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 chunk of content to answer the query. If your message isn’t structured clearly or consistent across channels, you risk being invisible.” - David Kirkdorffer Traditional SEO is no longer enough. In today’s AI-powered world, LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are answering your buyers’ questions and your brand may not even be part of the conversation. In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, The New SEO Frontier: How Marketers Can Win Visibility in the Age of AI, I sit down with David Kirkdorffer, B2B marketing strategist and expert in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), to explore how marketers must rethink visibility in the age of generative AI. We cover: How LLMs extract and synthesize content differently than search engines Why technical shortcuts like tabbed content and misused header tags can bury your message The return of offsite SEO and the critical role of brand consistency across all digital touchpoints How to structure content to optimize for chunking, schema, and clarity Strategic steps for teams to audit and adapt across content, web, PR, and demand gen 📌 The key takeaway: You must create content that is technically sound, consistently messaged, and delivers value in the exact format AI tools extract. That means clarity, chunkability, and alignment across your marketing ecosystem. Perfect for B2B CMOs, SEO leads, and content strategists looking to: ✔️ Stay visible in AI-powered search ✔️ Build trust with consistent messaging ✔️ Evolve SEO strategies to match modern buyer behavior
“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 opportunity?
David Kirkdorffer (04:51.442)
Everyone wants to know, “What am I supposed to do? How is this different—is it different?” Two main lines of inquiry emerge. One comes from senior marketing leaders—the CMO or someone at a higher level—who wants to understand what they and their teams can do holistically. The other is very tactical: people approach it from their domain expertise—website, SEO, content—and ask, “What do I do within my lane that makes an impact?”
The truth is, it’s a bit of both. In my view, it’s a holistic problem to solve. You can operate in just one tactical lane—website, SEO, or content—and it will have an impact. When you combine them, the impact is amplified, and it should also involve your PR, partner, and demand-gen teams; their work can help or hurt how your brand is recognized and surfaces in answers. So those two lanes—holistic and tactical—intertwine, and where you start depends on team size and resources.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:48.354)
If the main question is “How do I do this?” what do you think people should be asking first? What’s the right starting point?
David Kirkdorffer (07:01.140)
I think you need a big-picture view of how this is different and what drives it—how GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) actually differs from SEO. It even has many acronyms: generative engine optimization, AI optimization, LLM optimization, and more.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:38.732)
Based on your work, which term do you prefer?
David Kirkdorffer (07:44.744)
I like “generative engine optimization.” Unfortunately, “GEO” means other things in other domains, which is part of the problem—both technically and from a brand standpoint. When we use shortcuts like acronyms, we know what they mean; the LLM doesn’t. It could interpret “MRO,” for example, as any of 50 different things until you spell it out first.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:24.150)
Earlier you said it starts with a mindset. What mindset should people adopt to lean into improving their strategies here?
David Kirkdorffer (08:46.292)
At the highest level, LLMs and GEO replace the short keyword query box with a large window where users add lots of context. Through vectorization—turning language into math—the LLM finds little chunks of information, the “needles,” rather than presenting a haystack of links. It compares those chunks, validates them against other sources, and synthesizes an answer.
We often don’t know or care where the answer came from, as long as it’s accurate. But that means the LLM isn’t reading your whole page; it’s reading segments. So this isn’t just a technical SEO challenge—it’s about the words themselves: how we phrase them, how we make them easy to understand, and how we avoid letting brand personality cloud clarity.
Because of “chunking,” answers often come from two or three sentences—maybe 200–300 words—not entire pages. So we need to optimize those chunks.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:06.506)
Before we dive deeper into tactics, explain how these platforms differ from Google’s traditional search engines and why that demands a different strategy.
David Kirkdorffer (13:41.514)
Think of GEO as standing on the shoulders of SEO. If your SEO is weak, the shoulders aren’t strong. Some say, “This is just a new kind of SEO,” and there’s truth in that. Others think, “We just need to do good marketing,” and that’s also true. But with GEO, some shortcuts we’ve taken—like heavy JavaScript or hidden tab content—now have new impacts because LLMs don’t execute JavaScript or click tabs.
For example, if your page uses tabs for five benefits, the LLM sees only the first one; it can’t click the others. It forces us to reevaluate design choices, because GEO cares about different things.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:11.054)
So SEO is shifting from technical crawlability to a content-first approach—almost back to the early days of SEO. When you talk about chunking content, best practices seem to be resurfacing. What should we consider when writing content now?
David Kirkdorffer (17:34.914)
The best practice is simply doing what we’ve always known: write clearly for the reader. LLMs struggle with poetic or highly stylized language; they understand literal, structured information. Our challenge is to provide that clarity without becoming too dry. In the future, LLMs may understand nuance better, but for now, literal clarity wins.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:09.686)
There’s still a technical aspect—different from technical SEO a few years ago—like tagging. Why is that more important than ever?
