The Grow and Convert Marketing Show

Hosted by Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal

Business Marketing

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Oct 2026

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We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.

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October 15, 2026Episode 6049 min

AI Search is Personalized: How to Build a Content Strategy to Match

This episode has a slide deck that we speak to that you can view on Youtube . Most brands are approaching AI search like SEO: track a few prompts, check if you show up, count citations. But AI search has a fundamental difference from SEO: LLMs know far more about the user than Google ever did and they use that information to delivery extremely personalized recommendations to the user. Google got short keywords from users, and gave everyone more or less the same list of links to read for a given keyword. In SEO, the user did the research and decided which solution was right for their situation. LLMs, in contrast, have a massive amount of conversation history full of rich nuance about the user and their pain points. They then use this information and do research on behalf of the user and deliver personalized solutions for them and their specific pain points. Succeeding in this personalized AI search world requires teaching LLMs every scenario where your product or service could be a good solution, then getting that content discovered when they search the web. This talk shares the real customer chats and data behind this argument and walks through how to build this strategy for your own brand. - Why prompt tracking and citation counting mislead you: how LLM memory and user context create Invisible Prompts that no tool can see - How LLMs actually choose what to recommend: matching everything they know about the user against everything they know about your brand - How to publish content that teaches LLMs when and why you're the right fit, and get it discovered, with data from 100+ clients https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/personalized-geo/

September 25, 2026Episode 5937 min

How to Track AI Visibility as a Practitioner (Most people are doing it wrong)

In this episode, we break down how we think about reporting on AI visibility, why we built Traqer around topic-level tracking instead of individual prompts, and what we actually do with the data once we have it. We walk through a real client example in the call center software space to show how this works in practice. We cover why prompt volume data isn't what people think it is, why you can't bring an SEO mindset to AI tracking, why averaging across LLMs produces nonsense numbers, and how to turn visibility data into an actual action plan of what content to create and where to get mentioned. The lessons apply regardless of which visibility tool you use.

September 23, 2026Episode 581 hr 19 min

Everything Wrong With the GEO Conversation Right Now - we join Alex Birkett of Omniscient Digital

We joined Alex Birkett from Omniscient Digital for a wide-ranging conversation on GEO strategy, the state of the AEO conversation online, and how AI search is changing content marketing at a fundamental level. This one covers a lot of ground. We get into why we think most of the GEO advice circulating on LinkedIn right now is either misleading or just wrong, from the "Reddit is the most cited source" narrative to the newsletter sponsorship pitch to the ClickUp study that keeps getting cited as proof that listicles are dead. We walk through our own citation data across 100+ prompts and explain why what we're seeing on real client accounts looks nothing like what the aggregated studies suggest. From there, we get into the bigger strategic picture: how AI search is personalized in a way Google never was, why that changes the content you need to create, and why this is a strategy problem that nobody's treating as one. We revisit the Nicole story, talk about why Pain Point SEO needs to evolve for AI, and dig into why the "just get mentions everywhere" approach to third-party outreach is a short-sighted play. We also get honest about something we've been thinking about a lot internally: the long-form written content that built our agency may not work the same way anymore. People aren't binge-reading blog posts like they used to. LLMs are summarizing your arguments into two lines. So where does thought leadership actually live now?

September 8, 2026Episode 5735 min

Personalized GEO: How Content Strategy Should Shift for AI Search

AI search doesn't work like Google and your content strategy probably hasn't caught up. When someone searches Google, they type a broad keyword and filter through the results themselves. When someone searches ChatGPT or Claude, the LLM already knows who they are, what their business looks like, and what problems they're trying to solve. It's not returning a list of options. It's making a recommendation. That changes how you need to approach what content to create. In this episode, we break down why GEO is fundamentally a strategy shift, not a set of on-page tactics. We walk through a real client example where ChatGPT recommended us as the #1 agency for a prospect, but when we tried to reproduce that result in an incognito window, we didn't appear at all. Same prompt structure, different user context, completely different output. AI search is personalized. The LLM is running a matching algorithm between the user's specific situation and whatever it can find about your brand. If your content only speaks in broad category terms, you're invisible to the people who are your best customers. We cover what this means for content strategy, why most of what people are calling "GEO/AEO tactics" misses the point, and how we're shifting our own client work to account for this.

August 17, 2026Episode 5634 min

AI Visibility Case Study: How to Grow a New Brand That Hadn't Invested in AI Search or SEO

Most GEO/AEO advice assumes you're already a known brand. Here's how we'd approach GEO/AEO if you're not. Redline Capital is a business funding company that came to us after running mostly outbound. They didn't really have an online presence, no SEO foundation, and they were competing against incumbents that had invested in SEO for years. In this solo episode, Devesh walks through their Traqer dashboard and shows exactly how they went from roughly zero AI visibility to ~30% across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode- and which parts are still at zero, and why that's fine. Covered in this episode: → Why new brands can't get into an LLM's training data — and why web search is your only realistic wedge in → The Prioritized GEO pyramid, and why owned content beats off-site mentions when you're starting from nothing → Why a single blended "AI visibility %" is misleading and trivially gameable — drop the topics you lose and the number goes up → Why prompt tracking is not keyword research, what clickstream data actually is, and why it misses your B2B buyer entirely → The self-promotion myth, busted: Redline's own product page is the #1 citation and a named brand mention in ChatGPT, ranked above NerdWallet, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes → Citations ≠ brand mentions — and why getting cited ninth is worth almost nothing → Why attribution gets harder as you win: when LLMs name your brand without linking, people just Google you, and it lands as direct traffic Prioritized GEO Invisible Prompts Topic-Based GEO Pain Point SEO Traqer (our AI visibility tool) Questions about your own brand? Drop them in the comments, we read all of them. Newsletter

