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Your next customer may not Google you – they may ask AI who they should hire. Vivienne Wagner explains how clear messaging, reviews, authoritative content, and a consistent online presence can help AI understand your business well enough to recommend it to the right people.
Why AI Recommends Some Businesses and Completely Ignores Others
Ask ChatGPT for a restaurant recommendation, a contractor, or a web designer, and it doesn’t flip a coin. It’s drawing on everything it’s learned about you across every conversation you’ve ever had with it, then matching that against everything it can find about the businesses in question. If your business isn’t clear about who you are and who you’re for, you’re not in the running. It’s that simple, and that unforgiving.
I talked about this with Vivienne Wagner, founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group, who spends her days helping businesses become what she calls “easy to find, trust, and recommend” in an AI-driven search world. Her framing: AI has become a personal referral system. Not a directory. A referral.
Your Customers Aren’t Googling Anymore. They’re Chatting.
Think about how you use AI tools yourself. You don’t type a keyword and scan ten blue links. You have a conversation. You ask a follow-up question. Sometimes that conversation stretches over weeks.
“Every interaction you have with that AI, it’s getting to know you, what you need, and what your pain points are a little bit more,” Vivienne told me. That ongoing thread means the AI isn’t just answering your question, it’s building a profile of what you’re trying to accomplish. And when it’s time to recommend something, it recommends based on that profile.
Here’s the part that should get your attention: AI isn’t guessing. It’s still leveraging SEO fundamentals to figure out who you are, it’s just interpreting that information and making a judgment call the way Google never did. Which brings us to the question that’s been sitting underneath SEO for two decades.
The Three Questions That Still Decide Everything
Who are you. What do you do. Who are you for.
That’s it. That’s the whole game, and it was the whole game before AI showed up too. What’s changed is how unforgiving the consequences are for getting it wrong. Google could tolerate a vague homepage because a human was still doing the interpreting. AI is the one doing the interpreting now, and it doesn’t extend the benefit of the doubt.
If your website, your social profiles, and your Google Business Profile all send slightly different signals about what you do, AI doesn’t average them out into something coherent. It just gets confused, and confusion doesn’t lead to recommendations.
The fix is very low-tech. Write down what you do and who it’s for. Then feed that description to Claude or ChatGPT alongside your website and ask it point blank: does this match what you see? You’ll get an honest answer, usually a more honest one than you’d get from a friend who doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.
Reviews Are Content Now, Not Just Social Proof
AI reads reviews the same way it reads a blog post: as another data point about who you are and how you operate. That means the way you respond matters just as much as the review itself. Her rule of thumb: you’re not writing the response for the person who left the review. You’re writing it for the next person who reads it, and increasingly, for the AI that’s forming an opinion about your business from it.
This gets especially interesting with negative reviews, which most business owners dread. Vivienne pointed out that a thoughtful, professional response to a bad review can do more for your credibility than another five-star rating. It shows character. It shows how you handle a problem. And people, and apparently AI, pay attention to that.
Pillar Pages: The Long-Form Play Nobody Wants to Do
Vivienne shared a story about a bridal shop client who resisted, for months, the idea of building long, comprehensive “pillar pages” organized around seasonal themes (think “the ultimate guide to summer weddings”). Once they finally launched four of them, her traffic spiked and her AI visibility score took off, enough that she and a rival shop a few blocks away swapped positions in AI recommendations.
The logic makes sense once you see it: AI wants organized, comprehensive information it can parse quickly. A single page that thoroughly covers a topic, with clear sections and internal links to your other content, is exactly the format AI prefers. You don’t need to be a bridal shop to use this. A roofing and insulation company Vivienne works with turned individual service pages into long-form pillar content, linking each one out to related resources, and saw the same organizing effect.
Your Google Business Profile Is Doing More Than You Think
If you’ve been treating your Google Business Profile as a set-it-and-forget-it listing, that’s worth revisiting. Vivienne suggested treating it more like a social channel: post a couple of times a week, keep your hours and address accurate, and make sure the description reflects what you do and who you’re for.
