For my friends and contacts — this is an introduction to my new AI Search marketing agency- but more importantly, this is a message of sanity about the current wild west scenario known as “AEO, GEO, AI Search, etc.”

From Scott Mader | Founder, The AI General | a division of Mader Marketing, LLC

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Let me be straight with you about something.

I’m not writing this to sell you anything. I’m not trying to close you.

I’m writing it because there’s a real problem happening in AI search marketing right now — and the people most likely to get hurt by it are exactly the kind of business owners I’ve spent the last decade working with.

So let me just talk through it. Like I would with a good friend over the phone.

No jargon. No pitch deck. No countdown timer.

AI won’t optimize itself. Small business owners need a human who’s already been downrange.

When I decided to create my new marketing agency- I wanted to give it a brand name that described my many years in the local marketing and digital marketing world.

The best analogy I could draw was a military one. My career started in the trenches with small business owners.

I didn’t have the luxury of being sitting at a desk of a large digital marketing firm watching clients come and go and drop like flies. (Don’t get me wrong- I had that opportunity, but I quit after 1 week of feeding bullshit and excuses to small business owners).

No – I went to battle with hundreds of small business owners. On the battle lines- in a foxhole with bullets flying overhead. Most of ’em made it. Some didn’t.

But that unique cocktail of experiences ranging from local digital marketing, to Google Ads, to SEO, to working on sales scripts, to email drip marketing- all made me the hybrid marketing person I am today.

But there was always one big challenge I had a hard time helping my small business owners overcome.

LARGE NATIONAL COMPANIES CAME INTO LOCAL MARKETS & BOUGHT THEIR WAY TO THE TOP OF LOCAL SEARCHES IN MY CLIENT’S AREA.

If a large national brand needed hundreds of backlinks- they bought ’em. Need instant fake, five star Google reviews- no problem- they hired a black hat company to generate 4 or 5 hundred.

BUT- guess what? AI changes all that. AI HAS LEVELED THE PLAYING FIELD.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude and more to come actually vet the best local businesses and deliver those results directly and instantly to the customer.

And I have new AI clients that can prove this to be the case.

AI Search is easily the biggest fundamental change for small business marketing since Google was first introduced.

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The first thing I ask a new client is simple.

How much do you know about AI search marketing?

Most of the time I get the same answer. A shrug. Maybe an embarrassed laugh. Sometimes they rattle off a few things they heard at a conference or read in an email somebody sent them. But mostly — they’re confused. And honestly, that’s not their fault.

Business owners right now are being bombarded. Every week there’s a new AI expert, a new certification, a new course promising to crack the code. Most of it is noise generated by people who learned about AI search three months ago and immediately started selling it.

Hell, no wonder people are confused.

I got interested in artificial intelligence in 2016. Not because it was trendy — it wasn’t yet — but because I fell down a rabbit hole that started with Alan Turing’s 1950 paper asking a simple question: can machines think?

That question launched the 1956 Dartmouth Project on AI. It eventually produced Deep Blue — the IBM computer that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. I read everything I could find. When generative AI arrived in 2017 I wasn’t surprised. I’d been watching it build for years.

So when I tell you I know where this is headed — that’s not a sales line. That’s twenty-some years of paying attention.

The first time I built a fresh website for a brand new business — no SEO history, didn’t even have Google Analytics installed yet — and saw ChatGPT referring customers to that business inside of seven days, I knew the game had changed for good.

The tools are everywhere. The expertise to deploy them isn’t.

Here’s what a fast buck marketer looks like.

They watched some YouTube videos. Got a weekend certification. They have a real talent for telling people what they want to hear. If they weren’t in online marketing they’d be selling cars — and they’d probably be good at it.

What’s missing isn’t confidence. It’s the years of real world experience that teach you what actually works for real businesses in real markets. The understanding of what a Unique Selling Proposition actually is — not the phrase, but the discipline of finding what genuinely separates one business from every other one in its category.

That takes time. You can’t shortcut it.

I built a commercial carpet cleaning company from one person to five trucks with no money in the bank. Pure marketing systems. Sold that franchise. Started helping other local business owners and it worked well enough that the CFO of Buffalo Wings & Rings hired me to visit their struggling US franchisees one by one and turn them around.

I say that not to impress you. I say it so you understand what I mean when I say expertise. I don’t mean a badge. I mean decades of figuring out what actually moves the needle for businesses that can’t afford to guess.

Fresh out of college (and money), I built a commercial carpet cleaning company from one person to five trucks with no cash in the bank. Pure marketing systems. Sold that franchise. Started helping other local business owners and it worked well enough that the CFO of a national franchise hired me to visit their struggling US franchisees one by one and turn them around.

Any tool can fire blind. A General knows where to aim.

