Most business owners are panicking about AI search.
They’ve been told they need a new playbook. New tools. A whole new strategy. Something has to change, fast, or they’ll get left behind.
Michelle Bourbonniere has spent the last six months reading Google patents, antitrust filings, and AI search research papers. Not summarizing them with Gemini. Actually reading them. She has a PhD in African history, and as she put it,
“I have a degree in reading dense text.”
What she found is the opposite of what most people expect. AI search is built on top of regular Google search. Same algorithm. Same signals. Same boring, foundational moves. The fundamentals haven’t changed. They’ve just gotten more important.
In this episode, Jake sits down with Michelle (the SEO consultant behind ARTILLERY’s own audit from Ep. 12) to walk through what’s actually happening under the hood, what to ignore, and what to focus on if you’re a small business that wants to be found.
Key Takeaways
- AI search isn’t a new game. It’s a layer on top of regular Google search, and the same SEO fundamentals still drive both.
- When someone asks ChatGPT a question, the chatbot actually does live Google searches behind the scenes. The results are summaries of what’s already ranking.
- For local businesses, your Google Business Profile is the real front door. Recency of reviews now matters as much as total count.
- AI is shockingly literal. If you want it to call your business “transparent,” you have to say “we’re transparent” on the page. Subtlety doesn’t translate.
- Blogging is less of a priority than it used to be. Most blog questions get answered inside the chatbot, and the click never happens.
- Add “ChatGPT or AI” to your “how did you hear about us?” form field today. It’s the only signal you’ll get that AI search is working for you.
Episode at a Glance
Michelle walks through how AI search actually works, why a Vancouver wine brand found ARTILLERY through ChatGPT for a Divi designer, and what every small business should do (and stop doing) right now. The big idea: stop chasing the new playbook. Get dramatically better at the boring fundamentals.
Action step: Open ChatGPT in incognito mode and pretend you’re your next customer. Search for the kind of business you run, in your city. See what comes back. If it’s wrong about you, change the words on your homepage, services pages, and About page, then check again next week.
Main idea: AI search is built on traditional search. The path to showing up well in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews is the same path that’s worked for the last decade. Clear words. Real engagement. Strong Google Business Profile. Stay in your lane.
Why it matters: Most small businesses are chasing the wrong shiny object. The smart move is to double down on what already works, and to be more literal and explicit on your core pages so AI can summarize you the way you want to be summarized.
Quick tool: The contact form. Add “ChatGPT or other AI” as an option under “How did you hear about us?” today. Without it, you have almost no visibility into whether AI search is sending you clients.
Listen & Subscribe
Podcast page: https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/slow-steady-a-podcast-by-artillery/id1840249614
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37ZzVcI8N7xnEDqkap2vCW?si=70b138e65b8c42ca
Follow along:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artillery_media/?hl=en
Jake on X: https://x.com/jakekramer15?lang=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artillerymedia
Contact us: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/
About Michelle Bourbonniere, PhD
Michelle is the founder of Words on the Rise, an SEO consultancy specializing in small site SEO. She works with solopreneurs and small teams to develop smart SEO strategies that get their websites and brands in front of the right audience. She came to SEO by accident, through editing words on websites and noticing what Google did when those words changed.
- Nine years in SEO. 288 client sites worked on. Specializes in keyword research, content planning, and AI visibility audits
- PhD in African history. Self-described “old-school primary source” reader who reads Google patents in full
- Off social media for six years. Runs her business through her website, an email list, and a few private communities
- Author of the “How Google Works” framework and the newer “How AI Search Works” presentation now in demand across private communities and conferences
- Recently featured on multiple podcasts about how AI search works in plain language. Full Spotify playlist
- The SEO consultant behind ARTILLERY’s own SEO audit (covered in Ep. 12 with Brittany Downey)
Her mantra: “Doing things at a human pace. I’m all about work/life balance and doing things well, not quickly.”
Words on the Rise: https://wordsontherise.com
AI search cheat sheet + newsletter: https://wordsontherise.com/ai
Michelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-bourbonniere/
Highlights & Timestamps
00:00–04:00 — Welcome and the Words-First SEO
Michelle’s story. PhD historian turned editor turned SEO consultant who works only with words.
04:00–10:30 — Strategy First, SEO Second
Why business strategy has to come before any SEO work, and how a “soul file” of your business goals should drive every piece of content you put out.
10:30–17:30 — The Topical Radius (Stay in Your Lane)
The Google leak revealed a “topical radius” signal. The narrower your focus, the better Google understands what you do. Why ARTILLERY ranks well for “web design Lincoln” specifically because we don’t try to be everything.
17:30–25:00 — How AI Search Actually Works
Plain English explanation. AI does live Google searches behind the scenes, then summarizes the results in real time. October 2024 was the turning point when accuracy went from terrible to useful.
25:00–32:00 — The Three Rs of AI Search
Brand Recognition, Brand Reputation, Brand Recommendation. The framework for thinking about how AI sees your business, and what to do about each layer.
