Ep 244: From SEO to GEO - How to Stay Visible in an AI-Driven World with Expert Jared Bauman

SHOWNOTES

Jared Bauman didn’t expect to compete for his own name online.

But when a state representative with the exact same name started appearing everywhere in search results, it forced him to confront something bigger: search engines — and now AI tools — don’t guess who you are. They connect dots.

And if your digital presence isn’t clearly connected, someone else may become the “expert” instead.

In this episode, we take a calm, strategic look at how search is evolving from traditional SEO into what Jared calls “GEO” — Generative Engine Optimization — and what that means for solopreneurs and small business owners who want to remain visible in an AI-first world.

No panic. No hype. Just clarity.

Jared Bauman is the founder of 201 Creative, a marketing agency specializing in SEO and emerging AI search optimization strategies. He’s also the host of the Niche Pursuits podcast and has been an entrepreneur for more than 25 years, building and selling multiple businesses. As AI began reshaping search behavior, Jared studied the data, adapted his agency, and developed practical frameworks to help businesses stay visible and credible.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• Why SEO isn’t dead — it’s evolving.
• What “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO) actually means.
• The shift from focusing on keywords to focusing on entities.
• Why AI tools care deeply about accuracy, consistency, and freshness.
• How inconsistent business information erodes trust with AI systems.
• What schema (structured data) is — explained in plain English.
• Why third-party mentions and citations matter more than ever.
• The danger of “set it and forget it” websites.
• What a GEO Snapshot Audit reveals about your visibility gaps.

CALL TO ACTION

If you want your business to be recommended — not overlooked — in an AI-driven search landscape, this episode is essential listening.

Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations that help you grow the online side of your business strategically and sustainably.

Get regular access to tips, techniques and advice from experts about growing your business
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• 201 Creative Website – https://201creative.com/ 
• GEO Snapshot Audit (free audit discussed in the episode) – https://201creative.com/geo-snapshot/ 
• Niche Pursuits Podcast – https://www.nichepursuits.com/category/podcasts/ 
• Jared Bauman on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredbauman/ 

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 244: From SEO to GEO – How to Stay Visible in an AI-Driven World with Expert Jared Bauman

[00:00:00] 

Trudy Rankin: Jared Bauman didn’t expect to lose his own name online, but when a state representative with the exact same name started getting mentioned everywhere, Jared suddenly had competition, not just for search rankings, but for identity. And that’s when something became crystal clear to him.

If AI can’t clearly understand who you are and what you’re known for, it will confidently recommend someone else. So if you’ve ever assumed that your website, quote, “speaks for itself,” this episode may gently challenge that assumption . In this conversation, Jared and I talk about what’s really happening as search evolves into what he calls GEO or generative engine optimization.

We talk about why keywords aren’t the whole story anymore, what entities mean in practical terms, and how structured data or schema helps AI connect the dots about your business. But we also talk about what solopreneurs can realistically do to stay visible without [00:01:00] needing a full tech team or a complete website overhaul.

Now, Jared Bauman is the founder of 201 Creative, which is a marketing agency that specializes in SEO and he’s also the host of the Niche Pursuits podcast. He’s been an entrepreneur for over 25 years and has built and sold multiple businesses. So when AI began reshaping search, he didn’t panic.

He studied the data, adapted his services, and developed a framework to help businesses remain visible and credible in this new environment. Now that thoughtful, strategic approach is exactly why I wanted him on the show.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin and I help people who need a flexible work from home option grow the online side of their business so that they can earn more, stress less, [00:02:00] and have greater freedom in how they live.

And today I have got Jared Bauman with me. Now, you may be familiar with Jared if you listen to the Niche Pursuits podcast, because he’s the host of that and I listen to it regularly.

But recently, while he was talking on that podcast, one of the episodes he mentioned something around a GEO audit, and that’s something that I’ve been paying attention to a lot lately because with AI search you need to be able to be found. And you want people who are searching in the sort of the tools, the AI tools that are there.

You want them to recommend you. And it’s not obvious how to actually make that happen. And when Jared mentioned that he’s got this GEO audit as free, I thought I’m going to do that. And so I actually, you know, signed up, did the audit and I’ll explain a little bit more about that later, about which website I chose to give it and why, but long story short, the audit came through.

