← Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
From Magician to AI Authority: How Jimi Gibson Is Redefining Visibility in the Zero-Click Era
00:31:57
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. We are live and this is going to be fun. Okay, let me tell you about this guest. Before he was advising CEOs on brand and AI driven discovery. Jimmy was on stage. I see him smiling there. A professional magician. And here's what founders don't realize about that. The same psychology that that controls attention on stage or in theater controls visibility. In an AI powered world, if you don't know how attention works, you become invisible. Jimmy can help you appear and disappear, I think. But today we'll unpack my founder authority is the new SEO. How zero click AI search is reshaping demand and what business owners must do in the next 90 days to stay relevant. Jimmy, welcome to Lift Off. Thanks for joining me today.
- [00:55]
B
Sure. That's a lot of energy, Keith. I appreciate that. Ready to jump into some fun conversation?
- [01:01]
A
Awesome. Awesome. Well, you know, I typically start with the origin story kind of. Right. Let's do a little pattern match. How did you get. How did you go from professional magician to marketing whiz?
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B
Well, it goes back quite a ways. I was digging through some boxes a few years ago and I pulled out this little membership card and it was to Merlin's mail order magic club. And I flipped the card over and did some quick math and I was like 4 years old, so I'm assuming my parents signed me up because I wasn't reading and writing at that point. But yeah, just for whatever reason, it just latched on to me. And in middle school, I was doing birthday party shows for my friends. Like their parents would pay me to entertain my friends at their birthday, which I probably would have gotten invited to anyway. I don't know, making 25 bucks a show. And I thought I was a mogul, you know.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then in high school, I met a gentleman who was an account executive for a Fortune 100 company and he. They were looking for a promotional entertainer to do a bunch of shows. And so in high school, I was doing shows while everybody else was working fast food and cutting lawns. And that lasted 16 years. And I got to hang out at the agency and, you know, tended to gravitate towards the creative side because that was sort of at the end of the madman era. And yeah, I just thought if there was any career that mirrored magic, it would be marketing. I still do shows and it's always the lens that I see visibility through. Right. Because you have to make that connection. You have to elicit curiosity and then you have to make the trick work. And. And in marketing, you have to have the call to action. And so There's a lot of similarities.
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A
Yeah, you drew me in with that same kind of magic. And you mentioned that the, the, the, the art on stage of grabbing attention. I never heard storytelling become as vogue as it is right now. The whole idea of that and that's a function of getting attention, right?
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B
Oh sure.
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A
We have to be able to tell us a, a, a good story and grab people's attention, right?
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B
Yeah. And I think especially in the AI world, AI doesn't know your background, it doesn't know your bumps and bruises and scars and champagne toast that you've been through and yeah, yeah, I mean it can write a story, but it really doesn't know much about you. So the more authentic you can be with those stories and the more you can sort of let your audience in on who you are and what you're about, I think you can stand above some of the folks who are just sort of taking the easy path.
- [03:43]
A
Yeah, I completely agree. So what's the biggest illusion that business owners, you know, in the tech world or just general business, what do they have wrong about, about marketing?
- [03:55]
B
They're slowly vanishing and they don't even know it. I was reading a stat the other day, I think it's funny. I used to make people disappear for a living and now I help them reappear from the vanishing act they're doing on themselves. 84% of businesses today are not tracking their AI visibility. And so we have a lot of clients at the agency. We work with about a thousand active clients and we've seen web traffic decline and then some cases fall off a cliff and you go okay, well why is that happening? Because 60% of searches end in zero click. And you know, AI overviews drop click throughs on a website, especially In Google, about 42%. And so the whole traffic conversation is a big pie that's getting sliced up when Google used to be the, you know, 800 pound gorilla in the room. And so if businesses are not actively figuring out where their traffic is going, they're going to see their revenue erode considerably. Because if you're not showing up in AI, your competitor sure is or somebody
- [05:08]
A
percentage of the search is happening through Google SEO and aiaoeo.
- [05:14]
B
Well those numbers fluctuate and it's a little harder now to attribute that because of the zero click. And so if you're looking at your web traffic and you see it declining. Yeah, there's a couple of things that are happening, especially like Claude and Chat. GPT don't really have embedded links in the results. They Give like perplexity will. And so people are going to chat GPT, they're searching and then they might do a Google search with the information that's presented to them. So that traffic is coming in as direct traffic, which can also be misattributed as AI traffic. So you know, the fall off is about on average 10%.
