How to Build Visibility in the Age of AI: LinkedIn, YouTube & Growth Strategies That Work Now | Jimi Gibson

AI is changing the way businesses are discovered online and most leaders are completely unprepared for what is coming next.

In this powerful episode of the Unstoppable Success Podcast, Jaclyn Strominger sits down with marketing strategist, TEDx speaker, Forbes contributor, and Thrive Agency VP of Brand Communication, Jimi Gibson to unpack one of the biggest business shifts happening right now: AI visibility.

Search engines are evolving into answer engines. Platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity are changing how customers discover businesses, leaders, and experts. The companies and executives who understand this shift early will dominate attention, authority, and revenue over the next three years.

Jimi shares groundbreaking research from a 400-company visibility study revealing:

• Why invisible businesses are projected to lose millions
• How CEOs and founders directly impact company revenue through visibility
• Why LinkedIn has become one of the most important AI trust signals
• The difference between SEO, GEO, and Answer Engine Optimization
• How YouTube transcripts help AI understand your expertise
• Why personal branding is no longer optional for business growth
• How to use AI tools without sounding generic
• The simple visibility actions every leader should start immediately

This conversation is essential listening for CEOs, entrepreneurs, executives, consultants, coaches, franchise owners, podcasters, and thought leaders who want to remain relevant and discoverable in the age of AI.

If you want your business, brand, and expertise to stand out instead of becoming invisible online, this episode gives you the roadmap.

Connect with Jimi Gibson:
🌐 Business Visibility Index: businessvisibilityindex.com
🌐 Thrive Agency: thriveagency.com

Transcript

Jaclyn Strominger 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Unstoppable Success. This is a podcast where we hear from amazing individuals, leaders, and professionals sharing their tips, their tricks, their insights so that you can be unstoppable. I'm your host, Jaclyn Strominger. And today I get to welcome Jimi Gibson. And let me tell you, I'm so excited to talk about this, the things that he has learned. Yes, there's a twist on AI, but I can't wait to dive into it. But let me tell you a little bit about Jimi before we dive into the conversation. He is the VP of brand communication at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. He is a Forbes and Entrepreneur contributor. He was a TEDx speaker. He's a keynote coach. He's the author of Uninvisible. And before he did any of that, he was also a professional magician. I was going to say musician. Magician. Oh my God. For 25 years at the MGM Grand. And he had his own theater. At some point, he also knew how to levitate women or people, whatever, off you know, up in the air. So that's kind of pretty cool. So, Jimi, you've had a wealth of experience knowledge. So welcome to Unstoppable Success, because you've been unstoppable. And I can't wait to dive into your insights.

Jimi Gibson 1:18

Great. Well, thanks, Jaclyn. Your enthusiasm is infectious. So I'm excited to get into this.

Jaclyn Strominger 1:24

So so one of the things that that we were talking about pre-show AMI and has obviously it you I don't think you can turn on the TV, the radio station, social platform without saying something about AI. And you have taken a really interesting approach to AI. And I want to dive into this with our listeners because it really is going to help people be unstoppable in the years coming up. And you talk about using AI to go from invisible to visible and using that right. So I'd love to share, you know, a little bit about your background, you know, getting into Thrive and how you came across this being uninvisible.

Jimi Gibson 2:15

Yeah, great lead in. And I think most of the conversations that you're seeing about AI are how can I use the tool? How can I use it for workflow? What is a Gentic AI? What is Claude Cowork? Can I have it do things that, and yeah, all of those things are great. I think what's missing in the conversation is the fact that people are actually using these large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, to help them figure stuff out. And so you may see the term GEO, which is generative engine optimization. So that's a fancy word for a large language model. The other term you may see is AEO or answer engine optimization. Sometimes they get lumped as just a generic term. You may be familiar with a device like you have on your phone and you're asking Siri, or you may have a Google Home device, or you may have, you know, an Alexa device that you're talking to. Well, those are all AI platforms or engines. And so the interesting thing is they're not actually search engines, they're answer engines. And so, and I'm just going to give a little bit of background related to traditional SEO and the way businesses are found, and then we'll bridge that into what's going on in AI. And it's kind of crazy. So stop me or interrupt me at any point if something's not clear.