It was super useful just by itself. [00:03:00] Ended up on a call, just a discovery call with Jared where, oftentimes you think discovery call, are they going to hit me with a sales pitch? No. Jared actually took the time to just explain the audit results, answer my questions, and that was it. It was just really, really, really useful.

Just as a process. And of course, Jared is setting up a business that obviously he would like there to be sales from it, but the process was really pain-free. Really useful, really helpful. I really appreciated it and I thought I’d love to have him on the podcast just to talk about this topic and because I know a lot of people are concerned about this right now and they need to know how to actually be found.

So Jared, thank you so much for saying that you would be on the podcast. 

Jared Bauman: Oh, thanks for having me. Thanks for those kind words. I’m glad to hear that it was a good experience. I’m glad to hear you got a lot of value out of it. You hit the nail on the head. There’s a lot of trepidation, confusion, and to some degree we’re still figuring it out.

But I have to host a podcast every week where we talk about it, so I feel like I have to be a little ahead of the curve on this [00:04:00] one. 

Trudy Rankin: Well, absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think just for, if people aren’t familiar with you from listening to you from the podcast, the Niche Pursuits podcast, maybe you could just give people a little bit of a background, just a little bit about you and, why are you setting up this business at this stage?

Jared Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been an entrepreneur for actually over 25 years now. We just broke the 25 year mark. I’ve started and sold a couple of businesses thus far. Seven years ago, I started my marketing agency, 201 Creative, which is what you mentioned. We’ve ended up specializing along the years, along the way in SEO and SEO is adapting.

SEO is changing and it’s evolving. It’s not dead, but it’s evolving quite a bit, especially with AI, right? And so AI, what we call maybe GEO, optimizing for AI. GEO would be generative engine optimization. And so this is something that we’ve had to start paying attention to a lot, especially in the last year or two as we’ve started to get data that tells us how to, in essence, get cited, get referred, or get recommended by AI, by LLMs, by ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini and these things. And so [00:05:00] we had to adapt and evolve as an agency to make sure we were helping our clients not only rank well in organic search, but also rank well with LLMs and make sure that they were getting cited and recommended by LLMs.

And so that’s where all this came from. We wanted to help as many businesses as we could, so we created a smaller version of our initial stage audit. And that’s that GEO snapshot audit that we did for you. 

Trudy Rankin: Which is really interesting because it sort of has the feel even though your agency’s been there for a while, it sort of has that feel of a bit of a startup.

Because it’s got that startup vibe. 

Jared Bauman: Oh, it does. I mean, last summer we finally got enough data that we felt comfortable going out and saying like, okay, we have a pretty good idea of what it looks like to try to perform better with GEO, you know, getting ranked in AI. You’re not really getting ranked, so I hate to say that, but that’s how people like to refer to it.

So anyways, and so we basically had to start from scratch again, just like when we started the agency and we were building all these processes around the services people needed at the time. Well, we were just starting from scratch and we were looking like what [00:06:00] business services do we need to add for people to rank better, to do better to get cited, and so not only did all of our current services evolve, but we launched a bunch of new service offerings to kind of meet the needs of where things are going.

So it definitely has a startup feel to it. This audit, these calls, all this is very new, but it’s exciting. It’s kinda like starting a new business inside of a business in many ways. So it’s got a lot going for it. 

Trudy Rankin: So it helps to keep it fresh a little bit. And I can’t even remember, but from my corporate days, you know, there’s this lovely little diagram that shows a business kind of grows and grows and grows, and then it plateaus, and then it starts going down like this.

And unless you reinvent yourself, 

Jared Bauman: Yes. 

Trudy Rankin: You end up crashing and burning. But if you reinvent yourself, you start that curve all over again. That sounds like what you’re doing. It sounds interesting. 

Jared Bauman: It’s funny because the last business I left, I started with another founder.

And we had to hit one of those plateaus and it was one of those things where it’s like, okay we know we have to double down and almost reinvent the business to get exactly as you say that next gross trajectory. And that was a good time for me to evaluate and have a conversation and say, this is a good time for [00:07:00] me to leave this business.

And so I sold my share as my business partner and he went on to do that. But you’re exactly right. If you just sit there, you’re just going to slowly start to, you know, a mentor of mindset. You’re just slowly landing the plane. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And sometimes it doesn’t just land, it crashes.

Jared Bauman: It goes down fast.

Trudy Rankin: It goes down way faster than you’d like. And the reason I say that I’m not just making this up. I listened to a podcast episode yesterday where somebody who was running an agency when AI suddenly blew up. They could see the writing on the wall and they could see that within, you know, just a few months, their agency was going to crash and burn.

