By: Isaac Marcuson
Published Date: September 10, 2026
Thirteen seconds in, Jenna flubs a line and asks us to “take that out, fix it in post.” We kept it in. Sorry, Jenna! In episode 5 of To the Power of X, Chuck McCarthy and Kayleigh Crandell sit down with Jenna Pace to hash out the question so many of our clients have: what happens to keyword tracking, rankings, and the reports you’ve trusted for a decade now that buyers find businesses through AI search and various engines instead of the standard results page?
In This Episode
- Keyword tracking still matters, but can be misleading on its own: a rankings dip can hide buyers who now arrive through LLMs instead of Google.
- Winning visibility in large language models takes human legwork: sales calls, client conversations, and the exact words real customers use.
- AI search reflects your whole business, so unhappy customers on Reddit can shape how you show up before your content ever does.
Episode 5 Recap: AI Search and the Case for Human Legwork
About that cut line. Jenna fumbles a sentence in the cold open, laughs, and asks the crew to “take that out, fix it in post.” Chuck doesn’t blink: “We’re keeping it in.” The bit gets funnier once you realize the sentence she fumbled was the sharpest warning in the first minute, that businesses abandon working strategies because the dashboard looks bad one week.
Take the running gag about what to even call this discipline. AEO, GEO, AI SEO. Jenna reports that one team she heard about gave up and named it after the Old McDonald song, all vowels, E-I-E-I-O. Kayleigh lands the counterpunch that this crew was farming before it was cool. Good Farmer SEO, the Xponent21 practice of going back through content you already own and reworking it until an AI system can actually digest it, has been the house method since before the industry started arguing about acronyms.
Under the bits, Jenna sharpens her case, built from sales calls and client conversations rather than theory: the most automated era of search demands more human work, not less. The data platforms hand you keyword volume. They do not hand you the words a frustrated customer types into ChatGPT at 11pm, and no tool replaces asking. She draws a hard line on the machine side too: “We are anti-slop at this agency” (11:00). Models predict text. They do not reason. Somebody still has to think.
AI search is a mirror, and it reflects your whole operation, including the corners you would rather not look at. If customers are complaining about you on Reddit, the models are reading it, no matter what some vanity dashboard claims about your citations. Jenna’s deadpan version of that report lands hardest: “You appeared in Reddit 300 times” (17:22). The businesses that win are the ones willing to look in the mirror and fix what it shows them.
Key Moments in Episode 5
- 0:37 Chuck names the disconnect: clients ask for search volume on AI queries, and that number does not exist.
- 1:46 Jenna on the irony of AI search demanding more conversational, human understanding than traditional SEO.
- 9:06 Kayleigh explains Good Farmer SEO, the update-and-reformat discipline that predates the naming debate.
- 11:00 Jenna on why LLMs cannot reason and where human planning has to enter the process.
- 16:23 The mirror test: how customer complaints on Reddit shape AI visibility before your content does.
- 19:11 Chuck on blended AI visibility scores and why one number across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can mislead you.
Full chapter timestamps live in the video description on YouTube.
Go Deeper on AI Search Strategy
- The Good Farmer SEO Method unpacks the content-tending approach Kayleigh describes in the episode.
- Why Discovering Your Brand’s Most Valuable Questions Is the Smartest SEO Strategy covers the human-speak research the crew keeps returning to.
Watch Episode 5 of To the Power of X
Watch the full conversation on YouTube and subscribe so the next episode finds you. Interested in tracking your own LLM mentions? CARL Intelligence, Xponent21’s prompt-tracking product, shows you where your brand actually appears across AI platforms instead of hiding the answer inside one blended score.
Prefer audio? Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
To the Power of X is Xponent21’s podcast on AI and marketing, recorded in Richmond, Virginia. New episodes and their companion articles publish at Xponent21’s blog.
Isaac Marcuson
Isaac Marcuson is an AI SEO & Content Editor at Xponent21, a digital marketing agency in Richmond, Virginia, focused on AI search optimization. He runs the AI-assisted content systems behind the agency's work and edits what those systems produce. The job makes him a daily student of one question: why language models cite what they cite. Before Xponent21, he spent nearly eight years as a freelance digital strategist in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and the skilled trades. Each defined expertise its own way. Trust had to be earned in the local dialect. Offline, Isaac reads philosophy, theology, and cognitive science, and walks the James River most days.