Jaclyn Strominger 3:48

No, but but these are but what you just say, but those are what you're sharing. And I actually kind of want my listeners to understand that that actually is a huge educational piece to think about it from the sense of answering versus, you know, and that's really you know, our our phones, you know, you are so much an AI answer, or they subliminally answer because you know, you'll say something about toothpaste, and next thing you know, you're getting a thousand things about toothpaste. I was gonna try to say something that was like nice to come up out of my phone, right? What's in hearing me talk? I want whiter teeth. Okay, great. I'm gonna get a bunch of ads now.

Jimi Gibson 4:33

Yeah, I know it's it's scary and exciting all at the same time. And so, you know, we've been around, I've been in this for quite a while. And over the last 20 years, it was basically SEO. If you're talking about organic, and certainly when it comes to paid, you're basically on paid, you're bidding for keywords. On organic, you're trying to optimize for keywords. And so Google was still the big player in that space, and you would type something into Google, and then you would get 10 blue links back, and you would decide out of those 10 which ones you wanted. And so the difference is you were trying to get that ranking from one to 10. Obviously, number one was the best because that typically got the most traffic. And it was all about a page on your website. And so there are a variety of ways to do that with backlinks to that page, with the content on that page. You know, there's about 230 different things related to the algorithm, how it decides to present that page. Well, last year, 60% of searches that people did on Google ended in zero clicks. Nobody clicked through to a website. 60%.

Speaker 2 5:51

Wow.

Jimi Gibson 5:52

So over half of the searches that are being done, a page that is displayed has AI mode, it has knowledge panels, it has feature snippets, it has AI overviews. So people are getting that information without clicking to your website. And so you go, oh my gosh, what's going on? Well, Gartner did a study, and they're projecting that this year organic traffic to websites will drop 25%, and over the next three years, 50%. And so that can be a little scary. There's a couple of things going on in the background, and I think it bridges into what we need to talk about.

Speaker 2 6:33

Yeah.

Jimi Gibson 6:34

Because when people are engaging with these large language models and having a conversation with them, it, you know, there is a percentage of people who are looking for a product or service. And so, depending on which tool you use, it will either present you a link that you can then click through to a website, or it will just name the business. And then the behavior is, I'm going to get off of that large language model. I'm going to go to Google, I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way. And so attribution to traffic is getting a little wonky because of what I just described. But the other thing that happens is when that referral comes from a large language model, your conversion rate is four and a half times what it is on a traditional Google search. And so if you think about that, you go, well, that's actually a good thing. Your traffic can go down, but your conversions go up. And so your revenue may hold. And I would say that's probably good for the short term. But what we're seeing is the interaction with these large language models is increasing. And if you are not visible, then you are not in that conversation. That referral is not going to come. And that's really over the next three years, it's important for people to understand. Yes, if you are pretty good at traditional SEO, you're probably going to be okay. But there are some extra things that happen when you're doing optimization for one of these large language models or answer engines. So we good there before I move to the next step.

Jaclyn Strominger 8:12

Yes, but because I want to wanna so do you think I'm just curious, do you think because basically does the website become obsolete or does the actual website change in it's in the use of the website or what we put on the website?

Jimi Gibson 8:35

Good question. All right. How many hours do we have for the show? Okay.

Speaker 2 8:42

If you're gonna have to come back.

Jimi Gibson 8:46

All right, let me let me break that down. So in 2016, Google had an acronym that they used to determine whether something was useful to somebody searching. It was called EAT. They expanded that to EEAT in the early 2020s, and that stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And so they were evaluating content based on that and then presenting results that met one or more of those checkboxes. Well, interestingly enough, AI picked up on that, and that's how they evaluate content as well. The difference is content to a web page is different than visibility to AI, because visibility to AI is looking across many more places than your website. And so I would say the company website for transactional purposes is still the home base, right? You still need to have that information there. You need to have the location signals, you need to have the content. It's a conversion spot for people to feel like, yeah, and you know, besides the point that e-commerce is coming to some of these platforms. So that's a whole nother ball of wax. So I would say AI knows that anybody can write on their website. I'm great, I'm number one, I'm the best in the industry. But what it's looking for is it's looking for third-party thumbs up from other places that says, yeah, we agree with that, or we don't agree with that. And so I don't want to make the audience hungry, but we'll just kind of use an analogy of pizza. And so one of the things that these large language models do is about every three to six months, depending on that model, they go out and they scrape the entire internet for everything that's out there. And that's called the training data. And so that training data becomes the pizza dough. And they wrap that pizza dough up and they put it in the refrigerator. And then when somebody asks a question, they pull that dough out because they're getting ready to make a pizza. And if you didn't make the cut with that training data for whatever reason, it's okay. It's gonna start to make a pizza with some pizza toppings and it's gonna look at the most current information. It's gonna go a bunch of different places. We can talk about those places, and it's gonna start to build a pizza with pepperoni and green pepper and mushrooms and you know, whatever your favorite toppings are. And so you don't have to have every single topping on the pizza, but you have to have enough that it knows who you are and what you do and what you're about.