So they basically just shut it down. So I’m curious, what made you decide to pivot instead of just once again landing the plane or just bailing out with a parachute? 

Jared Bauman: Because here’s what came out of all the data last summer, and it was coming out before that, but last summer was when I really got on board.

And that is that most of what it looks like to perform [00:08:00] well in getting cited by LLMs is the same stuff that you need to do to rank well in organic search. And so it was this moment of, “oh, we’ve got this.” Like we’ve been helping businesses rank well in organic search for, you know, seven years now. And yes, there are some differences, there are some nuances, there are some additives.

It’s complex and will change probably faster than anything ever did in SEO, but the basics are still the same. And so to me, there wasn’t a need to bail. We’ve already got the expertise in most of what it takes. We’ve just gotta continue refining that. 

Trudy Rankin: That makes a lot of sense.

And it by definition means that for people who are listening, you know, if you’re in a similar situation and you’ve gotta be keeping your ear to the ground. You gotta be paying attention to what’s happening around you. So I’m curious a little bit about the form that this takes now. And so I’m coming back to the GEO audit that you created, and I’ll just give it just a little bit of [00:09:00] background to the listeners.

If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll know that a couple years ago, I, purchased a website that serves freelance writers from somebody who is a freelance writer and who had built it up and built up an email list and took that over and had been working on building that up ever since.

But, I had just very recently moved it from the platform that it was on, which had very limited, gave me very limited functionality to do what I needed to do with it, and I moved it to WordPress and in the process of moving it to WordPress, some stuff broke and all, obviously there’s lots of things that weren’t sort of very solid from an SEO perspective to start with, but just having this GEO audit just come through and just highlight some stuff in a much more specific and clear way made it possible for me to go have this vague, I know there’s something wrong here feeling to going, “Hey, I know exactly what’s wrong now I know what I need to do to fix it, and I know what to do.” What made you decide, [00:10:00] it’s a beautiful lead magnet.

It’s perfect. It’s a great lead magnet. What made you decide to use that as the lead magnet? You said you modified it from something you’d already had. 

Jared Bauman: So in my business right now as a marketing agency 2025 had a lot of challenges. If I’m just looking at it from a business perspective and running my own business, a lot of the challenges were due to fear and uncertainty.

And when other businesses have fear and uncertainty about where they’re going, they tend to often pull back on their marketing budget. Because marketing budgets are forward thinking. And if you are fearful, scared, or nervous about what’s going to happen in the future, you know, you tend to clench the fist.

And so going through the first part of 2025, a lot of businesses that I normally feel like would have invested in our services said, “Hold on, we’re going to hold on and we’re going to wait.” And a lot of that, you know, we had tariffs, we had, we have AI, creating nervousness, right? So, but what I realized in these conversations [00:11:00] throughout the first part of 2025 is that everybody was still very interested and excited to talk about what’s coming up with AI.

And I would tell people, “Hey, a lot of what you need to do to get cited by these AI engines is very similar to what we do from an SEO standpoint.” But SEO wasn’t exciting to take back to the boardroom because that just triggered all the nervousness about all the same things that they had done up to then to succeed.

That was being questioned around boardrooms and C-suite conversations and individual bloggers and individual business owners everywhere. Right? But AI is exciting and new, and I knew that we could deliver something great with that. And I was able to lean into what is exciting and new and people want to learn about when we made that GEO audit snapshot.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s a really, really important point because it’s that whole concept of, I don’t know, skating to where the puck is if you want to use it. Canadian. 

Jared Bauman: Wayne Gretzky. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, Wayne Gretzky phrase. And just seeing [00:12:00] what it is that people are thinking about and looking towards, and that’s on, to be honest, that’s really what caught my eye because that was what was worrying me.

It’s about am I doing enough or do I know enough about this topic to be able to do something for my own business, though the websites that I have. And so that’s really critical, I think, in terms of if you’re being strategic about your business. Thinking about what’s coming up, how can you be in the right place at the right time?

I’m curious though, so if you were thinking, let’s just take, let’s just take a, we’ll make a little. Imaginary case study, if you like. So, if a, let’s just take a solopreneur business someone who’s not, doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot of tools to, I’ll call it more time.

