From Invisible to Recommended: My Conversation on Telling My Story

For twenty years, business owners asked me one question about their website: how do I rank on Google? It was the right question for a long time. It isn't the only one anymore.

Today a customer opens ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI and describes their problem in a paragraph. Then they ask for a recommendation. What comes back is a short list of real businesses, with names on it. Nobody voted. Nobody clicked through ten blue links. The machine read what it could find and made a call.

That shift is what Henry and I spent half an hour on. Here's what we covered, and where you can pick up the pieces that apply to your business.

It started with bass guitars

I started playing drums at four and turned professional at sixteen. In my early twenties, a friend who owned a chain of music stores asked me to help manage them. The catch: they were bass guitar specialty shops. I'm a drummer.

So I'd make a recommendation to a customer, they'd ask if I played bass, and because I'm honest, I'd tell them the truth. In that instant, I lost every bit of credibility I had.

That sent me looking for what actually makes someone trust a recommendation. It came down to two things: empathy and authority. When somebody sits across from you and asks for help, they're really asking two questions.

Thirty years later, those are the same two questions an AI assistant is asking your website on a buyer's behalf. It's reading to find out whether you understand the problem, and whether there's any reason to believe you can solve it. That's not a new discipline. It's the oldest one there is, being graded by something new.

The client comment that changed my direction

After I got certified as a StoryBrand Guide, I assumed the formula was simple: clear message plus a beautiful website equals results. Then I followed up with a client about six months after launch and asked how the site was working for him.

He said he loved it. It looked great. And then he said he didn't think anybody was actually seeing it.

That stopped me cold. A business nobody walks into is a business with a problem, no matter how good the storefront looks. So I started digging into what actually drives traffic — and ran straight into the fact that Google tells you almost nothing about how it decides. It's the wizard behind the curtain, pulling levers while millions of business owners guess at what changed.

The one thing Google can't hide is the results themselves. So I started reverse-engineering them: search a term, look at what ranked, figure out why. After twenty or thirty sites, patterns show up. Now every project runs the same way — StoryBrand framework first to define the message, then keyword research to find the words the ideal client is already typing, then the copy, then the technical checklist.

The reason I push organic so hard is simple. Pay-per-click is an expense: stop paying and the clicks stop the same day. Organic is an investment. It compounds, and eventually you know roughly what next month looks like before it arrives.

AI search isn't SEO with a new coat of paint

Traditional SEO is built around keywords and making sure a page is optimized for them. AI search mostly doesn't care about keywords. It cares whether your content actually answers the question your ideal client is asking.

There are technical pieces I put in place for clients — an LLMs.txt file summarizing what the business does in a form an AI crawler can read, and an AI sitemap that does for assistants roughly what a traditional sitemap does for search engines.

But the honest core of it is much less technical than people expect. Imagine sitting across a table from your ideal customer. Think about the questions they're going to ask. Then put the answers on your website, in plain spoken language, complete, in one place. That's what gets lifted into an AI answer.

Findable versus citable

Henry asked me to explain the difference, and it's the distinction that matters most in this whole conversation.

• Findable means the AI knows you exist. Somebody asks for the best plumbers in the area and your name appears. That's a floor, not a finish line.
• Citable means you have something on your site the AI can lift and show as its own answer — proof, not just presence.

Here's a real example. A roofing client of mine in Cincinnati has something they call the Advantage Five: five promises they make to every customer. That content lives on their website as its own standalone page. Nobody else can call theirs the Advantage Five. Nobody else has that copy. So when somebody asks which roofer in Cincinnati has the best warranty, there's something specific and unique for the AI to point at.

That's the jump. Findable is being in the phone book. Citable is being the answer.

Fewer clicks, better clients

Across my client base, raw clicks have generally come down. But the people who do arrive are better prospects than they used to be.

I think about the customer journey in seven stages: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer. The first three used to take phone calls and a chain of emails. Now a prospect can move through know, like and trust entirely inside a conversation with an AI — if your website gives it what it needs to get them there.

Which means by the time they contact you, they're already warm. You're not winning them over on the call. Your content did that before you knew they existed.

The one thing to take away

Henry asked what single lesson I'd want someone to remember. It's this: at the base of it, this is just good marketing, and AI search rewards clarity.

That's why StoryBrand is still the starting point for everything I do. And the most common misunderstanding about it is worth naming — people hear "StoryBrand" and assume I'm going to tell their story. I'm not. I'm going to tell their customer's story.

Your customer woke up this morning thinking about their own day, not about you. They're the hero of their own story. When your website is written in the words they'd use to describe their own problem, and somebody types almost exactly those words into an AI assistant, your odds of showing up go up dramatically.

So here's the question worth sitting with: if somebody asked an AI for the best business in your industry, would your name come up? And could you say why?

Thanks to Chiwetelu Henry for having me on Telling My Story. You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen.