Getting Found When AI Answers Everything
James Baldacchino on making publisher content extractable for AI search, mining your archive for assets only you can build, and owning the audience directly.
Episode Summary
- AEO and GEO are just SEO’s next upgrade. The job is still getting found by search engines so humans can read you.
- AI dismisses content that matches everyone else’s. Unique, genuinely useful information is what gets surfaced and cited.
- Your historical content is a data asset. A crime map or a database readers can’t get anywhere else becomes content AI wants to point to.
- Use AI to crunch huge data sets for insights, not to churn out content. Garbage in, garbage out: you have to know what to ask.
The Playbook
Google sent publishers most of their traffic for two decades. That number is collapsing fast. Pete Ericson sat down with James Baldacchino, fractional CMO of Leaky Paywall and AI SEO specialist at Ellipsis, to map out how publishers get found now that AI answers the question before anyone clicks a link.
James has been building AI SEO engines since before ChatGPT went mainstream. He starts with a question you have to answer before any of the search work pays off.
Why should anyone give you their time?
Information used to be at your fingertips. Now it’s beyond that. You can ask AI anything and it answers instantly, and it’ll even make up an answer when it doesn’t know.
So the question gets sharper. Why you? Why should a reader walking past your shop stop and come in? The easy answer (because they need something you provide) is also a bad answer, because those readers were always coming anyway. The opportunity is the person who didn’t know they needed you yet.
If you can’t answer why someone should bother, that’s where you should worry. And the same question is what decides whether AI surfaces you at all.
SEO still works. The mechanics changed.
Call it AEO, GEO, or whatever you like. James thinks the renaming is overblown. SEO means being found by search engines, and that’s still the job. The search engines just work differently now.
The old game rewarded ranking high. The new game rewards making your content extractable, so the AI bot can read it, understand it, and pass it cleanly to the person who asked. You’re writing two audiences at once: the human who reads the answer, and the bot that has to lift it out of your page first.
Quick hacks don’t survive. James calls them LinkedIn hacks: the one trick that fixes your SEO. Even when one works, Google removes it in about five minutes. What always works is keeping the reader in mind: what they want, what their intent is, what specific information they’re after.
Why AI dismisses you, and how to fix it
The old journey was ten blue links. You clicked through three or four to figure out what you liked. Now the AI does that work for you, and the reader never makes the trip.
Which means if your content is the same as everyone else’s, the AI dismisses you. There’s nothing there it needs to surface. AI predicts what the searcher actually wants, then pulls X, Y and Z together so they don’t have to search again. Your opening is unique, genuinely useful information. In a world flooded with cheap, muddy content, the good and specific stuff just became more valuable, not less.
The Fisherman magazine is the clean example. They run live fishing reports, captains on the water calling where the fish are biting that week. Almost no one else has captains in the water publishing near-real-time, hyper-specific information like that. Guess who gets the link in AI overviews. Their fishing reports get hammered with traffic.
Quality is the bar, and the bar just moved
Most people look at AI quality upside down. They see AI spitting out impressive copy and relax. James reads it the other way: when everyone’s quality bar jumps, yours has to rise above it.
It’s the difference between a junior writer’s piece and your most senior writer’s. You know the gap. So does the LLM. And it’s not only about being mentioned or cited. It’s about how you’re talked about. Content can be cited as authoritative, or cited as a source that can’t be trusted. Quality decides which.
Turn your archives into content AI can’t ignore
This is the move most publishers miss. You sit on a pile of information no one else has, and you can process it into something only you can produce.
Take a local news site covering crime. Pull a year of crime reports into a map showing where and when it’s happening, and the patterns inside it. That’s rich, and readers care intensely, because everyone wants to know whether their neighborhood is safer than the next one. It’s also exactly the kind of unique, structured information AI wants to surface, because no one else has it.
The examples are everywhere. A New Hampshire community built a bear-sighting map that generated endless conversation. In Malta, someone mapped fireworks factories after one exploded, and the whole country started asking how they ended up with so many. The longer you’ve published, the more raw material you’re sitting on. The question is whether you’re bringing it together in a way only you can.
Use AI to find insights, not to write
Churning out hundreds of pieces with AI is something anyone can do now, which is exactly why it’s the wrong move. Google penalizes it heavily. Don’t try.
Where James leans on AI every day is the opposite end: handing it huge data sets to crunch for insights. Work that used to take him a week and a half of analysis for a client he now does in a couple of hours, and finds more insights than before. The caveat is real. You need to know how to present the data and what to ask. As his colleague puts it, AI at your fingertips is like having a very intelligent twelve-year-old. Brilliant, but you have to tell it exactly what to do.
For deep analysis, James reaches for Claude. For deep research and search, Gemini, because Google owns the index. But the order matters: figure out what information you actually want first, then pick the tool. Most people start with the tool, and that’s a disaster.
He also flagged Google AI Overviews directly. They’re not going away. Google is the ultimate testing machine and will keep changing them, but they recently started including far more links in overviews again. Get on board rather than fighting it.
The registration wall is your hedge against AI
AI is intercepting the click. The reader gets their answer and never lands on your page. A free registration wall is how you stop renting that audience and start owning it.
Give the article away, but trade it for an email. A reader who just hit a locked piece is interested, so that’s the moment to ask them to register. James put it plainly in the teardown: the signal could not be clearer. Once they’re on your list, you reach them directly.
Promo alert: this is exactly what List Builder does, free registration walls built for WordPress publishers.
Key Takeaways
- Answer “why you” before any SEO work. Positioning decides whether AI has a reason to surface you. Narrow your niche until you’re the obvious answer.
- Make content extractable, not just rankable. Write so an AI bot can read it and pass it cleanly to the person who asked.
- Unique beats optimized. AI dismisses content that matches everyone else’s. Original, specific information is what gets surfaced.
- Mine your archive for a database asset. Maps, trend reports, and historical analyses are things only you can build, and exactly what AI wants to point to.
- Use AI to crunch data, not to write. Mass-generated content gets penalized. Insight extraction is where the real leverage is.
- Put a free registration wall in place. AI intercepts the click, so capture the email while the reader’s intent is highest and own the audience directly.
“If your content is exactly the same as everybody else’s, the AI is just gonna dismiss you, ’cause you’re not showing it anything particular which it should care about.”
James Baldacchino
Try This Week
Pick one topic you’ve covered for years and pull the raw data together into something only you can publish: a map, a trend report, a ranked list. Make it the unique, structured asset AI has no choice but to surface.
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