They don’t have the time or the skills necessarily to basically keep ahead of the curve when it comes to AI, AI search, and all those sorts of things. What would be the most important things for someone like that, who needs to do most of the things in their business themselves?[00:13:00] 

And they’re worried about the whole AI search side of things. What would be the first, maybe the top three things that they should be thinking about looking at and doing and making happen no matter what, so that they manage to stay findable and valued by the search engines? 

Jared Bauman: I say a lot of what it takes to show up in an AI environment is similar to what it took to rank organically.

I do think though, there are some changes and there are some things that have been coming in the SEO world and are, you know, rendering themselves here in the new world that we live in, that includes AI. We can highlight a few of these things that from a high level are important. Number one, we’re kind of moving from keywords to entities, and I know that’s kind of complicated and it’s like, uh, what does that really mean?

I mean, historically, if we look back at SEO of 5 and 10 plus years ago, we were really targeting keywords, the words that people are typing into Google to search for, and we’re trying to make sure we’re optimized for those. And the [00:14:00] internet. And the experience in the internet, and then who’s behind the internet, the algorithms and the AI behind it, all of it’s gotten way more sophisticated now.

And so we’re not really going after keywords anymore. We’re going after making sure that we have a good grasp on the entities. We’re trying to be experts and authoritative and relevant for. And so an entity is a person, a place, a thing, an event, et cetera. And so entities are are very important to focus on.

I’ll keep it high level at that. But if we think about things that way, then that means that we need to have a broader perspective on how we’re approaching this. It’s no longer good enough to just, update a couple blog posts on our website every week or maybe pop over to Instagram and post a little bit.

We need to be kind of frequently showing up in these places on a consistent basis, because that shows that we are more of an expert that could be trusted in that. Specific brass tacks. Making sure to clean up, [00:15:00] uh, and we talked about this on your audit to clean up the technical challenges that prevent search engines and the AI from understanding who you are and what you’re an expert in.

Making sure that you connect the dots between who you are and what your website does and where you’re cited because, again, if you’re a solopreneur, you probably don’t have a ton of online mentions. You probably don’t have a huge website. You probably don’t have a ton of backlinks. And so making sure we connect all that is really important.

And then just getting, this is, this has never changed. This is was important with SEO and it’s still very important with AI, getting cited. By big, trusted websites, resources, and brands. That is a huge factor in basically establishing that trust, establishes that expertise and then that’s what’s going to help you show up not only in organic search, but also get recommended by the LLMs.

Trudy Rankin: So that’s, I mean, that’s high level. There’s a lot in there just so [00:16:00] that people can sort of connect the dots. Sort of, you mentioned so entities and you’re, they’re really when you think about entities, they’re like tangible things like a person, an organization or just the things that are tangible. And then when you mentioned cleanup, I’m smiling because with my particular website, there’s a lot of broken links , but there’s more to it than that. If you think about it, from the terms, from the point of view of, you think about it in library terms.

All my books are all over the place and on the floor and they’re not on the shelves in the right order. So that was something that was useful to really understand how important that was. But one of the things that we talked about when you and I were talking afterwards in the discovery call was I was trying to get my head around this concept called a schema.

Jared Bauman: Mm-hmm. 

Trudy Rankin: And I think it would be helpful if you could share with people where the concept of schema fits into what you just talked about and talk about it in terms that makes sense to people who are not in [00:17:00] this space. 

Jared Bauman: Yeah, schema is a language. It’s a language that computers understand.

It’s actually not an SEO or GEO term. It’s actually a computer term that’s been around for quite a while. But schema is a language in the structured data world and it structured data is exactly that. It takes all the stuff that’s on your website and organizes it into structures that computers and robots, bots, crawl bots can understand. As it relates to what we’re talking about, Lemme give you a personal example. I’m not even sure we talked about this before we hit record, Trudy, so I’ll share it with you. My name is Jared Bauman, and for many, many years, I was, uh, really the only Jared Bauman that ranked online until someone in the state of Kentucky became a representative by the exact same name and was now in Congress.

And so all of a sudden Jared Bauman on the internet was flooded with this state representative instead of with me. And while I cannot, and this speaks to the power of getting referenced online a lot, I can’t compete with that because he is getting referenced online almost every single day.

[00:18:00] So, back to my point about getting referenced online every day, as often as possible, but what I can do is clarify to make sure that Google and LLMs understand when people would be searching for me, the Jared Bauman that does SEO, the Jared Bauman, that’s the host of the podcast. And so what I do is in schema, I communicate that I am the same as the host of the Niche Pursuits podcast.

