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AI Search Visibility

Control how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews describe you when a buyer, seller, or client researches you — audit the answers, trace them to sources, feed the AIs your canonical facts. Use to win the AI first impression before any deal conversation.

Skill file ai-search-visibility.md · last updated Aug 12, 2026

Use this when you want AI to give the right answer about you — because buyers, sellers, and premium clients now ask ChatGPT before they ever reply to your email. Step 6 of the Local Service Spotlight method.

Inputs

• Your name, niche, entity home, and every profile URL.
• Entity-clarity findings and Person schema from knowledge-panel-entity-seo.
• Your differentiation sentence and top-5 proof points from personal-brand-strategist.
• Prior test-grid answers, if you’ve run this before — you’ll diff against them.

The buyer’s test grid (run verbatim)

Where the answers come from

• ChatGPT — training data plus live browsing; your entity home and high-authority mentions feed it.
• Perplexity — live retrieval with cited URLs; it quotes specific pages, so your definitive article matters most here.
• Google AI Overviews — the Knowledge Graph plus top-ranked pages; everything you fixed in Step 5 compounds here.

Steps

1. Run the grid in all three engines. Paste raw answers — no cleanup, no cherry-picking.
2. Mark every line thin, missing, or wrong. Wrong includes stale titles and another person’s facts bleeding in — entity collision surfacing in AI.
3. Trace each weakness to its source: the page, profile, mention, or schema field the model is reading — or can’t find.
4. Check for a definitive article on your topic. No canonical page means the models improvise; hand that gap to definitive-article-writer.
5. Produce 5 ranked actions: a page to strengthen, a mention to earn, a fact to add to the entity home, an inconsistency to clean, an article to write.
6. Re-test in 30 days and diff. This is MAA: metrics (the grid) → analysis (the trace) → action (the five fixes).

Output

• Verbatim current-state AI answers, a gap list traced to specific sources, and 5 ranked actions to make AI describe you the way you want for deals.

For DealCon — agency owners & acquirers

If you run an agency: when a prospect asks AI “who should run marketing for my [industry] business” and you’re the named answer, the call starts closed — inbound at premium pricing. If you buy & sell companies: sellers vet acquirers in ChatGPT now. When AI states your buy box and closed deals accurately, qualified sellers self-select toward you — off-market deal flow. Your edge: name the one question in your niche you must be the answer to, then aim all five fixes at that single question.

Run on a persistent agent (Fable 5)

• Loop to done: run the full grid in all three engines, verbatim, every time — and loop until every thin, missing, or wrong line is traced to a specific source and covered by one of the 5 ranked actions.
• Self-verify: paste raw answers, no cherry-picking, then grade them against the differentiation sentence and proof points held in memory.
• Compound with memory: store each run’s verbatim answers so the 30-day re-test is a diff, not a fresh audit — the trend across runs is the real metric.
• Log the run: the before/after diff is the meta-article — and the proof a client or counterparty can check.

See boil-the-ocean.md for the full operating principles.

Notes — Dennis’s method

• Same engine as the Knowledge Panel: clear entity + agreeing sources. Fix it for Google and you largely fix it for the AIs that read Google’s view of you.
• AI quotes canonical pages. ONE definitive article per topic; thin posts orbit it and link back. Competing with your own hub is content vandalism.
• Specificity survives the model. Zach Peyton’s facts — Superior Fence & Rail, largest US fence franchise, 110+ locations, $310M+ — get repeated verbatim. Vague bios get paraphrased into mush.
• George Paladichuk built NaiL AI so that when roofers ask AI about AI, he is the named answer. Pick your question and own it the same way.
• Don’t argue with the output — fix the sources. Models repeat what the web agrees on about you.
• Run this before every raise, listing, or launch. The answer changes as the web changes — know it before your counterparty does.

Definitive article & pairings

• Reference: https://blitzmetrics.com/definitive-article-guide/ · https://blitzmetrics.com/how-my-ai-agents-document-and-improve-themselves-meta-articles-definitive-articles/
• Pairs with: → dollar-a-day-strategist → content-factory → definitive-article-writer

Learned in the field

Appended automatically by the self-improvement loop (Skill-Learnings/): dated lessons from real runs. Newest at the bottom.