This applies whether you’re a local shop or, like Houndstooth Media Group itself, a virtual business serving clients nationwide. AI checks this profile early in its research process, and an active, accurate profile gives it more to work with.
Where to Start This Week
You don’t need a rebrand or a six-month content calendar to move the needle here. Start with the boring stuff that works:
Write one clear sentence describing who you are, what you do, and who it’s for. Test it against your own website using Claude or ChatGPT. Update your Google Business Profile description and post something this week. Respond to your last few reviews with the next reader in mind, not just the reviewer.
None of this is glamorous. It’s also not complicated. As Vivienne put it, once you understand what AI is looking for, you can put it on your site and start speaking its language.
Transcript From Vivienne Wagner’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is the founder and CEO of Houndstooth Media Group, where she helps businesses become easier to find, trust, and recommend in the age of AI-driven search. An SEO and AI visibility expert, she teaches business owners how to strengthen their authority, credibility, and clarity so they show up where today’s customers are searching.
Known for making complex marketing concepts practical and approachable, she brings actionable insights, strategic thinking, and a refreshing dose of humor to every conversation.
Today, we’re going to be discussing how you can make AI a personal referral system with Vivienne Wagner. Vivienne, welcome to the podcast.
Vivienne: Thanks so much. It’s great to be here.
Rich: So what led you to focus on helping business owners become more visible and easier to find online?
Vivienne: What led me to it, just an accident. Was trying to do it for myself. I had a blog and was trying to get more eyeballs on my blog, because that’s how bloggers make money, or at least back in the day.
And I had an accidental business with people asking me to help with their visibility. Wasn’t calling it visibility at the time, that’s back in 2013 or so, but it just kind of morphed into that, and I just have an aptitude for it, I guess.
Rich: Awesome. So when you describe AI as a personal referral system, what does that mean to you?
Vivienne: It means that we are no longer just going to Google and sort of trying to figure it out on our own. You know, you Google something and then you have to go read a bunch of different websites and see if there’s a match. Whereas, I think the audience and I’m sure you yourself have gone to ChatGPT or Claude and just started your search there as a conversation, right?
Rich: Absolutely.
Vivienne: And some of our conversations span weeks, months. We have that thread there, and we’re still going back. And so what happens during that period of discovery for the humans, it’s a learning opportunity for AI to understand who you are and what you’re looking for.
And so every interaction you have with that AI, it’s getting to know you, what you need, and what your pain points are a little bit more. And so then it’s now positioned to make recommendations to you based on you, what it knows you need. And I think if you think about how you might have been using AI to find what you need, get answers, it’s not a one and done. Every single one of those responses you get from AI has a follow-up question or a prompt.
And I think we kind of fool ourselves into we’re having this great conversation, but we’re taking its recommendations. I’ve bought products now from AI because it recommended it. I’ve gone to restaurants because it recommend. It’s the new personal referral. And the businesses who get recommended are the ones that have the most easy-to-read clarity around what they do and who they’re for.
Rich: All right. And I think this is where people’s ears might have perked up a little bit, because it’s one thing to have the conversation that’s ongoing. For me, it might be something around woodworking or gardening. And then at some point it may turn into a transactional query that I might ask Claude or ChatGPT.
You talk about clarity. So what does clarity mean in terms of this AI search we’re discussing?
Vivienne: It’s not being the loudest voice, it’s being the most clear about the three things that Google has always wanted to know. SEO at its most stripped-down level is who are you, what do you do, and who are you for? Answer those three questions, that’s SEO.
That’s the same thing with AI. AI doesn’t pull answers out of thin air. It’s still leveraging SEO to find out information for you, about you, from your website. But Google isn’t interpreting and making recommendations the way AI does.
So AI will look at your website. AI’s going to look at your social media, and your YouTube, and your Pinterest, and your Google business profile. It’s looking at all of these little online data points, and it’s forming an opinion about you and an interpretation of you. So if you’re not clear, it doesn’t have a good understanding of what you do, and it’s not going to recommend you to the right people.