I am the same as this Twitter profile that posts about SEO all the time, I’m the same as the 201 Creative founder. And so I connect the dots for them to see that I’m the person who is this. And so that way when they are trying to recommend the correct Jared Bauman for whoever’s searching, they have more context, well, schema does that allows us to help give LLMs and crawl bots context, and we can do it not just on a personal level, but on a business level. Let’s say your business is named XYZ. Well, we’re going to go ahead and codify that in schema. Let’s say that we have an about page where people can learn about us. Well, we’re going to [00:19:00] codify that, so that’s also where search bots know how to learn about us, et cetera, et cetera.

The more we’re able to utilize schema, i.e. structured data, the better we’re going to be able to ensure that we’re understood for who we are and what we’re an expert in, and we can connect that to other resources that mention us online. 

Trudy Rankin: So I’d like, and I’m just scribbling a note here. I’d like to sort of take that, what you’ve just said about using structured data and if for anybody who works in knowledge management or if they’ve worked in IT, then they’ll kind of probably get that.

But for people who haven’t, it’s still going to sound just a little bit esoteric. And so what I’d like you to do is just explain, as clearly as possible, how you might take that concept of structured data. And I like the term you used, you used the term connecting the dots. 

Jared Bauman: Mm-hmm. 

Trudy Rankin: Setting the context, helping the robots understand the meaning around what’s there.

And could you just describe in a fairly simple way [00:20:00] how you might make that come alive in a blog post? 

Jared Bauman: Well, yeah. So again, if we’re trying to connect all, okay, here’s the story I always tell. When someone goes to search and type and search for and they hit wedding band, right?

How does Google know if you’re, if you mean wedding band, like what I’m holding up, which is a ring, or whether you mean a live band at your wedding? 

Trudy Rankin: Yep. 

Jared Bauman: Now they don’t know which one you are actually intending to search, but what you can do is make sure that if you are a company that makes rings, that you make sure Google understands that you are a wedding band maker who makes rings and not a live music producer.

And if you’re the live music version of that, you can make sure that Google knows that you are the ones that play music in a band and not the one that is a jeweler. Why is this important? Well, because we want to clarify and connect the dots. So it’s going back to the conversation of entities, making sure that [00:21:00] you are clear about who you are, what you do, and how it relates together. I gave a presentation a couple months ago at a photography conference, and so we talked about how important it was that you are clear about the type of photography you do, how it’s important, you’re clear about the locations you serve, how it’s important, you’re clear about the expertise you have about, it’s clear, and so these sorts of things. We can use schema to help out with that. We can use online mentions and citations to help out with that. We can use reviews to help out with that, and we can get quoted as an expert in these areas as well. Now, when it comes back to our website, well, we want to incorporate all of that throughout our website in the right places. And so, you know, your about page is probably going to feature testimonials or reviews from people hopefully, that are able to substantiate that you are an expert in what you talk about. Third party mentions that you can link to on your website and point to can substantiate that you’re an [00:22:00] expert in what you talk about.

If you serve a local demographic, then you’re also going to want to incorporate that local factor. So if you’re sitting there going like, man, this all sounds a little bit overwhelming. I agree. It is, it’s gotten more complicated. Like it’s gotten more complicated, but in many ways because it’s gotten so complicated, it can be simplified back to a bit of the basics about what we’re trying to do online.

And so it really is about making sure that you are as accurately as possible connecting the dots though, so that Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, they can all understand what connects to what. 

Trudy Rankin: So when we were talking this concept of schemas through, we were talking about how you might arrange the words on a page, let’s say a blog post, so that it would actually come to life because it’s not, as you said, it’s not a, it’s not some secret sauce code that’s hidden behind. It’s how the information’s laid out on the page. [00:23:00] Can you just expand a little bit on that? 

Jared Bauman: Yeah. A couple things there. The schema is just something that you’ll access and basically fill in. So if you’re wondering, you just basically fill in, you grab a certain type of schema. If you’re a business, you’re probably going to want to use organization schema, and you just go fill in all the buckets that apply. And my business name there, it is my business address.

There it is. Uh, do I have hours of operation? I do. Fill it in. What’s my logo? There’s my logo. Like, so you just fill it in as best as possible. A lot of people leave that to chance, or they leave it to a plugin or they don’t bother doing it, or they do it once, they never go back and update it. And so, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of these GEO audits and I’m like, Hey, your, um, your footer on your website says your hours are this.

