Two AI marketing workshops from Bill Ross, free to download

These are the slides from two workshops I gave this fall. The first is about getting your business named when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews for a recommendation. The second is about where AI earns its place in marketing and where it quietly costs you. Both decks are free to download below.

Each section gives the main points from the talk, then a link to the full PDF. Where we’ve written a longer post on a topic, I’ve linked it so you can go deeper.

Who You Gonna Call? How to Become the Source AI Recommends

I gave this workshop for AMA Triangle on October 27, 2026. It covers GEO (generative engine optimization), local SEO and what we learned when we built city pages and a full website with AI. The goal is simple: when someone asks an AI tool who to hire, your business should be in the answer.

SEO still does the heavy lifting

Google still handles about 13.7 billion searches a day. GEO sits on top of SEO. If the basics are broken (pages that don’t get indexed, thin content, no reviews), AI tools have little reason to find you or trust you.

A top 10 ranking doesn’t guarantee a citation

A business in Google’s top 10 has about a 25% chance of showing up in an AI Overview. Roughly 90% of ChatGPT citations come from pages ranking 21st or lower. Brand mentions across the web track with AI visibility much more closely than backlinks do: 0.664 against 0.218 in an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands. Getting your brand mentioned in the right places, with the same facts everywhere, is a big part of our AI Search Optimization work.

Answer the follow-up questions too

AI tools turn one question into several searches behind the scenes. Someone asking for “the best roofer near me” also gets answers about cost, options, credentials and reviews. Your pages should answer those follow-ups. Pages with real prices, timelines, named people and schema markup are easier for AI to quote.

Local search is moving into AI

45% of US consumers used AI for local recommendations in early 2026, up from 6% a year earlier. Reviews still drive a lot of it. In one client case, a simple review process took new reviews from 1 to 7 a month, moved the business from 8th to 2nd in the map pack and raised AI traffic 40%. Our AI for local SEO guide walks through six workflows for this.

What happened when we let AI build

We tested this on our own work. Hundreds of AI-built city pages ranked for about three weeks, then Google dropped them. A website built entirely with AI got 75% less traffic and 83% fewer top-10 keywords than a comparable site built by people. AI helped with planning and development. It hurt when it wrote the design and the content. If you want to build town pages at scale, our guide to programmatic local pages covers how to do it without tripping Google’s spam policies.

Two myths to drop

• An llms.txt file has no confirmed effect on AI visibility.
• No agency can guarantee AI rankings. In testing, ChatGPT and Google’s AI returned the same list of brands less than 1% of the time.

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

I gave this talk on September 29, 2026, for marketers who already use AI and want to know where to stop. It draws on close to three years of marketing tests across the major AI platforms.

Marketers are all in. Customers are not.

88% of organizations now use AI, and 15.3% of the average marketing budget goes to it. Half of US consumers say they would rather buy from brands that don’t use generative AI in their content, and 68% often wonder whether what they’re seeing is real. More on that gap in Marketers are all in on AI. Their customers are not.

The tool predicts words

A language model predicts the next word. It doesn’t know facts. Its default answer is the average of the internet, it knows nothing about your brand unless you tell it, and it can be wrong with total confidence. The deck also covers the invisible watermark that text from Claude and ChatGPT has carried since August 2026 under the EU AI Act. See Your AI tool is predicting words for more.

Good results come from good briefs

Getting good output from AI is a communication skill. Brief it the way you’d brief a new hire: context, audience, goal and examples. Then give feedback and go again.

Where AI pays off

AI does well on repeatable work you can check: first drafts, keyword clustering, schema, call and review summaries, and data cleanup. Examples from our own projects in the deck:

• Turning 900,000 biotech specimen records into one searchable database.
• Auditing 20,000 pages with Claude and Semrush.
• Building a content calendar from a 10-competitor gap analysis.

Where it costs you

AI costs you when it replaces judgment. One site that published AI-written long-form content saw traffic spike and then collapse (the full story is in this post on the traffic crash). Brand sentiment fell after AI-written brand statements went live. I keep AI away from positioning, thought leadership, compliance-sensitive copy and anything that carries your name. To decide case by case, use the six-question should-test, which starts with “Would I sign it?”

Your job, with fewer chores

AI won’t take your job. It will take the parts of it that never needed you. The marketers at risk are the ones who refuse to use it and the ones who ship whatever it produces. The talk closes with a 10-step setup checklist to finish before your team writes its first prompt. The same ten steps are in Is AI going to take your marketing job?

Next step

If you’d like one of these workshops for your team, association or event, or want help putting the ideas to work on your own site, get in touch. Our AI Training and Team Enablement workshops can be built around your own examples.