Jaclyn Strominger 11:25

Right.

Jimi Gibson 11:26

And so if you're invisible, it's gonna be a very thin, bland pizza. If you have some of that visibility, it's gonna be a tasty pizza. Now, there's another opportunity that it's gonna confuse you with somebody else and make a pizza for somebody else that it thinks is you because you have no coherence or you have no clarity as to who you are online. And I think that's the big difference is you've got to have some pizza toppings all over the internet, and most of those pizza toppings don't come from your website.

Jaclyn Strominger 12:01

Right. So you have to have depth and breadth outside of the website of where you're going to, you know, what you have to have crumbs a lot more spots, so speak.

Jimi Gibson 12:15

And so where does it go look for that?

Jaclyn Strominger 12:17

Right.

Jimi Gibson 12:18

Well, it's gonna default to experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So if you have reviews for your business, they're gonna be very important because AI looks at the sentiment of your brand. Is it a positive sentiment? Is it a negative sentiment? It's gonna read those reviews, right? If somebody in your organization is mentioned in those reviews, that's awesome. You've probably seen that Reddit is a big driver of content. Why? Because it is user experience, it's opinions, all of those things. Interestingly enough, LinkedIn is now number two.

Speaker 2 12:57

Oh wow.

Jimi Gibson 12:58

Only 2% of the 2 billion people on LinkedIn ever actually post anything.

Jaclyn Strominger 13:06

What was that number? 2% of people actually post, and no, and everybody else doesn't?

Jimi Gibson 13:10

Yep, they just lurk.

Jaclyn Strominger 13:12

They lurk.

Jimi Gibson 13:14

So a search engine journal did a study back in November of 2025. I'm gonna say this slowly so people can understand. If an executive in an organization posts 10 times a year, not a month, not a week, a year, their referral base will increase by 30% and the deal size will increase by 3.7 times.

unknown 13:38

Wow.

Jimi Gibson 13:39

Because there is research that says when somebody reads content from an executive at an organization, they are more likely to close a deal within a 90-day window at a larger deal size. And so the bar is basically sitting on the floor. All you have to do is step over that bar. And and why LinkedIn, right? Well, LinkedIn has your whole resume. It knows who you are, it knows what your title is, it's connected to a company. People are very particular about what they post on LinkedIn. There's only a few who are posting, and so it gives the thumbs up to those who are. Articles have come back. Articles used to be dead, but articles stick around longer. They have more permanence than some of the other places. So I would say one tip for the audience would be go scrape the cobwebs off of your LinkedIn profile, commit to posting, you know, once a week would be awesome. Once a month, I'll get you the metrics that I just told you, and engage with other people on the platform. It's an amazing place now. I post five days a week. And, you know, there are many, many benefits that can come out of it. Now, the other part of it is, and and I want to make sure when we start talking about all these places to post content, AI doesn't care if you have a hundred followers or a hundred thousand followers. It doesn't care if a thousand people engage with your posts or your brother, your mother, and your sister-in-law. It wants that content. It wants to be able to connect what you're talking about to who you are and who you say you are and what your company is about. And so the coherence and the clarity of that means that you should not talk about a hundred different things. Don't post sunset photos with a quote. Put something in there that, and we can talk about how you mine, you know, your brain for you know what you should be posting about. But don't get caught up on being an influencer. Get caught up in being clear about who you are and what you talk about. Another place that AI is looking at is Wikipedia. Well, it's kind of hard to get a Wikipedia listing. There are companies that can help you do that. There's another place you can go that's related to Wikipedia called Wikidata. And it basically, if you put a profile on Wikidata, you're you're basically connecting the dots and giving AI a shortcut to who you are and what you're about. So I would encourage people to investigate that. It probably takes 20 minutes to set up a profile.

Jaclyn Strominger 16:19

So I'm just I want to just say so to start getting visible to these obviously large language models.

Jimi Gibson 16:30

Yep.