32:00–40:00 — Be Literal With AI (The Transparency Story)
The client who got described by AI as “transparent” because she literally wrote “we’re transparent” on her pricing page. AI is not subtle. You have more control than you think.
40:00–47:00 — Why Blogging Matters Less Now
AI is answering questions inside the chatbot, and the click never happens. What to write instead, and which pages to focus on.
47:00–55:00 — Off Social Media for Six Years
How Michelle runs a thriving solo business with no Instagram, no LinkedIn presence, no TikTok. Website, email list, private communities. That’s the whole stack.
55:00–End — The ChatGPT Lead Source
The Massey Wines (Vancouver) story. How a wine brand in Canada found ARTILLERY through ChatGPT looking for a Divi designer. And the one thing every business should add to their contact form today.
Strategy First. Then SEO.
The single biggest insight from Michelle’s audit isn’t a tactic. It’s an order of operations.
“Really business strategy should be the foundation. And then the SEO should support that. It shouldn’t be the other way around.”
Most agencies do this backwards. They run a keyword report, hand you a list of 80 things to optimize, and call it a strategy. But if you don’t know what your business is supposed to win at, optimizing for everything is just expensive noise.
Michelle’s framing is sharper. Get laser-focused on three to five things your business actually does. Put them in writing. Let that drive every blog post, every services page, every meta description.
Jake’s version: “Now every little piece of thing that comes out from us is coming out from those goals and tasks. And it makes SEO way easier.”
Strategy first. SEO is the support beam, not the building.
Stay in Your Lane (The Topical Radius)
A 2024 Google leak confirmed something SEOs had long suspected. There’s a signal called “topical radius.” It measures how tightly focused your site is on one topic.
A site that talks about web design and SEO and social media and email marketing and PR has a wide radius. A site that only talks about web design has a narrow one. Google rewards the narrow one.
This is why ARTILLERY ranks #1 for “web design Lincoln.” Not by accident. By refusing to be a marketing agency.
“We do websites.” That’s it. Social media? No. SEO? No, but we have someone for that (her name is Michelle). PR? No. The narrowness is the strategy.
Michelle put it this way: “You will do better because you’ve told Google what your lane is and then you stay in your lane and then you’re seen as the expert for that particular thing.”
The slow and steady move isn’t doing more. It’s doing less, on purpose, until you’re undeniable at one thing.
How AI Search Actually Works (Plain English)
Most people think AI search is some new mystical thing. It isn’t.
When you ask ChatGPT a question, the chatbot is doing real Google searches behind the scenes. It runs a few targeted queries, looks at what’s already ranking, summarizes the results, and shows you the answer in conversation form.
In Google’s own words from a recent Google I/O talk: “Let Google do the Googling for you.”
The big shift was October 2024. Before that, AI was largely making things up. Names of businesses that didn’t exist. Statistics out of nowhere. Then ChatGPT (and the others) got access to live search results, and accuracy jumped overnight. That’s also exactly when Michelle’s clients started telling her, “you wouldn’t believe what happened, somebody found me through ChatGPT.”
The practical implication: if you’re already doing the boring SEO work, you’re already most of the way there for AI search. The companies winning in AI Overviews and ChatGPT recommendations are the same companies winning in regular Google.
Including, very specifically, in the Google Map Pack.
The Google Business Profile Is Your Real Front Door
For local businesses, this is the single highest-leverage move in the entire conversation.
When a chatbot recommends “the best web designer in Lincoln,” it’s not making something up. It’s reading the live Google Map Pack rankings and summarizing them. Michelle has watched this happen in real time. A client gets a new five-star review on Saturday. By Monday morning, the AI’s recommendation has updated.
What drives Map Pack rankings:
- Total number of reviews
- Recency of reviews (this one is newer, and it’s a big deal)
- Star rating
- Keywords inside reviews (“dry needling,” “cold plunge,” “web design Lincoln”)
- Optimization of the linked website
- Engagement signals from people clicking through
The recency point matters. A business with 215 five-star reviews from three years ago can be outranked by a newer business that’s currently getting reviews. Google reads the cadence as proof that the business is still active.
Translation: keep asking. Keep the cadence going. Stop relying on the wall of stars you built five years ago.
The Transparency Story (Be Literal With AI)
This is the line from the episode that’s worth printing on a wall.
Michelle was running an AI visibility audit for a client. Every chatbot result kept describing the client as “transparent.”
She thought, that’s nice, AI is picking up on the vibe. Then she traced the citations back. The reason AI was calling the client “transparent” wasn’t because the client had a transparent process, an honest pricing model, or any of the other things you’d expect.
It was because the client had literally written “we believe in transparency, here are our prices” on her pricing page.
“You actually have a lot of control about what AI says about your brand. And so your magic pages on your site, your homepage, your about page, and your services pages. Those are the ones that it’s always going to try to figure out this brand. And so if you are unhappy with what AI is saying about you, just go change the words on those pages and see what happens.”