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A
Yeah.
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B
They're projecting it's going to be about 25%, which seems a little crazy, but it actually does. It could actually be worse if you're a business that relies on somebody searching for you and finding you.
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A
Right.
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B
But here's the opportunity. The opportunity is a Referral from an AI search converts at 4.4% higher than a standard organic referral.
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A
Referral.
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B
I didn't know that. Yeah. And we'll get. Have you done anything?
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A
Have you done any work around the paid or AI searches?
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B
Oh gosh. Paid is wild west at this point. Yeah, yeah. It's shifting everywhere and new platforms are bringing on paid as we've seen in the past. That happens all the time. But I think what I would be, you know, I think there's still paid opportunities on other platforms other than Google. Of course, you know, meta is a big player as well. But yeah, I would say organic search and visibility of a founder or owner or executive within the organization is another missed opportunity.
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A
Yeah. And by the way, Google's numbers aren't looking too bad either still. So they're still crushing. So we talk a little bit. I mean this is psychology, perception kind of things is really interesting. But you also mentioned something about the invisible owner creates an invisible company. So now that gets into the brand of the owner and the brand of the company. What do you do? I have that right. What's your POV on that?
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B
So one of the things that I actually have a research report coming out at the end of Q1 and I'll update it each quarter this that the impact of a business owner being visible transfers at a much higher rate to the business than the opposite direction. And so people trust a company where especially the CEO or the founder or the owner shows up. Search Engine Journal published a report at the end of 2025 that said if an executive in an organization posts 10 times on LinkedIn a year, not a month, a year, their referral rate would increase by 30% and the deal size would go up when a founder is able or an owner, CEO executive within the organization. I mentioned that 4.4 time increase in conversion for an AI referral to the website when the founder is part of that conversation and is visible in that result, you get a 42% close rate lift on whatever standard close rate you typically would have. So on a website and you know, I know we're sort of have a blended rate we might be talking about here between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead.
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A
Right.
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B
Overall, you're going to get about a 42% lift in your close rate and then you're going to get about a 1.23 lift in deal size just because of that owner's involvement in the conversation and the trust behind knowing who's behind that organization. Right. And so I think.
- [09:26]
A
Let me, let me.
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B
Yeah, yeah, sure.
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A
Let me unpack that just a little bit. Now I don't want to overgeneralize, but does this go for B2C and B2B? I'm not trying to break you down into cross tabs and segmentation, but I do want to get a little bit of a sense because, because it would feel like that's very relevant in a service oriented business. But I'm a tech guy, right. So I work in the tech industry and we buy tech because it's the best tech. But maybe it's not. Maybe that's a poor assumption and that the CEO still has to be out there talking about their tech and it would have the same results as a service company or a B2C company.
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B
Yeah. So not to throw tomatoes, but I would say tech is one of the biggest offenders in an invisible or a faceless brand because it's just historical with SaaS companies, tech companies. I would say because of the escalation of all of these new toys that we have related to tech, there's a heightened level of security and suspicion. And when. And I'm going to kind of back into this in a couple of ways. So that's one fact that exists. And so I would say if a tech company is willing to step out and have subject matter experts, it doesn't have to be the president, the owner, the CEO, somebody within the organization that is going to send a signal that there is some expertise, there's some authority and some trustworthiness. And so I'm going to use an acronym that actually Google developed about 2016, it was eat. They actually updated that in the early 2000-20s to eeat. And these large language models have adopted this approach. And the acronym EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. And so let's say that you have a blog on your website and it has no attribution to an authority. It's hard for these models to trust that information is correct. So the first thing I would say if you want to take away for the audience is if you have a blog on your website, make sure there's an author and there's a byline as to who wrote that article with all of their credentials associated with that. That's going to send that signal of trustworthiness expertise to these LLMs. And so the more of these that you can hit in that acronym, the more trustworthy the LLM is going to be able to cite and understand. Is this real information? Is this made up information? Was this generated through another LLM? And I just want to. And we can break this apart, but in traditional SEO, you are optimizing for a page and so it was keyword based. Right. And so you would optimize a page to get found based on keywords that that were associated with a product or service.
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A
Right.
