The New SEO Frontier: How Marketers Can Win Visibility in the Age of AI

“Visibility in the age of AI isn't just about ranking anymore—it's about being understood, trusted, and retrievable by the machines your buyers now rely on. These engines extract only the most relevant chunks of content to answer the query. And if your message isn't structured clearly or consistent across channels, you risk being invisible.” That's a quote from David Kirkdorffer and a sneak peek at today's episode.

Hi there, I'm Kerry Curran, B2B Revenue Growth Executive Advisor, Industry Analyst, and host of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast. Every episode, I sit down with top experts to bring you actionable strategies that drive real results. If you're serious about growth, hit subscribe to stay ahead of your competition.

In The New SEO Frontier: How Marketers Can Win Visibility in the Age of AI, I sit down with David Kirkdorffer. He's a B2B marketing strategist and generative SEO expert. We break down how your content, website, and messaging must evolve to be visible in LLM-powered search. We explore what's changed, what still works, and what's next—so your brand stays front and center no matter which AI engine your buyer turns to.

Be sure to stay to the end, where David shares why team alignment across content, SEO, PR, and partnerships is your best defense—and greatest opportunity—in an AI-first future. Let's go.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.422)
So, welcome, David. Please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.

David Kirkdorffer (00:07.466)
Hi, Kerry, and thank you so much for bringing me on the show. My background: I am a B2B marketer. I’ve been doing B2B marketing for—let’s say—30-plus years. I have focused most of my career on generating leads for sales teams, and that is still my focus, though the way that is done nowadays has certainly changed.

I’ve worked mostly in technology companies, selling technology to technology departments—so IT tech for IT tech consumers. Over the years, that has gone from enterprise accounts, as technologies became more democratized, down to medium-sized businesses and small businesses.

So that’s briefly about me.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:00.214)
Excellent. David, I know you have been deep into the research around what I’ll introduce as the evolution of SEO. Tell me: What are you hearing? What triggered your interest in diving into gaining visibility for brands within the GPTs and other AI engines?

David Kirkdorffer (01:25.994)
Right. OK, that’s a great question. Given my background of trying to get information into buyers’ hands—being buyer-centric—a number of years ago I focused on what we might call buyer enablement and the buyer experience: the buyer being successful in finding the information they’re looking for on our website. I realized that a lot of the great information buyers want sits behind a gate where you have to speak to a sales rep.

The idea I was working with—and many people, of course, not just me—was, “Can we get this information onto our website so that when buyers come, they can find what they need and say, ‘This looks like a good fit’?” Along come these LLMs, and now all of a sudden I’m thinking, “How do I AI-enable training? How do I make sure the AIs have the information that answers buyer questions?”

In a way, AI LLM tools are a disintermediating force separating my buyer from my answer. They’re turning to the ChatGPTs, the Geminis, the Perplexities, the Claudes, the Copilots, and various other tools—some specialized for particular domains. Our challenge is to make sure our answers are read, understood, and correctly represented within these LLMs so that, when a buyer goes there for an answer, our brand is visible.

It’s much more effective for a buyer to ask questions with ChatGPT, and you might ask the same question to four or five tools just to validate, because they all have different information sets, models, crawlers, and licensing agreements. Therefore, you may have high visibility in one and low visibility in another. Training data differs; retrieval data differs; the models themselves differ—so they have different “brains,” just like different people. That’s what brought me into this: trying to be customer-centric and helping my salespeople so that, when buyers do find information, our brand is there.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:27.744)
That’s excellent, David, and it’s such a hot topic. I don’t think I can go through a few hours of my day without it coming up. I know you’ve been evangelizing it a lot, which I’m sure generates many questions. What are the main questions people ask you about this capability and o