AI-Powered SEO: How Farzad Rashidi Gets ChatGPT to Recommend Your Brand

Jeffro (00:02.702)

Here’s a question every business owner should be thinking about. What happens when people stop Googling and start asking ChatGPT instead? Because it’s already happening. Millions of people are now asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for recommendations instead of scrolling through Google results. And if your business isn’t showing up in those AI answers, you’re becoming invisible to an entirely new generation of searchers.

My guest today is Farzad Rashidi, founder of Respona, and he’s figured out how to get brands mentioned in AI generated answers. Not through some black hat trick or prompt manipulation, but through a strategic approach to earning mentions and backlinks from high authority publications that AI systems actually trust and reference. Farzad’s company helps brands improve their visibility, not just on Google, but in the AI powered search landscape that is rapidly taking over. So over the next 25 minutes, he’s going to share some of some information about how service businesses can position themselves to be recommended by AI tools when potential customers are asking for help. So if you’ve been ignoring AI search, because you’re still focused only on traditional SEO, this conversation is definitely one you want to pay attention to. Farzad, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (01:11.436)

That was a heck of an intro, Jeffrey. Thank you for having me.

Jeffro (01:15.029)

Absolutely. I’m excited to talk about this because it’s kind of everywhere these days. We see it in our feeds. So how about we start with that big shift to AI searching? Is it overblown? How significant is the move from traditional Google search to AI powered answers? How fast is that actually happening?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (01:33.816)

So to elaborate, think that is, it’s already happened. So if you go and Google any key term, you see at the top of the search results, an AI overview. So it’s no longer traditional SEO versus new SEO. That is SEO. So basically what’s happened is that the top of funnel has changed completely. So back in the day when we started with content marketing, we’d write blog posts and we will put those on our blog and then build some backlinks to them, get those up in the search engines that are the 10 blue links in Google. People will go find them, read the blog post, come onto the website, them as gateways into our platform. And what would happen then is, or what has happened over the course of the past couple of years is that people are no longer reading blog posts and doing their own research. What’s happening is that a lot of these crawlers are understand smart enough to understand the context on the web pages. So when people are asking these search engines questions again still predominantly done by Google, it will just give them that answer without them having to do the research manually. So now the question is not only to show up or have your website show up in the 10 blue links is to make sure that your brand name is mentioned when it’s important. And so at that, that strategy still remains the same. You’re still trying to make sure that you show up in places where people are looking for product or service like yours. But the way you’re going about doing it has slightly changed over the course of the past couple of years.

Jeffro (03:15.231)

Okay, well you kind of touched on two different things there. So one is the fact that there’s these zero click searches, right? So people that were searching just for an answer, not necessarily to hire someone, they no longer leave Google, right? They got their info, they move on with their day. But the second thing that I’m more interested in now is how do you get your brand name to show up? What you kind of touched on in the second part of your answer there, because when chat GPT says, here’s the best plumbers in Carlsbad, it’s an implied endorsement, right? Like there’s… we assume that there was some logic behind that and why it picked that one, they must be better. So what is the AI actually looking at when it decides what to recommend in that context?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (03:55.328)

Absolutely. So, you know, LLMs are not inherently up to date. So when you ask it a certain question, the knowledge caught off is at the end of that training. So what these LLMs do in order to stay relevant is whenever you ask it a question, usually does a web search much like a human does. So essentially it does that top of funnel research that people used to do manually. having to basically look up, hey, plumbers in New York or any city, and then go and look at directories, maybe on Google Maps, maybe look at some listicles or Yelp, et cetera, and then basically cure their list of options. Now, what we’re doing now, basically, or what has become more important is getting those external citations. So it’s no longer enough to get your own website to show up in the 10 Blue Links.

It’s now more important than ever to make sure you show up in places where those crawlers are pulling that information from so that anytime they’re looking for best plumbers in XYZ city, you are mentioned more frequently and as you increase the frequency of your brand mentions, then increases the likelihood you also show up in the answer. Now it becomes a question of how do you get yourself mentioned in those pieces? So that would be something I’m happy to chat more about.