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B
That's not the way the Generative Engine optimization or Answer Engine optimization works. It's trying to cite an entity and typically a person. It's hard for it to cite a brand because a brand is not a person. A brand is made up of people. And so if you think in that terms, it loves clarity, it loves consistency, it loves coherence. And if it can verify across multiple places on the web that this business contains people who are experts in what they do, then it's much easier for them to present you as a trustworthy and authoritative option for whoever is asking that question.
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A
Yeah, it's interesting. I was going to ask you next, is AI amplifying authority or flattening it? And I guess it would depend, I guess that you kind of touched on that.
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B
Yeah, I would say it's much more important for businesses to prove that they know what they're talking about. And if you are relying on content from chat GPT that is very vanilla and generic, then I would say you're probably going to get buried and you're going to start losing market share. If you're willing to step out and hit those signals of eeat. And we talked about storytelling at the beginning and we also talked about attention and curiosity and all of those things. I have a pretty easy framework that if you can follow this framework, I've probably got a year's worth of content that you can do and I can teach it to you in the next four minutes.
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A
That's great. Well, what. So how should founders adapt their content strategy for an AI, an AI summarization?
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B
Well, first of all, I would say you should have some sort of pillar content, whether it be a blog, a video. YouTube is a great source because that's one of the top locations that these LLMs are going to. They're reading the transcripts. And so it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to worry about being viral or a content creator, but it loves that type of content. Make sure you have content out there that's an audio form that has a transcript, associated video and the written word. And there's all sorts of different places that you can put that content. But the first question I get is, okay, what do I say that's going to make me stand out or be any different?
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A
Yeah, make me visible, make me visible.
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B
And so if you want to hit on all of those, you know, experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness, I would say hold up your left hand and we're going to go through this finger by finger and I'm going to start with the pinky finger. And as a business owner, founder, CEO, executive, what? Think about that pinky promise you made on the playground as a kid. You know, you interlocked fingers, you say, I pinky promise too. And you didn't break that promise, right? Or you would not be very popular at school. So what is your brand promising? What is it promising your customers? What guarantee can you stand behind and publish and, you know, fight to the end to make sure that that promise is being kept? What promise are you making to your team, your suppliers, all of those things. And so that's a great place to start because when you stand behind something that's not something that chat GPT can replicate, the next one would be the ring finger. And you know, you might think that's a promise, but it really starts out as passion. And what passion did you have for the relationship? And you know, in the western world, that's where we wear the wedding ban. You didn't ask the person to marry you on the first date or you didn't expect to say yes on the first date, you know, whichever side of that you're on. So you have to respect that courtship. And are you in it for the long term relationship or are you in it for just the quick sale and moving on? Right? And so think about that relationship and how you communicate and what you do to protect that relationship. I just celebrated my 20th anniversary. That that's a different way of thinking about a relationship than, you know, if I was like, oh, well, this is great, I'll get, you know, I'll move on if I need to. No, you're committed to it, and you do things to make sure that you keep that relationship healthy. The next one is the middle finger. And, you know, for those who aren't watching, I am not giving Keith the finger. I'm holding up all my fingers.
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A
Okay, good, clarify.
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B
You know, a lot of people think that's a vulgar gesture. It's actually a gesture of defiance. And so who are you proverbially giving the finger to? Who is the villain? Who's the enemy? Right? And so if you really believe that your product or service can help your customer, then you need to stand for saving them from the villain. You need to gather your team around, you know, defeating that villain. You need to get your customers, your prospects, understanding why you need to defeat this villain. So that's a big one that I think people are scared. And, you know, you don't have to be mean or rude or, you know, vindictive, but you need to explain why you're different than your competition or an alternative solution to your product or service. The next one is the pointy finger. And the pointy finger points in a direction. If you don't know who you're talking to, then you can't tell those previous three stories. So it's pointing in a direction. Make sure you know who you're talking to and be clear. Right. And so I said earlier that these LLMs love clarity and consistency. For any type of communication, you should have one person you're talking to. You should be solving one problem, you should be offering one solution, and there should be one call to action. So a singular point of focus on all of those. And then the last one is the thumb. It's the universal symbol for things are going well, or thumbs down, things aren't going so well. And if you just had a KPI dashboard that was thumb up, thumb down, we wouldn't have to worry about, you know, the messy middle. But it's also, you know, a thumbprint. What mark are you leaving on the world? What mark are you leaving on your customers? What mark are you leaving on your team? Yeah, you know, I have three sets of twins as nieces and nephews, and kind of weird, they can open their phones with their face ID each other's phone, but they can't open it up with their thumb because that's unique to you. So be unique. Don't sound like everybody else. Go a different path. And so just by looking at your hand and remembering each one of those, those are things that you can tell that nobody else can tell. AI can't Craft a story from that perspective or that point of view and you've probably got, I don't know, 50 or 60 things that you can say to start you off on this path to, to get cited by these large language models.