Jaclyn Strominger 16:30

Making sure that you have like just making sure that you've got a you're active on LinkedIn. Go to Wikidata, don't worry about Wiki, you know, Wikipedia. And then obviously, and as you said, being really clear about what you're posting, don't put don't put the pictures of your dog or your sunset, but be clear on your and does it look at does it matter like for example, does it matter if you're on Facebook, for example, does it look at Facebook? Where is Facebook in that?

Jimi Gibson 16:59

I would say Instagram is more prominent. You know, it will pick up Facebook, but I'm sort of giving you them in the order of importance. And so if you're trying to decide where to spend your time, these are the places I would recommend.

Jaclyn Strominger 17:14

What about YouTube?

Jimi Gibson 17:15

Well, YouTube is actually below Medium. Medium is a platform that you can write articles. It's sort of a blogging platform. You know, if you have a blog on your website, you might restructure that blog and put that blog on Medium. And so that's a place it goes for information. You can set up a free account. I think you can publish two articles a day or within a 24-hour period or something. And then YouTube, you know, it is actually scraping the transcripts of a YouTube video. And I know this is really scary. People are like, I would never do a YouTube video. Like, it's not that hard. You can set up a YouTube channel in about 15 minutes. You could, you know, you got a thousand dollar camera, video camera with your phone, put it on a tripod, talk for a minute and a half about what you're expert at, get on a Zoom call with a colleague, a friend, talk about something that you love to talk about, have that interaction, download that video and put that video on YouTube, and you get in the regular habit of that, and you'll be amazed at how that starts to show up when you put a search for your name or your business or your expertise within one of these large language models.

Jaclyn Strominger 18:39

So, all right, so hold on a second. I'm gonna okay. So let's kind of go back and like talk a little bit about you know, you were just saying about YouTube.

Jimi Gibson 18:50

Right.

Jaclyn Strominger 18:52

You you know posting on YouTube, and you said what was scary was that it'll, you know, YouTube will it can obviously the large language models will actually look at the transcript. I don't, you know, and you said people might be afraid to post a post on YouTube. I I don't know.

Jimi Gibson 19:11

I I'm like, well, I well, I mean, if I asked my wife to do that, she would say, just poke me in the eye with a hot poker. I would never want to do that. And so I'm saying some people are afraid of the camera, it takes a lot of practice. You know, I made a decision last year that I was gonna post a video every single day on LinkedIn, and after about 147 videos, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go back and look at the first one. And it was horrible. Like, record a video, throw it away, record another one, throw it away. Another technique is to get on a Zoom call with a colleague or a friend or somebody in the industry and just have a conversation about something that's going on. And don't worry about it. I mean, you know, we're all on Zoom a lot these days, and you're having these kind of meetings, just record that meeting. And it can be sort of a mini podcast and then upload that, commit to doing that once a week, every other week, upload that to YouTube. Again, it doesn't matter if anybody watches it, if it gets shared around, YouTube loves that kind of content. You know, make sure you put a description and go to YouTube, look up how to write a description for YouTube, it'll tell you. There's plenty of people out there who can tell you how to write a description. So I think you know, there's a whole bunch of places that we've just covered. If you just did those and you just made a plan over the next 90 to 180 days to start to chip away at some of that, then you're gonna see a difference. The cool thing is, you know, in traditional organic SEO, it usually took about six to eight months once you started doing something to see some results. You can see some results doing what we've just described in 30, 60 days, and it'll make a huge difference. I will caution the listeners that if you're listening to this and you're thinking ahead, going, Oh, that sounds great. I'm just gonna do a bunch of blogs and chat GPT. Well, guess what? You're just adding to the AI slot that's out there, and AI already knows what you're about to write if you're gonna do that, because everybody else is doing the same thing and it's pulling the training data from your industry and you're saying the same thing. So you have to think of something unique. You have to think of something that only you can talk about. And yeah, I mean, you can use those for tools as a starting point, but if you don't layer in your personal experience, again, it's looking for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And it wants to know your bumps, your bruises, your skin knees, your champagne toasts, all of those things that went wrong, and all of those things that went well, case studies. So yeah, I would say those are some guardrails to make sure you uh stay within.

