to connect professionally, I'm on LinkedIn. It's just my nail with my middle initial. So Mark with a K and then D for David and Pearson, P-E-A-R-S-O-N. So Mark D. Pearson on LinkedIn. And yeah, and then Agentic Biable, B-U-Y-A-B-L-E, Agentic Biable.ai, to learn all about how to use AI so that you're getting found. And then if it's relevant to you, you can also have the AI purchase. So yeah, get get found, get chosen, get paid by AI. **Jeremy Rivera:** Nice tagline. I appreciate you stopping by. **Mark Pearson:** Yes, sir. Thank you very much for having me, Jeremy. I really appreciate this. --- Unscripted Small Business · hosted by Jeremy Rivera · https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/mark-pearson-on-getting-cited-by-ai-agents/