- [19:36]
A
Yeah. And Jim, when you look at all these things, is there a certain channel or type of content? I mean, that goes so broadly. Right. We're talking mostly into text, but you mentioned YouTube and then we talk about podcasts here and LinkedIn and SEO. What's the, what's the content you actually recommend? And that actually compounds.
- [19:57]
B
Yeah, And I would say it's a little different than traditional SEO because we've heard about backlinks and of course those are good and it is a indicator to Google that the site is important, but it's easy to game that. And you know, you've heard about people buying backlinks. Backlinks are still important because checks that box for coherence. So you're not just showing up in one place. You, you have this portfolio of places that you show up, but it's also about how reputable is that site that you're on. And so I would say if you're in an industry that has an association, a membership, you have to be certified, get a listing on that website. Local media are desperate for experts. Yeah. Go down to the local newspaper, the local TV station, the radio station, tell them who you are and what you do. If there is a charity that you have a heart for, get on the board of that charity, participate in some sort of fundraising for that charity, get involved with your local chamber of commerce. So these are kind of old school things. And then you did mentioned some. One of the interesting things, LinkedIn is a huge. And you mentioned B2B. LinkedIn posts are now visible through these large language models because of the trust factor associated with them. In the past, SEO didn't really give much credence to social media. But these large language models do you know you've read or probably seen a lot about Quora and Reddit, if you're so inclined, you can research and make comments on various threads associated with that medium. Is another place where you can publish content that's off site, but you don't have to conquer the world. You know, pick three or four of those.
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A
That's what I was going to ask you. There's so many, right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
So what's a minimal viable visibility system?
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B
Well, I would say the first thing you need to do is you need to go to chat. GPT Gemini Claude Perplexity Grok you know, most of these you can get on for free. You don't have to pay. Sure. Just type in who is and type your name. Yeah. And you're either going to get confused with somebody else, it's not going to know anything about you, or it's going to show that there's some visibility there.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So you have to set a baseline. And then you can also ask about your company, you can ask about your industry, you know, who's the expert in. And so that would be a place to start. The next thing you could do is pick one or two things. If you have not posted on LinkedIn before, go for it and you will be able to track over the course of that 90 days what's showing up and what's not showing up. And I'm going to give suggestions that don't require a lot of expense or effort or doesn't have to rely on anybody else. If there is content on your website that is not attributed to a person, go put a person's name within the company on that. Make sure that information is up to date. Put quotes in there from people within the organization who are experts and identify them by name. And then, you know, I know it's kind of scary, but start a YouTube channel. You know, video is the highest consumed content on the Internet and I've just explained why transcripts are important. And again, don't worry if in the 90 days you only get, you know, five followers, it's still going to be visible in the way that is associated with your business. And there's plenty of tutorials. I publish content all the time. If somebody wants to message me, I'll give you a few tips on what to do and what not to do. But yeah, I would say those are probably low hanging fruit for people to be able to engage in something that they can control and maybe distribute across the team. And yeah, a lot of people would
- [24:16]
A
probably, you know, cringe at that. You know, how do I become an authority without trying to become an influencer and without, you know, doing dances on Tick Tock which will embarrass me to no end. So how do I, how do I strike that balance between being authentic and being performative?
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B
Yeah, and I would say it is scary and it takes, it's like sh,
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A
it's like sign somebody in half, Jimmy, come on.
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B
Yes, it is. But I tell you, I made a commitment about a year ago that I was going to post a video every day, Monday through Friday on LinkedIn and, and the first videos were terrible. And you Know, after a few months, I realized that the algorithm really wasn't favoring video, so I started posting written content. But I would say, be okay with being bad and don't worry about being an influencer. And we've just gone over the five fingers and just start with those five fingers and just post about one finger a week. And when you see traction start to happen, you know, it's going to be fun. I mean, something that happened to me, the founder of our agency did not want to do that. And so he came to me about a year and a half ago and said, I'd like for you to be the face of the brand. And I was like, okay. I didn't know where to start, so I did a little bit of research, and then I spent last year just doing a variety of things, and then I kind of measured it quarter by quarter, and I said, okay, this is working. I'm wasting my time doing this. And, you know, it's going to vary a little bit by industry, but I would say the things that I've mentioned are solid. Pretty low friction to get into. Yeah, yeah.