Rich: How do we know that our messaging is clear? We may think it’s clear, but that’s only because we’ve lived in it for the past year, five years, or in my case 29 years. So how do we know that we’re actually being clear in a way that AI can understand and then recommend us?
Vivienne: Right. And to your point, we always think we’re crystal clear. I know what I do for people, you know. So we are already living with the assumption that people know what we do and importantly, how can we benefit them. Why do they need us?
The simplest thing, it feels just like a cheat, write down what you do and who it’s for. Really make that very, very clear. Give it to AI or Claude or whoever you’re using, ChatGPT, and say, “This is what we do. Now, here is my website. Is what we do reflected here?” And let Claude or ChatGPT just kind of go to town and say, “No, this is what I see.”
And so you can start asking those questions right there at your own desk. Figure out where is the disconnect in your messaging, in your market position. Because if there’s a misalignment between what you do and who it’s for, you’re not going to be attracting those people.
Rich: So after we go through that process, we let it loose on our website. And I’m guessing also maybe our email newsletters, our social media, so on and so forth. Once we identify any gaps or unclear messaging, what are the next steps?
Vivienne: The next steps are figuring out, okay, how do I refresh the current copy on my website? It’s vague, or I’m using language that is jargon-filled, and my ideal customer or client’s not resonating. They’re asking for something different. That’s where you have to start revamping your copy. You have to change what are you saying on social media. Wherever you start noticing those gaps and disconnects.
And by the way, you don’t have to do it all overnight. But you can at least be aware of the first problem, and then from there, okay, we’re going to zhuzh this a little bit. We’re going to make some refinements. And you just start. I think one of the easiest places to start, if not your website, go to your Google Business Profile. People forget about that and dismiss that, but it’s one of the first places that AI goes to get information about you.
Make sure it’s clear. Make sure that it actually is an accurate description of your business and who it’s for. Make sure your hours and address are correct. All of these little things start adding up. But you can treat your Google Business Profile almost like social media. Post a couple of times a week, show behind the scenes of what you’re doing or your latest product or service, whatever that might be. Show that there is some recency and that you’re active and engaged and start getting AI’s attention.
Rich: So we go to our Google Business Profile, and we update it. You’re, you’re suggesting that we actually post a couple times a week. Is- Mm-hmm … I think of Google Business Profile as such a local tool. Are you suggesting that this works only for local businesses, or is this for any business that has a Google Business Profile?
Vivienne: Every business should have a Google Business Profile, and for a long time, if you were a virtual company, you couldn’t, right? They said, “Sorry, you need an actual address, and it can’t just be a PO box.” And so we’re a virtual company. We only got ours in the last couple of years, so we’re trying to build our own because of this.
But you can discuss a local service area, which in our case, it’s the whole United States, and then you start talking about who you want to be attracting, what you’re for, what you do. And ask your clients and customers for reviews. And then respond to those reviews when you get them because AI treats reviews almost like content. It’s another data point for it, and that’s where you can start getting a little bit more granular in what you do and why you’re special, and you can start getting that messaging out there in just another area.
Rich: Vivienne, I know that sometimes reviews just come in whether we want them to or not, unsolicited. And other times, clients or customers may say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job,” and then we prompt them to go to Google or Yelp or Angie’s List or whatever’s relevant for our industry.
Do you work with a lot of small businesses, a lot of local businesses? What are some of the recommendations you’re telling your clients about how they might shape those reviews for AI?
Vivienne: Absolutely. Okay, so obviously best-case scenario is having somebody leave you a review that’s sort of keyword rich and all that. You can’t get the customer to give you a keyword rich review. So the biggest, best rule of thumb is write the response to their review, not for them, but for the next person who’s going to come across it and read it.
The response is not for the person who left the review, right? And so you can affirm what they said. Let’s assume it’s a great review. They loved you. You can affirm the win that you got for them, how happy they are. You can mention the service that you provided or the product you provided that got them feeling so happy, and then you sort of reestablish what you do and who you’re for, and then also, yay you, right? So that’s for a good review. It’s almost formulaic how you approach it. We create GPTs to do this so that it knows the formula. It’s very easy, especially if you’re high volume as far as reviews.