Jaclyn Strominger 22:06

You know, it's so funny you like first of all, so I guess kind of kind of recap. So question though, about so we've got obviously being clear about what you want to post about, not obviously just being generic. I mean, that's you don't want to be generic when you're asking AI to help you figure out what you want to post about. I like for me, one of the things that I do, and you can tell me what this is good or bad or ugly. Um I usually I usually write a newsletter every single week, and it gets released on Tuesdays. But I write it usually with some type of experience or leadership or something that has happened, or maybe I've read something in the news and I bring a slant to it and I kind of type in to Claude, what I use to write it. Like, this is my whole story, this is what I'm talking about, kind of what I want to, you know, what I want to share. Oh, and then I'm we had these two amazing podcast guests on this week. So I want to bring in their content and make sure that we got that going on. Please, you know, then let's make some posts that introduce the podcast, maybe a little script that I can do and write the post for that it will kind of bring people back to the newsletter. I mean, it's so it's me, and I'm obviously asking it, and it just puts it in a nice little grid for me and all that kind of fun stuff. But it's my it's me. I'm not saying I'm not asking it to pull anything out, I'm just asking it to make it nicer.

Jimi Gibson 23:41

Yes. And Claude is amazing, it can still hallucinate. You probably have to sometimes, sometimes it goes smoothly, other times you may have to wrestle it and beat it to the ground to make it do what you want to do, right? And so you have to get used to using the tool. And then I would say if that's a closed environment where AI can't see that newsletter, you might think about publishing that newsletter on your website so that that text is there. And that would not prevent you from shooting a quick video or a snippet or an Instagram reel or a YouTube short or some other place that that could reside, or doing a summary of that article and posting it on Medium, because the more places where there's coherence to your message, the better it's gonna uh look. And so now you get into you could literally have your content pillar being your newsletter, and then you could slice and dice that and make sure it shows up in parts and pieces around the internet, and that would be a strategy where you're not killing yourself every week to try to figure out what to do and where to put it.

Jaclyn Strominger 24:51

Right. Well, that's a that's actually kind of interesting. So let me ask you, what about some of the other platforms? Just kind of curiosity, like you know, whether it's Substack or School, like do those come into it as well? Like, does it get do those pull in?

Jimi Gibson 25:10

Yeah, as long as there's no wall, a paywall behind a membership or a course, so it has to be able to be visible as like a website.

Jaclyn Strominger 25:22

Right. Okay, so anybody coming into that to be able to actually see. I mean, there the stuff that's behind the paywalls won't get seen, but the stuff front and center would do that. That's actually quite quite interesting. Now you shared, you said, you know, you basically went on this journey and you you were saying that, you know, for your personal story, you were looking at, you know, in pre-show, we were talking about you said 400 companies, you know, some were visible, some were invisible, and that research. I'd love for you to share that. And and you started to say about your own personal story about how much you went visible on LinkedIn and recording.

Jimi Gibson 26:01

Right. Let me back up to the school question you had a minute ago, because I think there's an important indicator. And this would hold true for any place you put content. Make sure your name and your title and some little message about who you are and what you do travels with that. And so that's typically called a byline. And so if you have a course on school, make sure you fully fill out the bio section. And if that is publicly available, that's another credential that shows you have expertise because you've started a school or started a course on school, independent of the fact that most of the content is behind the paywall. So that's an important thing. And so if you have a blog on your website and it has no author attached to it, go back and put an author, make sure it has your full name, your title, and be consistent about that. And so AI is going to start to connect the dots with all of this.

Speaker 2 26:58

Yeah.

Jimi Gibson 26:59

So, yeah, what happened was we saw the writing on the wall at the agency about 18 months ago, and we were seeing that AI loves people over logos. And so, yes, it can understand what a company is, it can understand what they sell, it can understand what their reviews are, but the people behind the company are the ones that deliver the expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. And so the founder came to me and said, We got to do this, but I'm not gonna be that person. I want you to do this, and I want you to be the face of the company. And so at first I was like, Oh, well, that's kind of cool. And then I was like, Oh, that's not cool. What the heck am I gonna do? And so, you know, obviously I had a performing background, and so I was like, okay, well, I'm just gonna go into this with both feet. And at that time, there wasn't a lot of information about what we've discussed today. And so I just said, Well, I'm just gonna try a bunch of stuff. And so I was posting video on LinkedIn, I was getting on podcast interviews, I was writing articles for Forbes, an entrepreneur. I was writing an article every month, about a 3,000-word article for our blog. And then I would have a 15-minute video on YouTube that was a companion of that blog and all sorts of stuff. And so about July, I started looking at the research, and the algorithm was not in favor of video on LinkedIn, it just wasn't set up the way other platforms were, and so then I started writing. And so the two content types that get the most engagement on LinkedIn are infographics and carousels. And so the infographic is basically a one-pager that describes how to do something or information about something. A carousel is multiple panels, and so I just sort of went double down on infographics because I just like the one-page format. And so I started to do that. And then about Q3, looked at everything that I had done, and I was like, wow, okay, what's working and what's not working? And what am I going to do next year to change my behavior?