<!– learning:2026-07-20-ahrefs-free-dr-endpoint-auth-deadline –> July 20, 2026 (from: anthony-hilb-seo-tracker (weekly-brand-maa) — refiled from a stray root note by skill-pack-propagation on July 21, 2026)

Ahrefs’ free Domain Rating endpoint stops accepting unauthenticated calls on August 1, 2026.

⚠ RESOLVED August 3, 2026 — read this first: use site-explorer-domain-rating, always.
Everything in this section down to “Rules for any skill that pulls Ahrefs Domain Rating” is
the historical record of a deprecation that no longer needs tracking. Do not act on the dates.

The public-domain-rating-free MCP call still returns the normal DR value today but now carries a deprecation warning: “Unauthenticated access to this endpoint will be removed on 2026-08-01. Requests will require a free API key.” Every weekly/monthly tracker that pulls DR (anthony-hilb, wtp, trenton-sandler, cxotalk, family-law, somba, and any future tracker) will start erroring from August if its call path is unauthenticated.

Rules for any skill that pulls Ahrefs Domain Rating:

RESOLVED — August 3, 2026. Use site-explorer-domain-rating. Always. There is no date left to track and no key to register. The three dated rules below are superseded, kept only as the record.

Why the free endpoint was retired from our skills rather than migrated:

• We already hold the key. The workspace MCP authenticates with a paid Lite key

(subscription-info-limits-and-usage returns real workspace data, so auth demonstrably works). The “free API key” in Ahrefs’ warning is for callers who hold no key at all. Registering a second one would have added a credential to manage in exchange for nothing.

• Identical numbers. Verified August 3, 2026 across two domains: anthonyhilb.com returned DR 10

from both endpoints, michaelkrigsman.com DR 1.0 from both.

• The authenticated endpoint is MORE accurate. public-domain-rating-free lags the authenticated

series by about a day, which is exactly what put a wrong DR 11 into the anthony-hilb 2026-07-20 snapshot. Switching removes a known defect; it is not merely deprecation-proofing.

• Cost is not a constraint. ~50 units per call against a 100,000/month Lite allowance. For many

domains at once, batch-analysis takes up to 100 targets in ONE call at ~18 units each, verified to return DR values identical to the single endpoint.

The meta-lesson, which is the part worth keeping. This block carried a hard-coded vendor date into six skill files, and only ONE of them ever received the July 27 correction from August 1 to August 10. The other five still read “Until August 1, 2026” on August 3 — a deadline that was both wrong and already expired, still instructing agents to prefer the dying endpoint. A conditional written around a vendor’s date has to be re-verified in every copy, forever; an unconditional instruction needs nothing. Prefer the instruction that cannot go stale over the one that is merely correct today — and when a correction lands, grep for the other copies in the same breath. Same shape as the “a standing contract recorded in one file is not a standing contract” rule in Skill-Learnings/README.md.

Superseded, retained as the record:

1. ~~Until August 2026 keep using public-domain-rating-free first — it works and costs 0 units.~~
2. ~~If it errors, fall back once to site-explorer-domain-rating and state the switch in the report.~~
3. ~~Permanent fix: register a free API key (about a 5-minute setup).~~

Learned July 20, 2026. Resolved August 3, 2026.

<!– learning:2026-07-27-serp-depth-needs-max-crawl-pages –> July 27, 2026 (from: cxotalk-weekly-maa run)

DataForSEO depth alone does NOT go past page 1 — you need max_crawl_pages

Checking whether michaelkrigsman.com still ranked for “michael krigsman”:

` serp_organic_live_advanced { keyword, location_name, language_code, depth: 30 } `

returned 9 organic results and no michaelkrigsman.com. Combined with a live Chrome render that also didn’t show it, the obvious read was “the entity home dropped off page one.” That would have been the report’s headline — and it would have been wrong.

depth sets how many results to return; max_crawl_pages (default 1) sets how many SERP pages to crawl. Re-running with max_crawl_pages: 4 returned 21 results and showed four michaelkrigsman.com URLs — homepage at rank_group 7, /about/ 9, /home/ 12, /connect/ 14. The real story was the opposite of the false one: the site went from 1 ranking URL to 4.