Jeffro (05:24.947)

Gotcha. So for someone who’s been spending years optimizing for Google, it feels like it’s not that much different in the sense that, okay, if you had done a good job and you were getting these backlinks and mentions from these high authority sites anyways, then you would automatically show up over here. But is it really that much different if you’re trying to optimize for the AI endorsements and positioning?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (05:47.468)

Yeah, so they go hand in hand. So they’re not necessarily different in nature. They’re just different optimization strategies you can do to prioritize once. So let me elaborate. Basically, when you are focused on your 10 blue link SEO strategy, you are inevitably also helping with your AI visibility and vice versa. So if you’re optimizing for AI visibility, that will have impact on prioritizing landing pages also in 10 blue links because as you earned is brand mentions and bank links, they would also be in support of your traditional SEO strategy. So it’s not that that’s why I like to just put them all under the umbrella of SEO because it’s not necessarily two different initiatives. They’re pretty much the same. However, that the type of tactics strategies you will follow are slightly different because brand mentions in specifically different types of content, like listicles, product reviews, comparison guys, the type of content that is more, I would say, useful when it comes to AI visibility, has gained more importance versus some of the other types of backlinks. Now, back in the day, they weren’t that different in terms of the value you would have for your website when you get that placement. But nowadays, because those placements themselves, those backlinks themselves could also get picked up as citations. Basically, it’s become more important than ever to get placing those. So happy to walk through sort of the process and how you identify what you need to get placed in and essentially how you go about reaching out to them, et cetera.

Jeffro (07:20.272)

Yeah, I’m curious why does AI trust certain sources over others? Is it just looking at the domain authority score, or is there something else that makes a publication high authority in the eye of AI?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (07:33.686)

Right. So authority is a funny word. So obviously, you know, when there’s billions of websites across the web, there’s a algorithmic way of looking at it. So domain rating is a made up metric by, you know, Ahrefs and these SEO companies, is their estimate of how authoritative a website is. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that either Google or any of these open AI crawlers, et cetera, are looking at that sort score specifically, but what it represents is that essentially authority and credibility across the web has been determined by who’s talking about you. Because back in the late nineties, you there were other search engines that were purely keyword based. there were, when you would ask it a question, it would just surface the web pages that had the most number of times that keyword was mentioned. So the way Google became Google, they developed this algorithm called PageRank and that was their PhD thesis by Larry Page and Start Your Brain. And basically what they did is they developed this algorithm where they would look at external citations or backlinks as a way to measure credibility. So the more people are talking about you, it’s like a vote of popularity. And that same principle still applies today. So when sources are getting prioritized, oftentimes there are from more authoritative sources that are basically mentioned and linked to by other publications. So similar way to how the 10 blue links are prioritized. they’re also judged that way. But again, it is a black box. So OpenAI, for example, they use their own search engines. We don’t know exactly what search algorithm they’re using on the back end. But we do see some correlation between Google rankings and getting cited by their own. But what’s important now is that, again, it’s no longer enough to just optimize your own website and write content on your own site. What’s happening here is you want to get, increase the frequency of you mentioning specifically your brand name within the context of a type of article that these AI crawlers are looking for in order to surface in the AI answers.

Jeffro (09:48.578)

So is there a tool or a way for an owner to actually test whether AI tools are currently recommending them or their competitors? Because I know with Google, you get different results depending on who’s searching and where they are or if you’re an incognito window. And with some LLMs, like you just got to wait till they release a new model when it gets updated. some tools like Perplexity, they use the RAG approach. So it’s more likely to actually get live, accurate data. So what’s the approach there to find out what’s actually working?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (10:18.37)

Right. So frequency gathering is statistically significant sample size. So usually what you want to do, because AI answers are different every time you ask it a question. So what we found that works best is that if you run these prompts once a day, so at the end of the month, you have 30 model responses, and then you can go and calculate the score based on how many times you’ve been mentioning the AI answers. And then that would give you a pretty good measure in terms of your visibility. So it’s no longer if whether or not you’re mentioned in AI Answers or not, it’s a matter of, average, what approximately was the percentage of you getting mentioned in the AI Answers. And the goal is to increase that frequency, or what we call the visibility score. There are a number of tools that you can use for that. I personally use the Ahrefs brand radar to have a more affordable version now where you can load up your own custom prompts and they will track it and these tools are kind of getting commoditized. We also have built a free version inside Respana so it can go and see your current brand’s visibility for free. So it’s not something we monetize. There are other tools like Profound and Peak that in my opinion are a little bit hyped. Time will tell if it’s overhyped or not, but I think a lot of traditional ICO tools like even SEMrush and Ahrefs, that’s solid tools because prompt tracking and figuring out whether or you mentioned it’s not rocket science. It’s pretty simple actually from an engineer perspective. So if you’re already using one of those tools, my recommendation is just to buy that add-on and kind of measure that through them.