But if you get a negative review, that’s actually a really good way to get attention in a good way. So if we are looking at a restaurant and everybody loves the restaurant, great reviews, great reviews. As the consumer, when you see a negative review, do you stop and look at that and read it? And you’ve already read excellent reviews, and you’re like, “What’s wrong with this person that they just can’t be satisfied? Are they a troll? What’s going on here?”
A lot of times I will choose a restaurant based on how the proprietor responded to the negative review. Were they professional? Were they like, “We’re so sorry. We had no idea this happened. Please come back in, we’re going to make it right for you.” Like, how did they respond, right? That tells me a lot about the character of that company.
Or I particularly like the ones where it’s like, “I’m so sorry there was a fly in your soup at Bob’s Cafe. We’re actually Bob’s Bistro right down the street, and if you’d like to come in, we will make sure there’s no flies in your soup.” That kind of thing. It’s an opportunity to say more about who you are character-wise, and that matters.
Rich: Vivienne, you mentioned briefly that you create GPTs for this. I assume you’re talking about custom GPTs or Claude projects. Talk to us a little bit about that. What’s the use case behind those?
Vivienne: Oh, okay. So, you know, when I talk about AI Vivienne from Houndstooth, I’m usually not talking about productivity tools or operational uses of AI, right? I’m talking about AI-driven search. However, we’re still a business, and we use ChatGPT. We created GPT. Basically, it’s a review refinement response.
We can take somebody’s review, we paste it in there, and that GPT has rules, and it knows how to generate an answer that touches on all of the formula that I want to have happen. It’s always about the client. When we’re responding, the first thing is, “Yay, client, we’re so glad you have this win.” Second part of that formula is, “And we’re so glad that this is the service that helped you.” It’s formulaic.
And so if you have a really high volume, I know there’s people who have bots that answer it. We don’t have such a high volume of reviews because we don’t have that kind of client turnover, so ours can absolutely be handled manually. But I want whoever’s responding on the team to make sure that it’s all shared in the same voice.
Rich: All right.
Vivienne: So that’s how we use it internally as far as responding to reviews.
Rich: Now, if we’re doing this and we don’t have big teams or budgets, what would a realistic minimum effort approach to improving our visibility across AI look like?
Vivienne: Well, again, going back to clarity. If you’re a one-man show, you should know what your show consists of and who it’s for, right? And you can use AI to help you refine that and really drill down at who you’re trying to speak to. And then once that’s happening, you can adjust the copy on the page. You can decide, “You know, I need another page that’s just dedicated to this outcome that we get for people.” Because again, AI is not pulling the answers out of thin air. It’s sourcing the whole internet.
That includes social media. So you can be using AI to write the things that will attract AI. And I’m not talking about AI-driven slop. We know what that is, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about really getting granular and clear about who you’re for and what makes you different and how you can help them in a real special way. That’s what it’s about.
Rich: So we’ve talked a lot about things like our website and social media and even our Google business profile. Is AI just looking at things we control, or are there third-party websites outside of Google business profile that we should be thinking about and either being active on or somehow getting those third-party sites to also be talking about our business?
Vivienne: Absolutely, and I’m glad you brought that up. If you are on lots of podcasts and you’re written up and you’re just everywhere on these third-party sites and different apps, they’ll follow your name, right? Google will do that. But AI will follow your name and follow your services and interpret them and make recommendations.
So coming back to the idea that AI is this personal referral, right? And so if you are on podcasts, you have your podcast, you are being written up in media, you’re being discussed in Reddit, all of these different third parties are very important because AI sees all of that, and what it’s doing is it’s putting together a picture of who you are.
You’re an authority. You’re a subject matter expert. You have this credibility. All of those things add up together and start building the persona that AI will recommend, whether that’s you as an individual, whether it’s your company. All of these things are important, and they all work together.
Rich: This all sounds good. I’m sure there are some people who are listening and saying, “Well, how do I know if any of this is working?” What have you found working with your clients where you can kind of show that the needle is headed in the right direction?