David Kirkdorffer (21:09.686)
We have semantic tags—H1, H2, H3, etc.—but many treat them as visual elements. You might find an H6 above an H2 because it looks good, but that confuses the LLM. Ideally, one H1 states what the page is about, multiple H2s mark subtopics, H3s detail components, and so on. When that hierarchy is broken, the LLM can’t map ideas correctly, and your content may be excluded from answers.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:57.034)
Old is new again: off-site SEO also matters. Why is consistency off-site so critical, and what should brands do?
David Kirkdorffer (25:57.034)
B2B marketers want their message on as many authoritative sites as possible. A small brand’s site may have little traffic, so its signal is weak. Getting listed in directories or partner sites amplifies that signal. In the old days, “brand police” ensured consistent boilerplates—25-, 50-, 100-word descriptions—so customers weren’t confused. LLMs work the same way: if they see the same wording consistently, they trust it. When every team tweaks the message, it creates variations that confuse the model, so consistency is key.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (30:33.718)
This has been super valuable. For listeners who know they need to start right away, what’s the most important first step?
David Kirkdorffer (30:59.392)
First, learn how these systems work. You don’t need deep technical knowledge, but understand the impact. If you’re in a specific lane—SEO, content, web—still learn the bigger picture so your choices align with the new reality. Then triage: audit where you’ll work first based on team size and resources.
Gather the whole team—web, SEO, content, PR, demand gen—so everyone hears one story and understands how their actions affect each other. Agencies should know what they can and can’t do and set expectations. After learning and auditing, remember this is ongoing, like SEO has always been.
Finally, be present where your customers go. Different LLMs rely on different data sources—Reddit, Wikipedia, licensed content—and those arrangements change. Go where your customers already spend time.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (36:06.339)
Excellent. For folks who want to learn more or bring you in to help their team, how can they reach you?
David Kirkdorffer (36:42.518)
The best way is through LinkedIn. Search “David Kirkdorffer.” My email is firstname.lastname@gmail.com. I post about these topics and provide training classes—very hands-on and tactical, covering tabs, accordions, LLMS text, schema and chunkability, and more. Feel free to DM or email me.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (37:52.238)
Perfect. I’ll include those links in the show notes. David, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
David Kirkdorffer (38:05.046)
Thank you, Kerry, and thank you to the audience. If you’ve made it this far, that’s a compliment. I appreciate it and enjoyed the conversation.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (38:15.050)
Excellent—thanks!
Huge thanks to David Kirkdorffer for joining me on the show. If your brand isn't showing up in AI-generated answers, this conversation is your roadmap to change that. From content structure to message consistency to offsite visibility, David laid out actionable ways to adapt your SEO strategy to this new era of AI-driven buyer behavior. If you found this valuable, share it with your team and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
And for more strategic insights on revenue growth through marketing, head to revenuebasedmarketing.com or follow me, Kerry Curran, on LinkedIn today.
“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 opportunity?
David Kirkdorffer (04:51.442)
Everyone wants to know, “What am I supposed to do? How is this different—is it different?” Two main lines of inquiry emerge. One comes from senior marketing leaders—the CMO or someone at a higher level—who wants to understand what they and their teams can do holistically. The other is very tactical: people approach it from their domain expertise—website, SEO, content—and ask, “What do I do within my lane that makes an impact?”
The truth is, it’s a bit of both. In my view, it’s a holistic problem to solve. You can operate in just one tactical lane—website, SEO, or content—and it will have an impact. When you combine them, the impact is amplified, and it should also involve your PR, partner, and demand-gen teams; their work can help or hurt how your brand is recognized and surfaces in answers. So those two lanes—holistic and tactical—intertwine, and where you start depends on team size and resources.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:48.354)
If the main question is “How do I do this?” what do you think people should be asking first? What’s the right starting point?
David Kirkdorffer (07:01.140)
I think you need a big-picture view of how this is different and what drives it—how GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) actually differs from SEO. It even has many acronyms: generative engine optimization, AI optimization, LLM optimization, and more.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:38.732)
Based on your work, which term do you prefer?
David Kirkdorffer (07:44.744)
I like “generative engine optimization.” Unfortunately, “GEO” means other things in other domains, which is part of the problem—both technically and from a brand standpoint. When we use shortcuts like acronyms, we know what they mean; the LLM doesn’t. It could interpret “MRO,” for example, as any of 50 different things until you spell it out first.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:24.150)
Earlier you said it starts with a mindset. What mindset should people adopt to lean into improving their strategies here?
David Kirkdorffer (08:46.292)
At the highest level, LLMs and GEO replace the short keyword query box with a large window where users add lots of context. Through vectorization—turning language into math—the LLM finds little chunks of information, the “needles,” rather than presenting a haystack of links. It compares those chunks, validates them against other sources, and synthesizes an answer.