Rules:

1. Any “did we lose a ranking?” check must pass max_crawl_pages ≥ 3. depth alone is a

page-1 query, no matter how large you set it.

1. Never report a disappearance from a single SERP pull. Two pulls one minute apart

genuinely disagreed on this keyword (one had the homepage at #7, the other didn’t have the domain at all). Volatility at the page-1/page-2 boundary is real — report “contested foothold,” with both observations, rather than a clean win or loss.

1. A logged-in browser render is a third opinion, not a tiebreaker. Personalization makes

it systematically different from a clean datacenter pull; prior runs quoted “#8 clean / #3 browser” for the same query on the same day.

Severity note: this nearly reported a client’s site as having fallen out of the SERP entirely. Learned July 27, 2026.

<!– learning:2026-07-29-a-redirect-you-ship-is-a-redirect-you-own –> July 29, 2026 (from: SEO-tree link audit, July 29, 2026)

A URL you ship inside a skill pack is a URL you have to keep alive

Our own published packs told every installer’s agent to read localservicespotlight.com/ai-agent-application-password/ for login-free publishing. That URL had become a double 301 — one hop to a renamed article, a second hop to its current home. It still resolved, so nothing complained. It was sitting in boil-the-ocean.md and video-repurposing-agent.md across four public packs, in two generators, in the daily checklist, in the project’s own CLAUDE.md, and on the trunk page of the whole system.

A redirect chain is not a broken link, which is exactly why it survives: every check passes, every page loads, and the crawler quietly discounts the destination. Sixteen references were repointed at the final URL, at the source, so the next rebuild ships the fix to everyone.

Rules:

1. Cite the URL that answers 200, never a URL that answers 301. Follow every external link

you are about to write into a skill file, and record where it ends up, not where you started.

1. A URL inside a downloadable pack is published surface area. It reaches people you cannot

email later. Treat a link in a shipped skill file with the same care as a link on a page.

1. Fix at the source, then let propagation do the distribution. Editing a live page fixes

one copy; editing the skill file fixes every copy on the next run.

1. Add the dead URL to the checker, not just to your memory. verify_link_graph.py now

fails if any node reintroduces it and if any node sits behind a redirect hop at all.

1. A short URL does not need a redirect plugin. WordPress core’s

redirect_guess_404_permalink 301s an unmatched path to the single post whose slug it prefixes, so /persistent reaches /persistent-agents/ for free. Do NOT publish a stub page on the short slug to fake this — a thin page that competes with the article is the exact content-vandalism the definitive-article standard exists to prevent. Assert the short URL’s final destination on every run, because the guess turns into a 404 the day a second matching slug ships.

Learned July 29, 2026.

<!– learning:2026-07-29-a-check-that-cannot-fail-is-not-a-check –> July 29, 2026 (from: redirect-chain audit, July 29, 2026)

A check built on a branch that can never run reports perfect health forever

Two scripts written the same day counted redirect hops like this:

try: r = urllib.request.urlopen(req) # HEAD return hops, r.status except urllib.error.HTTPError as e: # <– catch the 301 here …follow Location, hops += 1

That except can never fire. urlopen installs HTTPRedirectHandler by default and follows 301/302 transparently, returning the FINAL response. So the counter returned 0 hops for every URL on earth — including one we had already proved by hand was a double 301. The first audit printed “34 rules · 0 chained” and read as good news.

Fixing the counter turned that into: 6 chains on one site, 18 on another, one self-redirecting rule with 12,190 hits looping forever, and the busiest rule on the site (829,576 hits) throwing away a trailing slash and buying a second hop on every single request.

Rules:

1. Before trusting a checker, make it fail on purpose. Feed it a case you KNOW is bad. If it

passes, the checker is broken — not the world. Both scripts now call a selftest() that fetches a URL known to redirect and aborts the whole run if it measures zero hops.

1. Any library call with “convenience” behaviour is a checker’s enemy. Following redirects,

retrying, normalising, caching: all of it hides the exact signal a verifier exists to see. Measure at the lowest level that still answers the question.

1. A try/except around a network call deserves the same scrutiny as the happy path. An

except clause that cannot be reached is dead code that looks like diligence.