There’s something worth saying plainly here.

A great tool in the wrong hands doesn’t produce great results. It produces confident-sounding results — which is actually worse. You move fast in the wrong direction and you don’t find out until real money has been wasted.

AI search optimization isn’t complicated in theory. Build the right signals. Structure content the way AI reads it. Make your business genuinely credible across the places AI looks. Earn the recommendation.

The execution is where most people get lost — because the execution requires judgment. Which signals matter most for this specific business in this specific market at this specific stage? What content structure does AI actually reward? What does “genuinely credible” look like for a plumber in Cincinnati versus a pergola installer in North Florida?

Those aren’t questions a tool answers. They’re questions a person with experience answers.

Knowing where to aim is the whole job. The tool just pulls the trigger.

AI search rewards expertise. Not software. Not shortcuts. Not gurus.

Here’s the thing about AI that nobody in the fast buck crowd is talking about — and it might be the most important thing I can tell you.

For the first time in the history of online marketing, the playing field is level.

Think about what the old world looked like. Big corporate competitors with deep pockets would swoop into a local market, buy fake reviews, stuff keywords and backlinks into their sites, throw money at Google Ads — and dominate. The good small business owner who actually did excellent work, treated customers right, built something real — got buried.

AI search doesn’t work that way.

AI is specifically designed to find authenticity. It looks for real experience signals — documented proof you’ve actually done the work. Genuine expertise — content that shows you know more than the basics. What other people independently say about you. Consistency and transparency — the same honest information showing up the same way everywhere your name appears online.

You can’t buy that. You can’t fake it. You can’t stuff it. The good guys finally have a weapon that money alone can’t beat.

Real strategy still comes from a real person who’s done the work.

I want to give you a real number because I think it’s more useful than any promise.

A client of mine — Central Florida Awnings — had a new website and zero AI search visibility. I ran a baseline test. Nothing. AI didn’t know he existed.

We built a new site with the right copy, the right structure, the right signals. Content that told AI exactly who he was, what he did, where he did it, and why a customer should trust him.

Two months later: 95 people a month finding him through ChatGPT.

I pulled the numbers again on June 30th of this year…..

… 252

new users found him on ChatGPT in June alone

… 28

more arrived through Perplexity

No ad spend. No SEO campaign running in parallel. Just the work — done correctly, by someone who understood what AI systems are actually looking for.

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The algorithm doesn’t care who sold you the course.

This one is simple and I’ll keep it that way.

AI systems evaluate your business based on evidence. Your content. Your citations. Your reviews. Your consistency across platforms. What third parties say about you independent of what you say about yourself.

They do not look at who you hired. They don’t factor in whether your marketing partner has a badge on their LinkedIn or a bestselling lead magnet or ten thousand followers.

So before you hire anyone for AI search — including me — ask them one question… “Can you show me my current citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI right now? In writing. With real test queries.”

Behind every business AI recommends is a human who knew what to do.

I wrote this for a few different people and I want to be straight about that.

Some of you are current clients. We’ve built a solid foundation together. AI search is the next layer — and the businesses that put it on top of strong traditional marketing are the ones building positions that are genuinely hard to compete with. Worth a conversation.

Some of you are people I’ve worked with over the years through franchise systems, speaking engagements, training rooms. You’ve seen how I think. You know I don’t oversell. If you’re running multiple locations or a franchise system and wondering whether this is real enough to act on — the numbers above are your answer.

And some of you moved on to a different provider. That’s fine — relationships evolve. But if your current partner hasn’t mentioned AI search in the last six months, it’s worth asking why. Not to me necessarily. Just worth asking.

The map isn’t the territory. You need someone who’s walked it.

Here’s what I keep coming back to when I think about why this moment matters.

The fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed. Meet people where they are. Solve real problems. Earn real trust. Be consistent. Be specific. Give people an actual reason to choose you over the next guy.

Those things have always worked. They worked when I was running carpet cleaning routes. They worked when I was turning around pizza franchises. They work now.

What’s changed is that AI has become the mechanism that surfaces those fundamentals — and specifically rewards them. The big guys who used to buy their way to the top of local search can’t buy their way into an AI recommendation. The fast buck marketers selling confusion don’t have the depth to build what AI actually looks for.

The good guys — the business owners who’ve spent years genuinely serving customers and building something real — finally have the advantage.

I help them take it.

If you want to know where your business stands in AI search right now — what’s working, what’s missing, and what it would take to get recommended — ask me for a free Recon Report.

It’s a straight look at your current visibility. No pitch attached.

Talk soon.

Until then- Keep Swingin The Ax…

Scott Mader

The AI General · Mader Marketing LLC · theaigeneral.com

(513) 341-1112

AI Gurus Are Coming Out Of The Woodwork.

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