Jaclyn Strominger 29:11

Because MMA, as I like to say, measure, monitor, and adjust.

Jimi Gibson 29:15

There you go. Good, good, good. And then I thought, am I the only one who's having trouble with this? And so I decided to initiate a research study, and I looked at 400 companies across five industries in the US, you know, took the major four sections of the US and divided that up. I had a small business with median revenue around 7.5 million and sort of a medium-sized business with median revenue around 24 million. And I wanted to know what's going on. Like these are actual businesses. And I wanted to make sure I had the owner or CEO as part of this data set. And what I found was 46% of owners of those 400 companies. And then so you might go, well, why didn't you study 10,000? Well, there is sort of a tipping point where it's statistically relevant, and then you don't really get much more information out of it. And so at 400, it's 95% statistically relevant with about a four and a half margin of error. So I'm like, yeah, I'm happy with that, especially across five different industries. So it wasn't going to skew to one particular type of industry. And so those two different size businesses, 46% of those owners were invisible. The interesting thing was the companies where the owner and the business was visible through AI, their traffic year over year. So I mapped it January 2025 to January 2026, their traffic increased two and a half percent. And you might think, okay, well, that's not much. Well, remember the stats that we talked about earlier, right? Everybody's traffic is going down. The companies where the owner and the business was invisible, their traffic declined 28.5%. And you're like, what? And so uh obviously there were a lot of data points, there was a lot of ways that we studied this. You can get the free report. I'll give Jaclyn the link and you can download the report. It's about 21 pages. But here's the killer for that seven and a half million dollar company over the next three years, if the business is invisible, you're at risk of losing $5.6 million over the next three years. For that $24 million company, you're at risk of losing $18 million over the next three years. Because your traffic is declining. Remember, 25% this year, 50% in three years. If you're invisible to AI, you're basically invisible to all these conversations that are going on. Now, here's the other kicker for the companies where the owner was visible, out of that gap of 5.6 million, the owner contributed 2.8 million to that gain. Well for the $24 million company, there's an $18 million gap between the company visible, the owner visible, the company invisible, the owner invisible. $8.9 million of that $18 million was the owner or CEO multiplier. And so right there, that should be enough to get people fired up to say, oh my gosh, we've got to have a plan. What are we gonna do? And I've also described that the bar is pretty low. Right. And so you've got to start doing it now.

Jaclyn Strominger 32:52

And for those that do it now, we'll have a higher gain. Okay, so listeners, get on you. We're gonna get onto these action items, right? Like start doing this right now. Yeah, right. Well, so I I have a question about this though, because with the visibility of the CEO slash owner, or you know, or maybe it's like that, a top person at the I mean, I'm not the owner, but I'm providing visibility to the agency for sure.

Jimi Gibson 33:19

Right.

Jaclyn Strominger 33:20

So you're so it's you doing that. So you hear this a lot of times in business, and I know this is going a little bit in a different direction for a second, but I'm just kind of curious your opinion on this. You know, a lot of times people will say you don't want the owner of the company to be the face or the name of the company because when you go to sell it, it's it has a negative impact. But as a matter of fact, what you're seeing right now, that's actually to gain that revenue share, you you need to have that visibility. So it's actually maybe take that other saying and throw it out with the bathwater.

Jimi Gibson 33:58

Yeah, maybe out with the bathwater. So interestingly enough, I did have a conversation with a couple of organizations that ask me that exact question. And typically, an important person discounts that exit by five to 25%, right? Because you can't reproduce that person. But that's old thinking. So how are you gonna exit if your business is declining by $18 million over the next three years? Like the trajectory is going in the wrong direction. And so I would say, yeah, there should be a plan. If you're planning on exiting in three to five years, then it should be all about you. As you get about one to two years out, stop talking about me and I, start talking about we and start activating people within the organization to do that. And so the air quote liability is spread among multiple people and it is not contingent on you. But I would say that's not a good excuse to continue to hide behind. You know, interestingly, franchising had the lowest visibility out of all the five industries because traditionally the franchisee is counting on the logo to do all the selling. But what ends up happening is somebody in the local market who does the same sort of thing, if they're visible, they're gonna steal that market share from that person. And so I actually talked with a new CMO of a huge organization that has about 10 franchises. She told me the first thing that she was gonna do was to pump up the individual personal brands of all of the franchise owners in their market so that they would not be a victim to this, you know, type of thing. And, you know, what does that mean? That means doing some of the things that we talked about, joining the local chamber of commerce. You know, if you're passionate about something in your community, sponsor, contribute to a charity, get on the board of a nonprofit, go down the street to your favorite taco shop on Tuesday and film a little video that says, Hey, I'm in so-and-so's taco shop. I love taco Tuesday. Hey, Joe, come over here and let's chat a second. Like it doesn't have to be rocket science.