AI is not subtle. AI is literal.
If you want to be known for something, say it on the page. In plain English. On your homepage, services pages, and About page. Don’t imply it. Don’t show it through clever copy. Say it.
Then watch what AI starts saying back.
The Three Rs of AI Search
Michelle’s working framework for small brands. Three goals, in order. Optimize for these three things and you’re set up well for the next couple of years.
1. Brand Recognition. When someone searches your brand name in ChatGPT or Google’s AI mode, does it actually know you exist as a brand? Test it: open an incognito window, type “tell me about [your brand name],” and read what comes back. If it summarizes you correctly, great. If it tries to interpret your brand name as a generic phrase (“words on the rise” as in trending slang), you have work to do.
How to fix recognition: rank #1 for your own brand name in regular Google. Try to own the whole first page (LinkedIn, social profiles, podcast appearances, media mentions). Then get mentioned across the broader web. Reddit, podcasts, media. The more places your brand name shows up next to context, the more confidently AI can recognize you.
2. Brand Reputation. When someone searches “is [your brand] trustworthy” or “[your brand] reviews” in a chatbot, what does it say? This one surprises people, because AI doesn’t just pull from your own Google Business Profile or Trustpilot. It pulls heavily from Reddit and Wikipedia, which are the two most-cited sources in AI search results.
How to monitor reputation: set up F5Bot (free) to email you every time your brand is mentioned on Reddit. Pay attention to how those threads read. You don’t have to control Reddit, but you should know what it’s saying.
3. Brand Recommendation. This is the fun one. When someone searches the problem you solve (not your name), does the chatbot recommend you? This is where matchmaking happens, and it’s where small, niched-down brands actually have an edge over big ones. AI search rewards specificity in a way Google never could.
The Massey Wines story is exactly this. A wine brand in Vancouver searching ChatGPT for “a Divi designer who can take my ideas and make them beautiful” got matched to a small agency in Lincoln, Nebraska. That match would never have happened on regular Google. AI made it.
How to earn the recommendation: get clear on exactly who you serve and exactly what you do. The narrower the niche, the cleaner the match.
Three goals. Check them quarterly. They’re the new dashboard.
Michelle has written full breakdowns of each R. If you want to go deeper:
Blogging Matters Less. Core Pages Matter More.
This was the surprise of the episode for most listeners.
Michelle has done keyword research and content planning for nine years. She loves writing keyword reports. And she’s now telling clients that blogging is a lower priority than it used to be.
Why: AI is answering the question inside the chatbot. The user doesn’t click. Even if you rank for the question, you don’t get the visit, and you don’t get the lead.
That doesn’t mean stop blogging. It means blog with a business purpose. Blog about what your prospects are evaluating you on. Blog to support a sales conversation, not to chase informational keyword traffic.
Where to spend the energy instead: the core pages. Homepage. About. Services. Entity pages for the people behind the business. Those are the pages chatbots use to summarize who you are and what you do.
Make those great. Make them literal. Make them say what you want said.
The One Thing to Add to Your Contact Form Today
If you do nothing else after listening to this episode, do this.
Open your contact form. Find the “How did you hear about us?” field. If you don’t have one, add one. Then add this option:
ChatGPT or other AI tool
Why it matters: AI recommendations are personalized. Two people in the same city searching the same thing can get different answers. There’s almost no way to track this from the outside. The only reliable signal you’ll have that AI is sending you clients is the client telling you so.
Jake’s example from the episode: a wine brand in Vancouver, Massey Wines, found ARTILLERY through ChatGPT. The client was searching for a Divi designer who could take his ideas and make them beautiful. ChatGPT did the matchmaking. He filled out the contact form, said where he came from, and the connection was clean from there.
Without that one form field, ARTILLERY would never have known.
Off Social Media for Six Years (And Thriving)
Michelle hasn’t been on social media for six years. No Instagram. No LinkedIn presence. No TikTok.
Her business is thriving anyway. How:
- A website she owns (WordPress, full control of the source code)
- An email list of about 500 people, sent on a “human pace” cadence (no fixed schedule, just when she has something to say)
- A few private communities (Circle-style, paid, no algorithm) where she networks with web designers and copywriters
- Speaking inside those communities about how AI search works, which has become her signature talk
When her mom got sick in 2025 and she had to step away for a few months, the email list saved her. “I just started sending some emails and my business just started up again. Social media would not have let me get away with that.”
This is the slow and steady stack in the cleanest possible form. Build assets you own. Show up when you have something to say. Skip the algorithm games entirely.
Call to Action
Want help making sure your homepage, services pages, and Google Business Profile are saying what AI needs to hear about your business?
Start here: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/
Show Credits
Hosts: Jake Kramer
Guest: Michelle Bourbonniere (Words on the Rise, https://wordsontherise.com)
Produced by: ARTILLERY, Lincoln, Nebraska
Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY
https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/