Your Google business profile says your hours are this and it’s different. And then your schema says your hours are something completely different. That does not create trust, right? So there’s what we can do with the schema.

But then there’s what we can do with the actual words on the page that can go much further than that. And that’s where, you know, [00:24:00] really understanding entities, the entities you’re connected to and weaving them not only in, a webpage, but throughout your website. And so, the schema is kinda like the basics.

It’s kind of like, very basic level of the language. And then what we do with the words, the images, the graphics, the quotes, the studies, the stats, all that stuff, that’s enriching the basic bare data that the schema is showcasing. 

Trudy Rankin: So I’m just trying to come up with an analogy just for my own benefit really.

And I’m just thinking it’s a little bit like the experience that I’ve had with you know, when you’re setting up a sign up to my email list form, you have the ability to choose what fields go in there. And if you make the mistake of just having name and then email address and then, but you actually need somebody’s first name or you need their first and last name.

If you use the wrong form setup in terms of the fields that are available, you are going to end up with [00:25:00] problems. Is it the same thing with this? 

Jared Bauman: I think that’s actually a great example. I mean, in the online marketing world, we’re always trying to balance how much information we ask out of people, because more is always better when you’re a marketer.

The more data points we have, the more we can slice and dice and pivot and all that, right? So if we could get everything out of them with no drop off in conversion rate, we would totally do it. But we don’t do that because we understand that at some point people are like, I don’t need this that bad.

I’m not giving you my, you know, the name of my firstborn child. But schema allows you to do that and Google the crawl bot, they will soak it all up and they will love all of it. They will crawl all of it, and they will use all of it. They will parse all of it. And so, yes, so many people, and I’m guilty of this in my previous businesses when I didn’t understand this.

We don’t use the structured data with enough effect when it is available to us and there’s no downside to it being accurate with it. 

Trudy Rankin: That makes sense. So really what it really means is that [00:26:00] for a lot of people who, building the website was one of the hardest things they ever did for their business, and they did it and they’re hoping that it’s one and done.

However, life changes, the world changes, and this whole AI search things come up means people really need to pay attention and need to go back and look at their website. They need to think and sit down and think about it in a structured way, whether you are sharing enough information so that this whole concept of entities, and I’m going to just, instead of using the word entity, I’m going to just say, you as the website owner, the information about you on your about page needs to match what it says in your FAQs.

It needs to match what it says in any of the other parts of your website in order for it to be what’s the right word? Consistent. Which, and the consistency then creates the believability, builds the trust, and makes it so much easier for the tools, the robots to actually crawl. 

Jared Bauman: I don’t want to reach by saying this, but I think when we look at a [00:27:00] Google and really, when we say SEO, we’re thinking about Google, like they’ve been around for over 25 years and they aren’t just a search engine that relies on keywords now, right?

Like their machine learning has been running for decades and has learned stuff that we don’t even begin to understand. They know more than just what keywords are on a page. They also have all that Chrome data going for them, you know, data that is given to them from users interacting and, uh, bouncing back and all this stuff on Chrome.

So they’re so sophisticated that to some degree we’ve been able to take our eyes off this prize for a little while. You know, like I used to tell clients a couple years ago, I’m like, you know, yes, title tags are important, but Google’s rewriting half of them anyways, so don’t stress out over it. Meta descriptions are good, but Google rewrites most of them anyways, so you should do it, but it’s not the high priority that other things are.

Well, it’s not that LLMs are not as sophisticated, but they just don’t think about information in the same way. And so a lot of this stuff that we did a while back [00:28:00] to create clarity and trust we really should do. And we’ve seen the data and the evidence that it’s important when it comes to LLMs, and I think you really said it well.

It’s about being accurate. That’s really important. I gave that example about the different business hours. It’s about being consistent. Is your brand reference the same way across the internet by people on reviews, by businesses, by citations, is it being consistent? And how fresh is that? Now, fresh is something we haven’t talked much about, but AI, LLMs specifically, they love fresh content. A lot of data studies have come out with it. Go ahead and look it up. They don’t like to reference stuff that’s several years old or longer. And so, if you’re not updating, again, that person that set it and forget it because they don’t want to think about it, I get that I’m that way about some stuff with my business.