Jaclyn Strominger 36:28

Right. You know, I talk a lot and I've and I feel like this is something where it really shows that each and every one of us, whether no matter what we are in, whatever whatever business we are in, we still are our own brand. So if you're part of a company, right, you know, and you're looking to help grow that. But if you're outside, if you're at a franchise, you are you we are all a brand. So we still have to create our our own personal individual brand authority, and then we can tie it to a company, right? So that's really important because as you said, if AI is gonna get to know gets to know people better than they are going to get to know a logo, yeah, then you know, we have to think of ourselves basically as becoming that, you know, visibility.

Jimi Gibson 37:28

Yeah, the term you'll probably come across as entity. And so another thing you can do, you mentioned the website, is if you have an about page and it's kind of thin and flimsy, pump it up. Have an about page about folks in the company, and then use that page as like almost like a table of contents to the places that they've been. And so for you, Jaclyn, you would have, you know, maybe your top five episodes on your about page. You would have your credentials or any associations that you belong to. Maybe there's been an article written about you, and they're all on that page and they all link out to those references. And so you're helping that AI triangulate. Oh, okay, Jaclyn is at this organization. She has these things that I'm able to connect the dots. This is the home base for all that information. There is a little piece of code that if you want to go the extra mile, it's a schema code, S-C H E M A, that will allow you to tell AI what this page is about, that it's about a person. If you don't know how to do it, just go to schema.org and or you can actually ask Claude, how do I create a schema code and where do I put it on the website and it'll tell you exactly what to do. Oh, right. So that's a little bit of a hack. Yeah. So although we can't get into all parts and pieces, but I would say if you replay this episode and you you kind of make a list and you meet with your team, and if you're not inclined to write, you probably got somebody on your team who knows how to navigate Claude or Chat GPT or one of these things to help write and just make sure it sounds like you and it's not fluffy and generic, and you'll be in good shape.

Jaclyn Strominger 39:16

Right. So I have a question. So just because I know this is like a people will probably ask this too. So do you have a favorite AI tool or favorite, yeah? I guess what's your favorite to use for AI?

Jimi Gibson 39:30

Yeah, and I would say it depends on what I'm trying to do. And so if I'm writing or doing some sort of higher-level function, I would say Claude is great. If I am looking for a snarky take on something, Grok can get really snarky. If I'm creating a little short video or some graphics, I love Nano Banana through Gemini. I was a big chat GPT fan, and I think the wave is moving away from that. But if I'm creating a custom GPT, I'll still create a custom GPT in Chat GPT. I love perplexity for researching businesses because it will provide the links and it'll provide the attribution of where that information is coming from. So I like to try them all and try to have something in my head. I'm trying to do this and see which one I have to wrestle with the less. Yeah.

Jaclyn Strominger 40:22

No, that's actually good. I mean, I've it's so funny because I I really love Claude for you know a lot of things. I have not really used nano banano, whatever, you know, in in, but that would actually be pretty interesting for graphics. You know, I could tell you that I don't love, I mean, I use Canva for things, but I don't think it's got a great it's AI is really wonky.

Jimi Gibson 40:46

They're playing a little ketchup these days, so is Adobe.

Jaclyn Strominger 40:49

Yeah. So but this has actually been truly, truly, really remarkable. So if you had to say, you know, you, you know, like again, just to go back through that list, you know, if somebody were to is it, you know, pick one or two things, the top two things that they could do for the next 90 days.