July 1, 2026Episode 5531 min

Webinar: Why Your GEO Strategy is Probably Wrong (And What Actually Works)

Most GEO advice is wrong. Everyone's recommending llms.txt files, FAQ schemas, and content tweaks, but none of that actually influences whether ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini recommend your brand. In this webinar, Devesh Khanal (co-founder of Grow & Convert) breaks down what actually drives visibility in AI search. You'll learn: - Why most AI traffic is "dark traffic" you can't measure in analytics - The flawed advice everyone's following (and why it won't move the needle) - About our GEO prioritization pyramid that we use to get real visibility for clients (and why tier 1 content matters most) - How to stop thinking in keywords and start thinking in topics - How to measure AI visibility without clean attribution If you're doing GEO or trying to be visible in ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs, this framework flips the script on what most people are doing. Related content: Topic Based GEO Prioritized GEO Learn more: 📧 Join our newsletter: growandconvert.com 🔧 Try Traqer.ai (7-day free trial): traqer.ai 💼 Work with us: growandconvert.com

June 8, 2026Episode 5418 min

Does Third-Party Content Actually Drive LLM Brand Mentions More Than Your Own Site?

"Third-party content drives 85% of brand discovery in LLMs." It's the GEO stat making the rounds on LinkedIn right now, and a lot of marketers are using it to argue that your own site content doesn't matter anymore- that GEO is really about getting mentioned everywhere else. We disagree. And we have client data that contradicts it. In this episode, Devesh and Benji break down where this narrative came from (an Air Ops post citing a Graphite study), where the methodology breaks down, and what we're actually seeing across our clients in Traqer.ai. The short version: big brands like Salesforce and Peloton skew studies like this because they already have category-level brand awareness. For smaller players like Toro TMS and Climb Hire, clients we've worked with where their own content is essentially all we've done, they're pulling strong brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini. That's not third-party publications doing the work. We also get into: – Why Perplexity, AI Overviews, and AI Mode behave differently than ChatGPT and Gemini (and what visibility numbers look like across each) – The growing evidence that LLMs may decide what to recommend from training data and a loose SERP read first, then find sources to cite after the fact – Why competitive categories (CRM, exercise bikes, content marketing agencies) need a different playbook than less-saturated ones – Why your own site is the only place with enough canvas to spell out the specific use cases, pain points, and customer types that LLMs match against real user conversations Referenced posts: Invisible Prompts and Topic-Based GEO https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/invisible-prompts/ https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/topic-based-geo/ This is the companion to last week's episode on self-promotional listicles for SEO. Watch that one first if you haven't. Subscribe for new episodes. Newsletter and full written breakdowns: growandconvert.com/newsletter #GEO #AISearch #ContentMarketing

May 27, 2026Episode 5336 min

Is Google Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles? Our Data Says No

"Self-promotional listicles are dying" is the new SEO narrative making the rounds and we've had multiple clients Slack us asking if we should change our strategy of producing list posts. In this episode, we break down Lily Ray's Substack post that started it all, walk through why the data she shared shows correlation but not causation, and pull up the actual rankings of category-keyword listicles we run for clients to show what's really happening after the late-January 2026 traffic dip. Then we get into the part nobody else is talking about: - How to actually write these posts so they hold up through core updates. -Why you don't need to force-rank a list. -Why you don't need to call yourself "the best." -Why the first-person "I tried all 15 of these" framing is a lie that backfires. -And why product schema hacks will get your site torched. We walk through a negative example, then show two posts that have ranked through multiple Google updates- our own "Best Content Marketing Agencies" post and a client example in trucking management software. The full written breakdown with screenshots and ranking data is going up on the blog — link in the newsletter: growandconvert.com/newsletter Full blog post on this topic: https://www.growandconvert.com/seo/self-promotional-listicles/

April 10, 2026Episode 5245 min

Topic-Based GEO: The Content Strategy Framework for AI Search

A client told us ChatGPT kept recommending Grow and Convert until she had to reach out. So we copied her exact prompt into an incognito window. We were nowhere to be found. That one example changed how we think about AI search strategy entirely. In this episode, we introduce Topic-Based GEO, our new framework for content strategy in the age of AI search. We explain the concept of "invisible prompts" (the personalized context behind every AI search that makes prompt-level tracking unreliable), walk through how to build a topic map for your business, and share practical steps for creating the kind of content that actually gets LLMs to recommend you.

April 2, 2026Episode 5144 min

GEO Is Not SEO: The New Rules for Getting Recommended by AI

Most people optimizing for AI search are focused on the wrong metric. Getting cited by an AI model feels like a win but a citation doesn't mean you're actually influencing the answer. And after sampling AI search prompts over 20,000 times, the data makes that painfully clear. In this episode, Devesh and Benji from Grow and Convert sit down with Bernard from Clearscope to break down what's really driving AI recommendations and what isn't. They get into why Gemini searches an average of 5.7 times per query while ChatGPT barely searches at all, why Google appears to be actively suppressing brand citations even when it mentions you, and why the GEO "hacks" everyone's pushing right now (schema, Reddit, you name it) aren't moving the needle. The bigger takeaway: training data controls 70–80% of what AI recommends. Web search only affects 20–30%. Which means the content strategy that actually works in this new era isn't about producing more it's about going way more specific. In this episode: Why getting cited by AI ≠ influencing the answer Gemini vs. ChatGPT: how differently they search (and why it matters for your strategy) The brand suppression finding: why mentioning yourself might be hurting your citations Why "Content 2.0" is about persona-specific, long-tail content not volume How Grow and Convert is evolving Pain Point SEO for the AI search era Relevant articles: Invisible prompts: https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/invisible-prompts/ Topic Based GEO: https://www.growandconvert.com/ai/topic-based-geo/