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A
Let me. Let me take you around the bend here. So if AI makes information abundant, what becomes scarce.
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B
What becomes scarce is sort of what we've talked about. People being real people telling the truth and people, you know, hearing a story of defeat is much more interesting than hearing a story of winning. When you can move somebody from defeat to overcoming that defeat, that's the redemption story. That's the underdog story. That has lessons associated with it. If all you post is, you know, humble brags about, I won this and we did this and we closed this many deals. It. It's just really not interesting to people. People want to know because other businesses are out there struggling and they're going, how do I solve this problem? How do I get from point A to point B? And you've probably got a career's worth of information that would be helpful to people.
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A
Yeah, okay. I'm going to move into my lightning round, if that's okay.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What one trend our founders underestimating today?
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B
Well, I hate to throw the boomerang back and have it come hit me in the head again, but they're underestimating the importance of them showing up and being a voice for their organization.
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A
What technology will reshape demand? Gen Pass or Play?
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B
I'll play. I would say direct messaging that does not hit somebody with a close, but starts with, I really just want to get to know you and your story.
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A
Oh, being soft.
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B
Yeah.
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A
All Right. I like this one too, Jimmy. Give me one tactic that's dead. Although we're kind of on that same vein. Huh?
- [27:52]
B
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I would say keyword stuffing and buying backlinks.
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A
What about a police? A belief in personal branding that needs to go away,
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B
That it's rude and self serving.
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A
Okay, and now it. Now a. A very leading question. Will AI doom agencies?
- [28:21]
B
Wow, you must have been in our executive meeting last night.
- [28:24]
A
That's super loaded. I'm sorry? Well, I think the word I meant to use was commoditize instead of kill off. But answer it however you'd like. Of course you run a very successful agency with lots of customers. But, but it is a, it is a question, right? Because you. We're all on social media. We see the offers and the, you know, the prices and the. All that nonsense. So give me your take on that.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah, I would say one of the things that we're doing right now is having those real conversations about, you know, everybody said 10 months ago that SEO was dead. Well, it's not dead. So we have to be able to reinvent ourselves and transition because it's up to us to understand how conversations are shifting and how this pie is getting sliced up. And there's always room for somebody who can look ahead and know where things are going and help guide businesses in that direction. Yeah, sure, you can bring that in house. Yeah, you can figure it out on your own. But we work with people who don't want to figure it out on their own and they're relying on us to know the best path forward.
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A
Okay, so final question. If you're starting a company today, Jimmy, and you're in that sort of zone around the time you started your agency, what would you get into right now?
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B
Wow. I would say content. It's going to be two. Part one is to produce content that is not garbage and to make sure that I never release any content that is not premium quality at the highest level. And we used to say it would take six to eight months for content to do its thing. In SEO, you can get results in as quick as 30 days. And so that's what I would focus on, folks.
- [30:25]
A
That's Jimmy Gibson, the vice president of brand communication at the Thrive Internet Marketing agency. And thrive agency.com is the website. Jimmy, you've given me nothing but great information and insights, really quality discussion. I really appreciate your time. And yeah, I don't, I don't see that going away for you as a need. Now my other thought would be, well, what about the magician business. Can you fall back on that if. If AI does consume it all? How. What's the demand curve like in the magician world?
- [31:01]
B
Yeah, I would say everybody needs joy and wonder, and I still perform and get paid, and I would be happy to crank that up when needed.
- [31:10]
A
So true. Where are you based, by the way?
- [31:11]
B
Charleston, South Carolina. The company's out of Arlington, Texas, but yeah, I'm in Charleston.
- [31:17]
A
That's beautiful down there. I actually fly into Charleston once or twice a year.
- [31:21]
B
Oh, well, let me know.
- [31:22]
A
I will have to check out our magazine show, but I think a lot of what we try to do here, Jimmy, as we've discussed, is share some of these insights, ideas, tactics for the next generation. And we're moving into a very exciting new generation. I don't know how far we can see into the future, but it sure is fun to. To sit and chat about this. And I, again, I appreciate your time so much.
- [31:45]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Keith, thanks for inviting me on and had a great time.
- [31:50]
A
I did, too. Take care.
- [31:53]
B
All right.