What would you do if a single Google update wiped out 80 percent of your organic traffic?
That is exactly what happened to my agency in 2021. I panicked for one day. Then I got to work, and the rebuild that followed became Micro SEO Strategies℠, the human-driven AI-assisted methodology Boulder SEO Marketing still runs on today. Fast forward to now, and roughly 40 percent of our new client leads come through AI search.
I’ve spent the last 30 years obsessed with how search engines work, and honestly, I’ve never seen things change this fast. That’s exactly why I’m super excited about next week, because I get to share what’s working, twice. On October 7, I’m hosting our free AI SEO & GEO Online Summit. On October 8 and 9, I’ll be right here in beautiful Denver for AgencyCon, where I’m sitting on a panel about building your own AI platforms and tools. This week’s tip is short and sweet: two events, what you’ll learn at each, and how to decide which room belongs to you.
Watch the full video above to learn more.
Two Events, One Thread
Here is the thing. On the surface, these are two very different events. One is a two-hour online summit, free, open to anyone who wants to get found in AI search. The other is a two-day, in-person conference built exclusively for agency owners and leaders.
But they share one thread, and it’s the same thread that runs through everything I’ve learned since 2021. Anyone can generate AI content now. Producing more was never the hard part. The hard part is the strategy that decides what to create, the system that makes it repeatable, and the technology that runs it at scale.
The summit shows you that thread from the visibility side: how brands get picked up by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI features, and which signals actually move the needle. AgencyCon shows it from the operations side: what happens when an agency stops renting every tool and starts building its own.
In my experience, most teams get stuck because they try to fix the third piece first. They buy another AI tool, point it at a keyword list, and wonder why nothing ranks. Both events flip that order. Strategy first, then the system, then the technology that scales it. That’s the order we learned the hard way, and it’s exactly how the closing sessions of the summit are built.
If you only have time for one, I’ll help you pick at the end of this newsletter. But I genuinely think there’s something in both for most of the people reading this.
What Happens When a Brand Starts With Zero Reputation?
Our first session at the AI SEO & GEO Online Summit comes from Bogdan Babiak, CMO of SE Ranking. SE Ranking is our favorite SEO tool, and it’s a company I’m proud to serve as a brand ambassador for. Bogdan has helped grow the platform’s user base from 50,000 to more than 1.5 million, so he knows a thing or two about building visibility that compounds.
Bogdan is tackling a question I hear constantly. Every brand visibility playbook out there assumes you already have something to work with. Existing rankings. Backlinks. Reviews. A history. So what do you do when you have none of that?
SE Ranking ran an internal experiment to find out. They built a completely new brand from scratch and tracked, month over month, how it surfaced across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini. Bogdan is bringing updated data from the latest tracking period, and his session breaks down which signals actually moved the needle and how fast each platform picked the brand up.
Why does this matter to you? Because a brand with zero reputation is about the cleanest test there is. There’s no legacy authority muddying the results. Whatever moved that brand is what moves AI visibility from a standing start. Whether you’re launching a new business, a new product line, or a new client site, this is as close to a controlled experiment as our industry gets right now.
I haven’t seen Bogdan’s final numbers yet, and I’m not going to guess at them here. That’s exactly why I’m excited for this one. Expect concrete numbers, not theory.
What 858,000 Small Business Sites Already Told Us
Our second session comes from my friend Shawn Davis, who leads content and communications at Duda.
If that name sounds familiar, it should. Back in May, Shawn and I unpacked Duda’s study of more than 858,000 small business websites, and I wrote up the findings in Why AI-Visible Sites Crush Invisible Ones. The headline finding stuck with me: AI-crawled sites generated 3.2 times more human traffic than the sites AI engines ignored, along with 2.7 times more form submissions and 2.5 times more click-to-call events.
Those aren’t vanity numbers. Form submissions and phone calls are closed business, especially for local service companies.
The finding that stopped me in my tracks back then was Google Business Profile Sync. Sites with it enabled hit a 92.8 percent AI crawl rate, yet only 0.4 percent of the sites in the study had it implemented. That’s one of the widest gaps between effort and outcome I’ve seen in nearly three decades of SEO.
At the summit, Shawn goes deeper on what actually makes an SMB website visible to AI. He’ll walk through the signals that separate the sites AI systems find from the ones they overlook, and the practical changes that turn greater AI visibility into more traffic and leads. You’ll leave knowing which signals matter most and what to fix first.
