A cold email pitched “AI search visibility” to a marketing manager, who called it a scam and told the sender to watch Dennis Yu videos instead. Here’s what happened when we actually checked the claims.
The Cold Email That Started It All
On April 3, 2026, Infinity Exteriors Marketing Manager Ethan Van De Hey received an unsolicited email from someone claiming his roofing company wasn’t showing up in ChatGPT recommendations. The sender pitched fixing “content and authority structuring issues,” with a guarantee, so Infinity Exteriors could start capturing sales from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
Ethan’s reply was blunt: “This SEO AI ChatGPT stuff is a scam.” He told the sender to watch Dennis Yu videos and “start an agency that is actually trying to help people and not take their money.”
That response landed in Dennis Yu’s inbox, and what followed was a credibility analysis that exposes a pattern playing out across the digital marketing industry right now.
The Rise of “AI SEO” Snake Oil
A new wave of agencies is cold-emailing business owners with a fear-based pitch: your competitors are showing up in ChatGPT and you’re not. They promise to fix “content and authority structuring” so you rank in AI-powered search tools. As Dennis has discussed on the Marketing Mechanic show, these pitches are proliferating, and the irony is that the people making them often can’t demonstrate the very authority they claim to build for others.
AI search optimization does matter. The catch is simple: trust and authority in AI systems work the same way they have always worked in digital marketing. You build them through real expertise and content that other credible sources actually cite. There are no shortcuts and no secret techniques that override the fundamentals.
The Credibility Audit: Practice What You Preach
After Ethan forwarded the cold email thread, Dennis conducted a thorough credibility analysis of the sender, applying the same content and authority standards that any AI system would use to determine trustworthiness. The findings were revealing.
The cold email came from a throwaway .info domain with zero web presence. The only Google result was a DNS lookup, and the domain redirected to a completely different niche site. This is a classic cold-email-at-scale tactic: using disposable domains so the main business domain doesn’t get flagged for spam. For someone selling trust and authority, that approach undermines both.
The sender’s own website had multiple 404 errors on key pages, including flagship blog posts that were indexed in Google but returned errors when visited. That’s basic SEO hygiene, the digital equivalent of a dentist with missing teeth.
Social proof was thin: a LinkedIn profile with only 4 followers, a Facebook page with roughly 183 likes, zero Trustpilot reviews, and a 0.0 rating. For someone claiming over 15 years of experience and hundreds of clients, the numbers didn’t add up.
The sender’s blog featured self-promotional “best of” articles where their own company was listed among top experts, a well-known SEO manipulation tactic, not genuine third-party validation. Geography was inconsistent across platforms, with different locations listed on LinkedIn, Facebook, Trustpilot, and the company website. Multiple brand names across different niches suggested a scattered operation rather than a focused authority.
The Irony Test: Does the AI Even Agree?
Perhaps the most telling finding was what happened when you actually asked ChatGPT about the sender’s brands. The AI’s own assessment was lukewarm at best, describing the operation as a “transition play” from traditional SEO to AI search. Even the AI tools the sender claimed to optimize for could see through the positioning.
That’s the core flaw in the “AI SEO” pitch. AI systems evaluate the same trust signals that have always mattered. They look at whether your identity is consistent, whether other credible sources mention you, and whether your content actually helps people. You can’t game your way into AI recommendations any more than you could sustainably game Google’s algorithm.
What Actually Builds Trust in AI Systems
The principles that determine whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or Perplexity recommend a business are not new. They are the same principles that BlitzMetrics and Dennis Yu have taught for years through frameworks like Dollar a Day and the Content Factory.
Real authority comes from doing the work. Publish helpful content. Earn mentions from credible third-party sources. Keep your identity consistent across platforms. Collect authentic reviews from real customers. As Dennis explains on the Marketing Mechanic, so many people are trying to pitch “ranking in ChatGPT” when they themselves don’t rank, because they haven’t done the foundational work that AI systems rely on to determine who deserves to be recommended.
The Standards of Excellence framework captures this simply: if you want to be seen as trustworthy by AI or humans, you need to actually be trustworthy. That means your website works. Your content is accurate. Your social profiles match. Your reviews are real. Your expertise is validated by others, not just by yourself.
What I Told Chris Raulf About the AI SEO Hype
This pattern, salespeople pitching “AI SEO” services they can’t actually deliver, is exactly what I broke down when Chris Raulf invited me onto his online summit. Chris opened the session with the same framing he uses for every event he runs: “I do these online summits because after 30-plus years in the SEO space, I’ve had the privilege of building relationships with some of the sharpest minds in the industry. No fluff, no sales pitches, just real stories and practical know-how you can actually use.” That’s the bar he sets, and it’s the opposite of what the cold-email crowd is doing.
Watch the full Chris Raulf AI SEO & GEO Online Summit segment below for the complete conversation:
When Chris asked me to introduce myself on the summit, I told him: “I was one of the first folks at Yahoo, and as a search engine engineer, this was before the term SEO was even invented. When you are gathering more data than commercial databases are able to handle, you encounter specific problems.” That’s the lens I bring to AI search today. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The systems have just gotten bigger.
Here are a few points I shared with Chris that reinforce why most “AI SEO” pitches are smoke and mirrors:
- AI ranks entities, not websites. Every person, product, company, and location has what I call a social security number in Google’s Knowledge Graph, a KGM ID. ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity all pull from the same entity data that Google has been organizing for years. If your entity isn’t well-documented with corroborating citations across multiple independent sources, no “ChatGPT ranking” service is going to fix it for you.
- Why DigiMarCon ranks #1 in AI answers. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini for the world’s top digital marketing conference series, and DigiMarCon comes up. Not because we have a hundred thousand attendees. We don’t. It’s because there are so many citations across websites, emails, and attendee content reinforcing that claim. That’s the same entity-building work any legitimate AI visibility strategy requires.
- AI Overviews already take two-thirds of the search results. I told Chris that website traffic looks like it has dropped sharply in recent months, but that doesn’t mean your information is being shown less. It means users are consuming it inside Google instead of clicking through. The idea of ranking number one or being on the first page is going to matter much less in the next year or two.
- You don’t need to optimize separately for ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Practically speaking, it makes no difference. All of them depend on data that Google has already gathered better than anyone. Distribute real, verifiable information about your entity in the places that already feed the LLMs, and every model can pick up on it.
- The winning agencies use AI to deliver results, not to sell packages. I pointed Chris to my friend Erik Huberman at Hawke Media as the counter-example. $700 million in revenue, 23 acquired agencies, hiring aggressively, because he’s using AI to drive provable sales for clients, not to pad retainers with busywork.
Here’s a quick clip from the conversation where I explain that point in 30 seconds:
Run the Test on the Next Email That Hits Your Inbox
Don’t take my word for it. The next time an “AI SEO” pitch lands in your inbox, do four things before you reply. Open the sender’s domain and look for broken pages. Check their LinkedIn follower count and Trustpilot rating. Search Google for their company name and see what shows up on the first page. Then ask ChatGPT what it knows about them. If the answers are thin, the offer is thinner. Forward the email to a marketing peer who’s been burned by one of these pitches before, and ask what they’d do. That five-minute audit will save you a quarter of wasted retainer.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.