Jimi Gibson 41:10

Sure. Well, I would say the first thing you want to do is you want to go to some of these tools that we've mentioned and just put in your name. Who is, and don't put your company name, don't do anything, just put your name in and see what comes back. And it may be you and it may be somebody with the same name as you. And then you can go, who is your name at this company and see what comes back? And then, depending on what type of company you're with, product or service-wise, go if you were looking for XYZ service in this particular area, who would you recommend? And I know that's a long sentence, but you know, typical Google, a typical Google search is about five to six-word phrase. A typical interaction with an LLM starts at about 32 words. So don't, you know, don't be skimpy with how you communicate that. And then just do a screenshot and go, okay, this is ugly. That's fine. And then you can start to do things. And so, from a business perspective, you want to have your Google business profile uh set up. You want to make sure you identify people within that Google business profile. I would say go to your LinkedIn, clean that up, make sure your title is not something, you know, you're trying to be cute, be clear, you know, be clear instead of cute or clever. Um, you know, look at that about section. It is looking at that about section. Make sure that says who you are and what you do. I would say pick some venue that you want to challenge yourself on. And so I just told you there's two billion people on LinkedIn, and only two percent are posting. Post something. I guarantee you nobody's gonna see it. So don't worry about that. Um, and you'll start to gain some muscles and it's gonna feel weird, and then sooner or later somebody's gonna go, you know, I saw your post. That was really cool. Can you tell me more about that? If you're so inclined to do video and you don't even know the settings on your camera, find a middle school kid or a teenager, they'll show you all the settings on your camera, right? Have them film you. You can actually in the app on your phone from YouTube, you can film and post directly from your phone. You don't have to do a bunch of gyrations. So, yeah, and then I would say the other thing is just sort of catalog who you are, what you've done, where your name might be out there, whether it's membership to an association, if there's been an article written about you, you know, whatever that is, just if you're on a board, just gather That information and then go to your about page on your website and update that. And I would say, you know, if you're aggressive about it, you can probably get that done in a week or so. If you want to slow roll it, you know, take 30, 45 days to do it. But the time to start is now. We have this window of opportunity that should be exciting and encouraging, that this is kind of a whole new world. And the ones who jump on board are the ones who are going to reap the benefits.

Jaclyn Strominger 44:30

Right. I absolutely love this. Jimi, I could talk to you forever about this. So I'm going to probably ask you to come back on, you know, in like, you know, in a in a quarter, because I'd love to, you know, have like continue this because I think there's so much that we can learn. And and you know, I had somebody else on the podcast and they were talking about how podcasting, even though it's been around for a while, it's still in that infancy. So you know, where that is taking, and and a lot of people give up too.

Jimi Gibson 44:58

After seven episodes is the the the I've had I've had enough of this. Yeah. So right.

Jaclyn Strominger 45:05

Yeah. I guess I'm I guess I'm doing okay with 112 or something.

Jimi Gibson 45:08

Yes, yes.

unknown 45:10

Awesome.

Jaclyn Strominger 45:11

But anyway, what is the best way for all of our listeners to connect with you and and see what you're doing? Obviously, I know you'll send me the link to that that report that research report because it's absolutely fascinating.

Jimi Gibson 45:27

Yeah. So if you want to just go to the website business invisible, excuse me, businessvisibilityindex.com. And again, I'll provide the link. Thrive Agency is thriveagency.com. Again, there's a lot of free information on there. You don't have to be a client to read the information. If you do need some help in this area, I'd be happy to chat with you. And then if you want to connect with me directly, obviously said I'm on LinkedIn. That's an area that I feel comfortable on. And so DM me. If you have a question about anything that we talked about, I'll actually answer your question. So yeah, I would love to connect with people there.

Jaclyn Strominger 46:02

Fantastic. Okay. So listeners, please do me a favor. There's a there's a lot of information in here. You have got to, a number one, connect with Jimi. Go get, you know, all the links will be in the show notes. So go and connect with him. Go to Thrive, go to his website, get the research. But then please share this episode with your friends, your business associates, your colleagues, that your any CEO that you know, because if they want to be visible, they're going to need to do these actions. And then that visibility will also help create unstoppable success. So share this episode. And then, listeners, do me one other favor. Um, again, as I mentioned, uh the platform school, we have a brand new school community, unstoppable success. Please head over there. The link to that will be also in the show notes. And join the first hundred or so people that get in will get in for free. There will always be some free content, but we got some great, really, really great courses that are going to be coming out. So thank you, listeners, for listening. Uh, I truly, truly am grateful for every one of you. And thank you, Jimi, for being an amazing guest. And we're going to have you back because we want to keep this conversation going.

Jimi Gibson 47:14

Awesome. Well, thank you. It was fun.

Jaclyn Strominger 47:16

Thank you.