If you run a local business, or you build and manage sites for local businesses, this is the session to bring your questions to. Every session includes live Q&A, so come ready.
Strategy, Then System, Then Technology
The last forty minutes of the summit belong to my own team at Boulder SEO Marketing, split across two short sessions.
First, Simon Golding and Daniel Burns take on the two pieces most teams get wrong. Simon leads enterprise strategy at BSM, and he and I have worked side by side for more than a decade. He covers the strategy that decides what to create in the first place, so you earn rankings and citations instead of adding volume the engines ignore. Daniel, our COO and my business partner, then shows how to turn that strategy into a repeatable, documented system. That’s the difference between a one-off win and an operation that produces quality content month after month.
Then Harold De Guzman, our Head of AI, closes the summit by demonstrating the technology that runs it all at scale, live. Harold heads our AI task force and architected microSEO, the AI SEO & GEO operating system behind our human-driven AI-assisted workflow.
Here’s what I want you to know about that final session. It’s education first. You can take the manual method Simon and Daniel teach and run with it yourself, today. Harold simply shows what becomes possible when the strategy and the system work as one. There’s no pitch at the end. That has been the rule for every summit we’ve run.
I created this summit because things are changing so fast in our industry that we need a recurring place to share what’s working right now, not what worked last year. We run it quarterly, and recordings of past summits live on the summit page, so even if you can’t make it live, bookmark it.
Why I’m Talking About Building Your Own Tools in Denver
The day after the summit, I’m heading to AgencyCon at the Children’s Museum of Denver at Marsico Campus. AgencyCon is a two-day conference, October 8 and 9, built exclusively for digital marketing agency owners, operators, and leaders. It’s hosted by Hyper Dog Media, and it runs on a rule I love: zero sales pitches from the podium.
On Thursday, October 8, I’m joining the panel AI Automation: Building Your Own Platforms and Tools, moderated by Jim Kreinbrink, alongside Brian Kato, Marcus Jeffery, and Greg Ahern.
This topic is personal for me. When ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, I spent six days straight, more than a hundred hours, in prompt engineering. By the end of that week, I had a working system. I took it to Daniel and told him almost everything inside Micro SEO Strategies℠ could be automated or AI-assisted. Daniel built it.
That system became microSEO, the operating system that now powers both Boulder SEO Marketing and our newest company, Enterprise GEO. Enterprise GEO helps enterprise businesses and agencies create content at scale with the help of AI that actually ranks in Google and gets cited in AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
Today we have four full-time developers building the platform, and we’re on track to automate about 80 percent of our agency operations by the end of the year. That’s what I’ll be digging into on the panel: what it really takes to build your own tools, where it pays off, and where agencies get it wrong.
It’s also a theme that runs through the whole first morning. Right before our panel, Brent Weaver of E2M Solutions presents Building an Agentic Agency, and the day opens with a keynote from agency coach Steve Guberman. If you’re an agency leader thinking about AI as an operating model rather than a shiny add-on, Thursday morning was built for you.
Which Room Is Yours?
Here’s how I’d think about it.
The AI SEO & GEO Online Summit is for anyone who needs to get found in AI search: business owners, marketing managers, SEO professionals, and digital marketers. It’s free, it streams live on YouTube, and it runs Wednesday, October 7, from 9:00 to 11:00 AM Mountain, which is 11:00 AM Eastern and 5:00 PM Central European Time. Two hours, five speakers, real data, and live Q&A after every session.
AgencyCon is for agency owners and leaders. If you run an agency, or help lead one, and you’re wrestling with growth, operations, or how AI fits into your delivery, you’re not going to want to miss these two days in Denver. You’ll spend them with a big group of fellow agency owners, exchanging ideas and learning from people who’ve sat in your seat.
And if you’re an agency leader in Colorado, or you can make the trip? Do both. Learn the visibility side online on Wednesday, then come talk shop about building the machine on Thursday.
What to Do Next
First, join the summit. Register for the October 7 AI SEO & GEO Online Summit.
It’s complimentary, and every seat comes with live Q&A with the speakers.
Second, learn more. If you’re curious about the system behind our results, see how microSEO powers our work, or explore how Enterprise GEO brings it to enterprise teams and agencies. You can also browse all of our upcoming AI SEO training and events.
Third, reach out. If you’ll be at AgencyCon, or you want to talk about where AI search fits in your business, contact me directly. I’d love to connect, in person in Denver or online.
I hope to see you at one, maybe both, of these events.
Stay safe and healthy.
Cheers,
Chris