We often don’t know or care where the answer came from, as long as it’s accurate. But that means the LLM isn’t reading your whole page; it’s reading segments. So this isn’t just a technical SEO challenge—it’s about the words themselves: how we phrase them, how we make them easy to understand, and how we avoid letting brand personality cloud clarity.
Because of “chunking,” answers often come from two or three sentences—maybe 200–300 words—not entire pages. So we need to optimize those chunks.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:06.506)
Before we dive deeper into tactics, explain how these platforms differ from Google’s traditional search engines and why that demands a different strategy.
David Kirkdorffer (13:41.514)
Think of GEO as standing on the shoulders of SEO. If your SEO is weak, the shoulders aren’t strong. Some say, “This is just a new kind of SEO,” and there’s truth in that. Others think, “We just need to do good marketing,” and that’s also true. But with GEO, some shortcuts we’ve taken—like heavy JavaScript or hidden tab content—now have new impacts because LLMs don’t execute JavaScript or click tabs.
For example, if your page uses tabs for five benefits, the LLM sees only the first one; it can’t click the others. It forces us to reevaluate design choices, because GEO cares about different things.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:11.054)
So SEO is shifting from technical crawlability to a content-first approach—almost back to the early days of SEO. When you talk about chunking content, best practices seem to be resurfacing. What should we consider when writing content now?
David Kirkdorffer (17:34.914)
The best practice is simply doing what we’ve always known: write clearly for the reader. LLMs struggle with poetic or highly stylized language; they understand literal, structured information. Our challenge is to provide that clarity without becoming too dry. In the future, LLMs may understand nuance better, but for now, literal clarity wins.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:09.686)
There’s still a technical aspect—different from technical SEO a few years ago—like tagging. Why is that more important than ever?
David Kirkdorffer (21:09.686)
We have semantic tags—H1, H2, H3, etc.—but many treat them as visual elements. You might find an H6 above an H2 because it looks good, but that confuses the LLM. Ideally, one H1 states what the page is about, multiple H2s mark subtopics, H3s detail components, and so on. When that hierarchy is broken, the LLM can’t map ideas correctly, and your content may be excluded from answers.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:57.034)
Old is new again: off-site SEO also matters. Why is consistency off-site so critical, and what should brands do?
David Kirkdorffer (25:57.034)
B2B marketers want their message on as many authoritative sites as possible. A small brand’s site may have little traffic, so its signal is weak. Getting listed in directories or partner sites amplifies that signal. In the old days, “brand police” ensured consistent boilerplates—25-, 50-, 100-word descriptions—so customers weren’t confused. LLMs work the same way: if they see the same wording consistently, they trust it. When every team tweaks the message, it creates variations that confuse the model, so consistency is key.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (30:33.718)
This has been super valuable. For listeners who know they need to start right away, what’s the most important first step?
David Kirkdorffer (30:59.392)
First, learn how these systems work. You don’t need deep technical knowledge, but understand the impact. If you’re in a specific lane—SEO, content, web—still learn the bigger picture so your choices align with the new reality. Then triage: audit where you’ll work first based on team size and resources.
Gather the whole team—web, SEO, content, PR, demand gen—so everyone hears one story and understands how their actions affect each other. Agencies should know what they can and can’t do and set expectations. After learning and auditing, remember this is ongoing, like SEO has always been.
Finally, be present where your customers go. Different LLMs rely on different data sources—Reddit, Wikipedia, licensed content—and those arrangements change. Go where your customers already spend time.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (36:06.339)
Excellent. For folks who want to learn more or bring you in to help their team, how can they reach you?
David Kirkdorffer (36:42.518)
The best way is through LinkedIn. Search “David Kirkdorffer.” My email is firstname.lastname@gmail.com. I post about these topics and provide training classes—very hands-on and tactical, covering tabs, accordions, LLMS text, schema and chunkability, and more. Feel free to DM or email me.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (37:52.238)
Perfect. I’ll include those links in the show notes. David, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
David Kirkdorffer (38:05.046)
Thank you, Kerry, and thank you to the audience. If you’ve made it this far, that’s a compliment. I appreciate it and enjoyed the conversation.
Kerry Curran, RBMA (38:15.050)
Excellent—thanks!
Huge thanks to David Kirkdorffer for joining me on the show. If your brand isn't showing up in AI-generated answers, this conversation is your roadmap to change that. From content structure to message consistency to offsite visibility, David laid out actionable ways to adapt your SEO strategy to this new era of AI-driven buyer behavior. If you found this valuable, share it with your team and hit subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
And for more strategic insights on revenue growth through marketing, head to revenuebasedmarketing.com or follow me, Kerry Curran, on LinkedIn today.