How Ideal Clients Find You in the Age of AI | Series 3, Episode 1

Authority Matters

This episode explores how professional discovery is shifting from traditional Google search to a fragmented ecosystem involving AI LLMs, soc

Key takeaways

• Dennis Meador notes search behavior has fragmented: 50–76% of US users still rely on Google, while 72% now use AI for discovery.
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are emerging but lack stable rules; chasing them often wastes marketing budgets.
• Professionals should treat media presence like a diversified index fund rather than betting on one platform or algorithm that may shift overnight.
• The hosts distinguish between being a 'thought leader' (peer recognition at conferences) versus an 'authority' (client conversion and revenue generation).
• Podcasts are highly effective for AI visibility because a single 30-minute episode can be repurposed into dozens of short-form assets that LLMs index.

Main topics

• AI-driven client discovery
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) & Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
• Multi-platform media strategy

Notable quotes

"You can't be just good at Facebook. You can't just be good at TikTok... You have to have a balanced attack."

Conclusion

Professionals must shift from chasing fragmented AI algorithms to buil

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) and authority building, which is what I was doing through SEO, and that was itself locally as they were... Speaker 1 (0:07) Think about the last time you needed to hire someone you didn't already know. Maybe you Googled them. Or somebody referred you and then you Googled them. You might have seen one of their videos. Or these days you might have asked an AI LLM for help. The way people find professionals is changing. But the questions underneath it haven't changed. When someone goes looking for an expert who does what you do, do they find you? And if they do, what do they find? Today we're talking about how ideal clients discover professionals in the age of Google, AI, social media, and increasingly fragmented attention, and why building authority today means thinking beyond any single platform. Welcome back to Authority Matters. I'm Sean O'Connor. Over the first two series, we've talked about why authority matters and how you actually build it through consistent strategic media. Now we're moving to the next question. What happens after you start creating all of that content? How does it help the right people find you? I'm joined by Dennis D.M. Meador, founder of the Legal Podcast Network and the Authority Podcast Network, a.k.a. the BAM man himself. DM, great to see you. You know what? I'm happy to be here. You know, not long ago, right, if we talked about being found online, we were basically talking about, you know, the Google. Is that still the right way to think about discovery, do you think? Speaker 2 (1:38) No, but it's still not, we're still not at the point where we should completely forget it either. Speaker 1 (1:43) Also, I feel like, and I don't know about you, but at least like on my desktop. You know, in Google and other, you know, AI is being incorporated into what, you know, the results I'm being served up. So, I mean, it's almost not an it's it's not an either or thing, obviously. Speaker 2 (2:02) Right. You've got so it used to be like 90 something percent of people, you know, use Google. That's how they search. Like just a few years ago. Now it's 50 to 76 percent of people use Google. Seventy two percent use AI. So it's kind of it's very fragmented, whereas it used to be like now worldwide. It's still in the like high 80s or low 90s. for like Google, but when you talk about just the US market, which primarily this is what this is for, you're talking about, like you said, a mixture. And the other thing is like Google now shows Gemini, which is answer engine optimization. So you've got GEO, you've got AEO, you've got SEO, and then of course our favorite EIEIO. Speaker 1 (2:49) So, you know. And I'm Sean O. Speaker 2 (2:52) Exactly. Speaker 1 (2:53) Well, you're going where I'm going, which, you know, I've been thinking about it in terms of kind of those three buckets, right? There's the search. There's, you know, there's the, hey, I'm going to ask the question or I'm going to scroll and see what shows up in my feed, right? You could search the goo. You could ask chat, right? You discovered in your social media feeds. Speaker 1 (3:18) Do professionals need to be thinking about all three or is the ecosystem just making that a natural kind of migration? Speaker 2 (3:27) You asked it as an either or, but it sounded like the same thing to me. So I'm just going to say that, yes, professionals should absolutely be thinking of all of these things. They should be trying to put, you know, we still pretty much know SEO. We still pretty much understand. you know, social for the most part, although it's, if we understand social based on the intent base and the tick tock sort of algorithm is the way things work now, it's still a black box of the LLMs and the, um, you know, the, uh, generated engine, uh, generative engine optimization, because like, With Claude, for example, I'll search something and then I'll have a meeting with my sales staff and I'll say, pull this up. Look at what this says. And they'll pull it up and it'll say completely very different things. And I'm like, oh, I kind of feel silly now. So that's, I think, the big thing about generative engine optimization. With SEO, there was kind of one big place it all happened. But with generative LLMs and generative engine optimization, it's, I almost want to say, more localized to the individual. And I think we all knew that this sort of search, rewarding this sort of search behavior was coming. But what ends up happening is you now cannot say, well, I show up for, you know, this search term in Claude. Because the reality is on your computer, you probably do show up in this search term for Claude. And your computer knows that you're you. And if you're using Claude, for example, which is what I tend to use the most of. So it's going to feed you. Like if I say, who is Dennis Metter to my Claude? I'm pretty damn impressive, Sean. I'll tell you that right now. But I Speaker 1 (5:25) have somebody Speaker 2 (5:26) else. I'm like, check this out. But even with my wife or whatever, like, check this out. And they'll type it. It'll be like, which one do you want? And I'm like, what do you mean, which one? There's only, you know, so that's what's happening now. There is fragmentation, but we do need to do what we can, keep the SEO, because we're still looking at still 50 % to 70 % utilizing, you know, Google, understand and propagate our social media channels with good stuff, and then... understand the underlying things with the LLMs that we know for the most part are the things that are going and that are being cited so that we can ensure that when people search, we have the best chance to have the positive result that we desire. I Speaker 1 (6:16) don't know if I know the answer to this question, but I'm wondering if you think that as we're speaking right now and, you know, late 2026 is one more valuable than another or is it really all about um showing up across all these places i Speaker 2 (6:35) think it i think ecosystem is just where and really honestly when i created this two and a half years ago it's kind of what i saw is i was like It can't be one anymore. You can't be just good at Facebook. You can't just be good at TikTok. You can't just be good at YouTube. You can't just be good at Google. You can't just be good at blogging. You can't just be good on, like, you can't just be anything anymore. You have to have a balanced attack for a couple reasons. It's not just because of the changes, but... you know, there's surges. It's almost like digital media is like a stock exchange and there's like movement of, there's more value in here and more movement here and they're giving away eyeballs here because they're building and those eyeballs are converting. Well, now that