Jeffro (11:56.212)

Okay, so let’s talk for second about Rosemona, because what I gather from the website is you’re doing placements for people, right? They pay you, you find a site where you can write an article about them and link back, and you’re picking a site that you think AI is going to consider important or high authority and more likely to influence its recommendations. Is that correct?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (12:16.302)

Yeah, in a nutshell, absolutely. so just to kind of, I think it’s helpful for people to go through an example. And again, this is helpful because what we do is not rocket science either. A lot of folks can just do themselves in house. And the reason why they come to us, it’s a convenience and having to, you know, not having to think about it. can just plug and play, we’ll take care of it for you. But again, if you’re dealing with shoestrings, you it might be better to do it in house so the process that we follow is quite simple. So give me a company and a prompt that you want to optimize.

Jeffro (12:49.118)

Joe’s Closet Company and the prompt might be custom closet installers in Phoenix.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (12:59.886)

Okay. So custom closet installers in Phoenix. First thing you do is you pick out the models you care about. So a lot of times it’s Google AR overviews and variations of it like Gemini and Google AR mode. And also Chatch VT, because it’s one of the most used, I would say, LLMs and then maybe Cloud and Perplexity, depending on your preferences. And then what you do then is first take a current state of visibility. So let’s kind of see where we’re standing and it is helpful to run these prompts through all these models, get the responses back and analyze the results and see what closet installers are getting mentioned. And then if you are mentioned, how you stack up against your competitors in terms of the frequency of you getting mentioned. Again, we generate that report for free on Responda. Folks can also use, as I mentioned, tools like Ahrefs or other brand visibility trackers to kind of get that report.

Uh, or manually, could just run the prompts a couple of times and take a look and kind of eyeball it, you know, and see if you mentioned or not. If a lot of the times, if you’re a small company, it’s more likely than not that you’re not getting mentioned often enough. So once we know where we stand, then the next question is what do we do to increase that stance? Right? So what do we do to increase that visibility score? And in order to do that we want to take a look and see where the models are looking in order to generate those answers. we take, so every single model, when you ask it, but what are the best closet installers in a Phoenix in a hundred percent of the time, they do a web search. So they’re going to go and actually do a search on that keyword and they will tell you exactly what sources are pulling from. Now, some of them, a small percentage of them are social links, maybe a Reddit threads forums as some over YouTube, but majority of the time, my experience is from editorial links. So either review sites or companies or home remodeling blogs, et cetera, or other type of editorial piece content that’s been created on that sort of topic. So we weed out those social links, user generated content, and take a look at the editorial links, which is usually about 75 % of the citations. And then we take those.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (15:22.51)

And then we figure out basically what other publication. let’s pause here real quick. Natural reaction. When you have that list, it’s very tempting to try to brute force yourself into or essentially, or brute force your way into those citations. So what a lot of people try to do is that they’re like, okay, we know where the models are pulling these answers from. Let’s try to get ourselves mentioned on those pieces so what they do is that they spin up average campaigns, they reach out to site owners, spend a lot of time. And this is not to say it’s a wasted effort, but in my experience, we’re started as an average company. So we’ve seen this across millions and millions of emails sent each month. The success rate on that is less than 1%. So let’s say if you have a couple of prompts and you ran it through six models, you end up with a batch of like say 500 citations across all of them and you weeded out all those social links and the home pages, stuff like that. And you end up with like three, 400 editorial links. If you end up reaching out to them, if you’re lucky and you’re good and you know what you’re doing, you end up getting cited on three or four of them. So, and I will do absolutely nothing. Just not enough to move the needle. So here’s the process that we found that works time and time again. And that is to create a replica of them. So,

Jeffro (16:39.193)

the

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (16:49.262)