But when it comes to your website, when it comes to getting mentioned, you’ve gotta keep things fresh. So accuracy, consistency, and freshness. Those are three very important things to think about as you’re looking towards GEO. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really, really helpful information. [00:29:00] I’m just, my head’s sort of starting to tick over all the different things that I need to start to put onto task lists to actually make that actually happen.

Jared, it’s been really, really interesting speaking with you. I’d just like to finish up by asking you, can you just explain, for people’s benefit, the listeners’ benefit, just a little bit more about the GEO audit and how they might be able to access that for themselves if they’re interested.

Jared Bauman: Yeah, so it’s what we call a snapshot audit. It’s not a full audit. We basically crawl, like what we try to determine the 20 to 30 most important pages on your website, but we can get a pretty accurate picture from a high level about how your website is positioned to get cited by LLMs and AI overviews.

And then we roll it all up in a, I think, a pretty nice snazzy little graphic where we break it into 5 key sections and then we give you a score 1 to 100 with some key things that you could do to improve that score, to make you closer [00:30:00] to kind of optimal visibility for an AI overview or an LLM.

Things like how is the technical part of your website? Things like how are you positioned in terms of online mentions, reviews? How is your online credibility? And we actually use a third party tool for that and we incorporate that in. We look at things like, how is your structured data? How are you communicating these sorts of things?

We look at your content. How thin is it? How robust is it? How accurate is it to the best of our ability to understand? And then we roll that up into a quick little graphic and visual that we can send your way. Right now it’s trying to simplify it so people can kinda get their heads around it.

And yeah, it is free right now. We’re going to try to keep it free as long as we can, but it is free. So, I’d be happy to make that available to your listeners. I know you got a lot of value out of it, which is great to hear. 

Trudy Rankin: And I’ll put the link to it in the show notes so that people can check it out if they want.

And, just reiterating that, you know, it was great talking with you on the discovery call afterwards because it really helped solidify some of the concepts in my mind. [00:31:00] And yeah. And, I just it for people who typically tend not to jump onto a discovery call because they think, oh, they’re going to sell me.

Don’t worry, that’s not going to happen In this case. At least, it didn’t happen to me. That’s what I, I can at least say that. 

Jared Bauman: It’s not my style. I’ve been, um, I got off a call right before this with, again, our business is based entirely on referrals and I got off a call from a referral, you know, so, I suppose if I had to, maybe I would, but I’ve never had to, and I’m blessed to be in a position where we can do these.

And what happens is that there’s people that get on these and they really need help. And those are the types of people that we can help. As an agency that provides those services, sure we can help, but for a lot of people, that’s just not where they’re at, but that might be something they need down the road, or they might refer us to someone that does need that.

So we’re a boutique agency. I don’t need hundreds and hundreds of clients. 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s a good lesson for people who do run agencies is that it is a good, it’s a good way of doing it and of keeping the pipeline full. So Jared, thank you so much for being on the call. [00:32:00] If people were interested in getting in touch with you outside of maybe finding out about the GEO audit or the GEO audit, where would they find you?

Where’s the best place for them to get in touch with you? 

Jared Bauman: Sure you can go to 201creative.com and, get in, you know, learn about us, get in touch with me there. 201creative.com/geosnapshot. That’s where you can get your free audit. And then I’m also on LinkedIn, Jared M Bauman. 

Trudy Rankin: Great. Thank you so much for that.

Really, really appreciate it. 

Jared Bauman: My pleasure. Thanks Trudy.

Trudy Rankin: If this conversation with Jared sparked even a little realization that visibility today requires a little more clarity than it used to, then that’s a good thing. Because the goal isn’t to panic. The goal is to be intentional because as Jared explained, most of what works in AI search is still built on strong foundations, accuracy, consistency, credibility, and staying current.

But what’s changed is how clearly we need to communicate those things. So here’s my encouragement for you. [00:33:00] Just take one strategic action this week. You can review your about page. You could check that your business information is consistent everywhere online, or you might update one key piece of content so that it reflects what you do now, not what you did three years ago, because small thoughtful improvements build long-term visibility.

And if you found this episode helpful, remember to subscribe and leave a review because your review helps other business owners find calm, practical guidance instead of noise and overwhelm. And if you’re building the online side of your business and you want regular insights to help you grow steadily and strategically, I’d love you to join my newsletter.

You can sign up at onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter. That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter. And thank you so much for listening.

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