This week I welcome Alisa Scharf, Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive, to the podcast, to ask the question she fires back at every client who walks in wanting to "win at AI visibility." Her answer flips the whole project: fix what the models get wrong about you before you chase the category terms. We got into her research on why lower-authority websites earn more citations, why LLMs recommend a brand only 2.3% of the time, and the gap nobody is tooling for: getting an agent to actually use your website, not find it.

About the Guest

Alisa Scharf is Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive, where she runs the AI practice across the agency's client accounts. Her team's research spans hundreds of thousands of pages and tens of thousands of prompts, and she argues that citations are a leading indicator, not a business outcome.

Chapters

  • 00:00 - The first question Alisa asks a new client
  • 04:08 - Brand accuracy: what models get wrong about you
  • 06:57 - Defense wins championships
  • 09:54 - The brand accuracy audit
  • 13:12 - Why lower-authority websites get cited more
  • 15:57 - Citations are page two of Google
  • 19:37 - LLMs recommend a brand 2.3% of the time
  • 21:49 - The agentic browsing tooling gap
  • 28:13 - Losing 30-80% of organic traffic
  • 37:31 - How a 15-year-old brand catches up
  • 40:24 - What we will get wrong in 12 months
  • 43:18 - Where to find Alisa

Key Takeaways

  1. Defense before offense. Pick five factual prompts about your own company, founding, location, what you sell, who you compete with, and run them across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Fix what the models get wrong before you spend a dollar chasing category terms.
  2. Citations are a leading indicator, not a result. They swing by month and by model. Real success shows up in direct traffic, branded search, and brand recognition, none of which sit neatly on a dashboard.
  3. Visibility is not readiness. Getting cited and getting an agent to actually buy, book, or provision on a customer's behalf are two different problems. Most providers sell the first and call it the second.

Notable Quotes

"You can flip an old house and turn it into a really impressive place to live. You can't flip an old house and turn it into a skyscraper."

"Everything we just spent the last 10, 15, 20 years learning is now doing you a disservice, because you really have to turn to a fresh page and say, where is my audience?"


Resources

Connect with Alisa Scharf

No Hacks is a publication about the agentic web. Articles, a weekly podcast, and a newsletter for SEO, CRO, and web professionals who want to stay visible, trusted, and findable as agents take over. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.

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