Vivienne: Oh, well, a lot of this is very easy to see, as far as quantifying it just using Semrush, your Google Analytics. Your Google Analytics should start showing you that Claude is sending you traffic, ChatGPT is sending you traffic. You can see that it’s quantifiable.
We have a couple of clients where last summer, fall, we’re like, “You need to create pillar pages.” And by you, I mean we’ll do it for you. Don’t worry about it, we’re not putting anything on your plate. But pillar pages that really show AI that you are a subject matter expert, you know what you’re talking about. And then it organizes the rest of their content in a way that the machines like to read it.
We have a client, we had to kind of beg her to let us do it for her, but we launched four pillar pages in the fall of last year. And in the fall of last year, she had traffic spikes in her Google Analytics. She also had her AI visibility score track it and just take off. And it’s connected. You can see it happening because you’ve now given AI more information about you so it can recommend you, and then we track that compared to her competition.
This particular client literally has a rival shop across the street and over a couple of blocks. And part of the reason why we’re like, “You need the pillar pages, and you need them now,” and they switched positions with AI visibility. Our client started tracking up, her score improved, the size of the share of the audience improved, and the number of mentions and citations improved, and that’s the holy grail when you’re measuring AI.
Like your AI audience, okay, that’s great. That’s like when your ads person goes, “Look at all the impressions we got you.” That’s nice. How many converted? That’s where it then becomes how many mentions, how many times, what was my company cited in AI answers? And that’s what you want to track. And hers tracked up just dramatically.
Rich: You had mentioned pillar pages. For people who may not be familiar with that term, how do you define it, and can you talk a little bit about one or two of the pillar pages you created for this particular client?
Vivienne: So this particular client, in her case, we treat the pillar page like it’s a super-duper blog post. It is long. There’s a lot of information. It’s not necessarily written for the humans, but it is long, and it covers everything that her ideal customer, which is a bride, she’s a bridal shop, the ultimate guide to summer weddings, to fall weddings, to winter. You know, you got four opportunities there with the seasons, and it starts off at the top of the page with a table of contents, everything that you’re going to find on that page, and it links down section by section.
Now, keep in mind, a bridal shop, they’re selling dresses. I call them the wedding mafia. All of these businesses are going after the same bride customer, but they’re not a competition, right? The florist isn’t competing with the baker for the bride. They both can be the result of. So she had sections for the wedding dresses and flowers and colors and venues near her because she’s a location-based business.
So thinking she’s going to want to have a location-based customer, it makes sense to do that. And so putting those in place, winter, spring, fall, all of those in place, that’s what shot up remarkably for her. And then we’re able to link out in each of those sections to existing content that she had. Because, yes, AI wants the content, wants to learn more about you, it really appreciates it when it’s nice and organized. It’s speaking its language, right? So organizing all of that other content makes it really easy for it to parse that information.
Blog posts are the way we see it the most often, but then there’s other industries, businesses. Like, we have a guy who’s in roofing and insulation. We turned his service pages into long pillar content, and so each of his service pages links out to other related content. It just organizes everything really beautifully, and AI pays attention and gets more information about you more quickly.
Rich: Awesome. If people want to learn more about you, Vivienne, more about Houndstooth Media Group, where can we send them online?
Vivienne: Well, send them to our website, houndstoothmediagroup.com. And in the website there is a section called Resources, and we have a free webinar series where I break this down specifically, approachably, so you can check it out and start implementing yourself if you’d like to.
Rich: Awesome.
Vivienne: Because it’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. Once you understand what AI’s looking for, you can put it on your site and you can start speaking to it in its language.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Vivienne, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Vivienne: I’m glad to be here. Thanks so much.
Show Notes:
Vivienne Wagner and her team at Houndstooth Media Group help businesses become easier to find, trust, and recommend in AI-driven search. An SEO and AI visibility expert, she helps business owners strengthen the clarity, authority, and credibility of their online presence. Connect with Vivienne on LinkedIn, and visit the website to check out their free webinar series.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.