The Search Signal

Ask an LLM about a well-known company and it answers fast, and usually gets it right. Ask something obscure and it can be just as confident and completely wrong. This episode traces that behavior back 40 years, to two rival ideas about how to make a machine understand the world, and shows how their recent fusion is what actually answers questions about your company in AI Search today. What you’ll...

Every marketing team has a search dashboard. But that dashboard has a structural blind spot: it can’t see what’s happening in AI search, and it won’t flag that anything is missing. When a buyer finds your brand through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity, that visit typically lands as direct traffic with no source attribution. There’s no indication AI was involved and nothing in your reporting...

As AI platforms reshape the search landscape, many marketers are falling back on an old, unreliable playbook: chasing individual keyword ranks. In this second episode of The Search Signal, Michael Transon explains why a single snapshot of an AI search response is just noise—and why you need to update your tracking strategy. He breaks down how platforms like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity source...

Most search marketers have gotten two completely different answers to this question, and both sound convincing. One camp says answer engine optimization (AEO) is its own discipline that needs its own budget. The other says it's just search engine optimization (SEO) with a new name and your existing program already covers it. In this debut episode of The Search Signal, Michael Transon cuts through...

The Search Signal is a weekly podcast from Victorious founder and CEO Michael Transon, built for marketing leaders trying to make sense of how search is changing. Each week, Michael takes one thing happening in search, breaks down what it means, and helps you think through your next move. No hype, no filler. Just clear thinking for busy marketing leaders. New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe wher...