The thing about these LLMs is that they’re always on the hunt for new content or more fresh information. And that’s the whole point of them doing rack or doing these web searches because they don’t want to rely on their outdated training data. So we do see that they prioritize content pieces that have been published more recently versus stuff that’s been released over, you know, more than a year ago. So what we found that works really well is to yes, you could try to reach out to those publications, but most likely they’re not interested. But what we found most successful is to find a comparable publication, meaning a site that sort of matches the type of keywords. So that same level of sort of topical authority and also domain rating, which is, you know, one of the best ways that we have to judge, you know, how big the site is or how authoritative the site is. So you’re following sort of the existing citation pattern to find comparable publications in terms of authority that may be more receptive to creating a new piece of content following the structure of that citation article. So for example, if you find articles that says best closet installers in Phoenix in 2025, we’re going to create a brand new piece on a comparable publication on best closet installers in Phoenix in 2026. Follow that structured article in terms of the title, but again, going to do our own research and actually create a better piece of content as or what folks in the industry call it the skyscraper content. And what will happen then because we have that new piece of content published as that gets indexed and these AI models crawl it and gets picked up, then we see usually 25, 30 % of them if you do it right, end up in the citations. You’re kind of going where the puck’s moving versus kind of try you know, force your way into the existing citation. And that’s something we’ve seen worse.

Jeffro (18:48.927)

So you look at what’s already ranking, you kind of glean from that how you could do something similar and then you do a slightly better, slightly newer version and recency helps you rank above that on the algorithm. what would be the lifespan of these backlinks then that are getting created because obviously someone else could do the same thing. They could add tag a month on it or if it’s something that changes more frequently.

Yeah, and comparing back to when people just pay for press releases, you could get a bunch of backlinks, but they might fall off after three, six months. So what’s the lifespan there?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (19:26.297)

So first of all, there’s a couple of questions hidden in that question. usually what we found is like traditional press actually doesn’t work really well for this strategy. So if you analyze the citations, a lot of them are actually industry sites, blogs, companies, and that their blogs are getting picked up because a news article, even though you might have heard of the publication, it’s not an topical, it doesn’t carry much topical authority. Like Forbes is not an expert on closet installation.

Jeffro (19:41.716)

Mm-hmm.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (19:55.375)

So you’re going to mention that that doesn’t nearly carry as much value as a really niche like interior design company that is mentioned in their blog post. And you usually see much more longevity on those type of articles because usually ideally you want to, when you work with a publisher, you want to negotiate a do follow permanent link. So what that means is that those articles should theoretically never drop. And so it’s part of their SEO strategy to keep that article live and also you want to make sure that you still get a backlink pointing to your website in support of your traditional strategy. So it’s not only getting a brand placement on an article, but you still getting that backlink pointing to your website with signals to the search engines that, hey, they’re an authoritative resource. So that also helps your own landing page, your own website to go up into search results into 10 blue links. and maybe some of them also get picked up at citations. But the key here is that we’re not just creating these backlinks by eyeballing it. We actually are following an action plan based off of, okay, what sort of citations we’ve seen that are getting picked up and let’s create skyscraper content following the structures on a comparable publication. Now, how often you have to do that, that depends on your competitors, which is true also with traditional SEO as well. How do you know how many backlinks you need to rank for that target keyword?

Well, that depends on that keywords competitiveness. What determines the keywords competitiveness? How many of your competitors or how many people are exactly. it follows under the same sort of jurisdiction here, but we find that existence is relatively novel and new, not a ton of people are doing that yet, which means there’s an enormous amount of opportunity for companies to invest.

Jeffro (21:29.106)

trying to rank for it.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (21:45.271)

And then once they do, usually we see the rankings go up much faster than any other traditional SEO measures because usually these articles that we write and get indexed and get cited, they usually have a direct impact on that visibility score in the next couple of months. So you no longer have to sit and wait, you know, six plus months for the things to kick in. You can actually see things working much, much better.

Jeffro (22:09.873)

Do you see any difference in the sites where anyone can register to be a contributor versus ones where they have an editorial team that has to approve or curate or write their own content?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (22:20.623)

Right. So usually what we find that you may find exceptions to this, what I’m going to say, but anything that’s easy to do is not relevant. So that’s, that’s a very general rule of thumb. And the reason why is that that would just give you temporary abuse, right? So any hacks you find when it comes to SEO in general, it’s temporary because the whole point of these search engine companies is to weed out these type of sites.

So you’re at the mercy of how smart their algorithm is. So if you’re just looking for easy ways out, like for example, Medium, they still get a ton of mentions. Reddit Threads. And I think Reddit itself has a pretty good engine to weed out a lot of unwanted promotional comments.

I do see it getting abused quite a bit. So if it’s something that’s relatively easy to do by user generated content, and that’s what happened also at the beginning when Google came out in early 2000s, people were just blog commenting and putting on posts on Facebook and those were counted as backlinks and they just introduced a tag, mail, follow and it was done. So what we find that works well is not trying to cheat it, do it the hard way, where you actually go find legitimate companies in your space.

Jeffro (23:25.081)

Sure.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (23:41.839)

and actually collaborate with them, write a piece of content and get your brand placed there on a permanent basis. And those are very hard to get. So in my opinion, that’s where I would put my money on because that would create a moat around the strategy. also compared to the competitors, that would be something that’s not as easily, it’s not something you can easily replicate.

Jeffro (24:04.505)

That makes sense. So the type of content that you’re writing for these different platforms, that’s going to be then where the content lives. Because I think traditionally people think of, I get all this ultimate guides and stuff on my site and I link back to those blog posts. But it sounds like we’re writing the content over there on someone else’s site and then just linking to the home page, I guess. Is that the approach?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (24:26.777)

That’s an excellent point you bring up because up until a few months ago, the strategy mentioned was working. So again, the easy way out, right, was when people were like, okay, if I’m a closet installer, I’m going to write a blog post on best closet installers in Phoenix and I will put myself at the top. And then as that blog gets published on my own site, because it ideally carries some authority already, then these LLNs will pick it up and it was working. And then guess what happened?

LLM stopped referencing self-promotion on listicles. so because it’s very easy to catch, right? If you’re like, okay, I’m Joe’s closet installer and I’m promoting myself. Obviously that means nothing. but the, um, the, the strategy here is that you’re getting this external citation. And that’s the whole point of SEO is you’re getting external validation from other relevant authority resources. Or they’re the ones that are talking about you and linking back to you.

and then when it comes to the backlinks itself, yes, it could be to your homepage, but I usually prefer to get it to a landing page. want it to get ranked. if it’s a, yeah, exactly. It could be to your service page. Again, these are still do follow backlinks you get that we’ve been getting for the past 20 years. Right. So the value here is, it’s not something that’s questionable. It’s just that the type of content now you get those backbones from are now have gained more importance.

Jeffro (25:31.496)

service page or something like that.

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (25:52.175)

in terms of structure, so you gotta optimize them in a way that you kinda get these dual purpose links kinda hitting two birds with one stone.

Jeffro (26:00.62)

Well, I appreciate you taking us through that and kind of giving a step-by-step example and contrasting what used to work with what’s working now. So hopefully this has been eye-opening for a lot of our listeners because if you’re not paying attention, you might not realize how quickly AI Search is kind of taking over and how fast things are changing. And obviously you need to change your optimization strategy to keep up with that. So earning mentions back links from high authority sources that AI systems trust. You’re not gaming the system. You got to kind of commit to doing this to be recent and authoritative. again, there’s no shortcuts that are long lived. That’s just the way it is. But for anybody listening who wants to learn more about how Responna can help with AI visibility or just wants to kind of dive deeper into this, where should they go Farzana?

Farzad Rashidi – Respona (26:48.303)

Absolutely our website for respana.com that’s R-E-S-P-O-N-A.com. We do this for our clients who don’t have to do it themselves. It’s done for you paper result product. So you can come and tell us I want five listicles with this title and go do our outreach, write the content pieces, optimize them, publish them. So you don’t have to worry about it. yeah, and it’s a paper placement model. There’s no commitments or retainers or anything like that and if you’re a marketing agency that offers this as a service to clients, we also white label these placements. So you can come in and make these orders and we do the whole work for you. You take on new operational work or hassle. And we basically do the whole thing and you can add your markups and resell them to your clients.

Jeffro (27:36.999)

Make sense? Well, guys, if you’re listening, once again, the reality check is don’t just obsess over Google rankings. know, potential customers are asking chat GPT for recommendations. So if you’re not showing up there, you’re leaving money on the table and you really got to start paying attention to this. this is happening now. And thanks again, Farzana, for coming on the show and talking with us about all of this. Guys, make sure you’re subscribed to Digital Dominance. Share this episode with a friend, another business owner who might benefit from it. And until next time, take care.