1. Zero is a suspicious answer. Zero orphans, zero chains, zero errors on the first run of a

brand-new check almost always means the check is not wired to anything. Confirm one true positive exists before believing the zero.

Learned July 29, 2026.

<!– learning:2026-07-29-read-the-plugin-source-before-writing-to-its-table –> July 29, 2026 (from: collapsing 24 redirect chains across localservicespotlight.com + dennisyu.com, July 29, 2026)

When a plugin’s REST API is undocumented, download the plugin and read it

Two redirect tables needed surgical edits and neither API was documented in a way that answered the only question that mattered: what happens to the fields I do not send? Guessing against a live table with 34 and 192 rules on it was not acceptable, and probing by trial risked detaching real redirects carrying thousands of hits.

So both plugins were downloaded from the wordpress.org repo at the exact installed version and read. Ten minutes, and it turned two unknowns into contracts:

• RankMath Redirections has no route that LISTS redirections. The read path is

status/exportSettings (redirections ride along in the export). The write path is updateRedirection, which is really the post-metabox save handler: it rebuilds the rule from (redirection_id, url_to, sources, header_code). Omit redirectionSources and the source is rebuilt EMPTY, silently detaching the rule from the URL it exists to catch. It also rejects an empty objectID, which a standalone rule does not have — pass an id matching no post, because a real one makes that post’s metabox claim it owns a redirect.

• Redirection plugin (redirection/v1/redirect) sanitises the whole payload and then does a

full row UPDATE. A partial patch drops every field you left out. The payload has to be the GET item echoed back with only the target changed — and hits / last_access must be OMITTED, because the sanitiser maps them onto last_count / last_access and rewrites the counters.

• Its import path is safe but useless for repairs: set_redirections() skips any row whose

source already matches an existing rule, so re-importing corrected copies changes nothing.

Rules:

1. Read the source before the first write, not after the first surprise. curl the versioned

zip from wordpress.org, unzip, read the sanitiser and the update method. Cheaper than one bad write to a production table.

1. Find out whether update means PATCH or REPLACE. If the model sanitises into a fresh array

and calls $wpdb->update with it, every field you omit is erased.

1. Audit every redirect engine a site has, not the first one you find. dennisyu.com runs

RankMath Redirections AND the Redirection plugin at once. X-Redirect-By proved the plugin wins; fixing the RankMath copies changed nothing a visitor could see — 2 of 13 “fixes” held and the rest still measured 3-4 hops. X-Redirect-By on the response is the ground truth for who is actually in charge.

1. Never auto-rewrite a regex rule. Its source is a pattern, not a URL, so hops cannot be

measured, and its target may contain capture groups. Report it and stop.

1. A rule pointing at itself is a live infinite loop, not a chain. Detect “never lands after

N hops” as its own class and never auto-repair it — the correct destination is an editorial decision. One such rule had taken 12,190 hits.

1. Check the trailing slash on high-volume rules. A target of /$1 where WordPress canonical

wants /$1/ costs an extra 301 on every request. On the busiest rule on the site that was 829,576 requests each paying for a hop nobody needed.

Learned July 29, 2026.

<!– learning:2026-08-03-prefer-the-instruction-that-cannot-go-stale –> August 3, 2026 (from: Ahrefs free-DR deprecation follow-up after the anthony-hilb-seo-tracker run)

A conditional built on a vendor’s date rots in every copy except the one you corrected

The anthony-hilb report flagged that Ahrefs’ public-domain-rating-free endpoint stops accepting unauthenticated calls on August 10, 2026 — seven days out, and the date of the tracker’s own next run — and recommended a “5-minute free API key registration.” Chasing that down produced two findings, and the second is the one that generalises.

1. The registration was never necessary, and checking took one call. The workspace MCP already authenticates with a paid Lite key. The “free API key” in Ahrefs’ warning is aimed at callers who hold no key at all. site-explorer-domain-rating returns the identical number on the key we already have — verified across two domains the same day (anthonyhilb.com DR 10 from both endpoints, michaelkrigsman.com DR 1.0 from both) — for ~50 units against a 100,000/month allowance. It is also more accurate: the free endpoint lags the authenticated series by about a day, which is precisely what wrote a wrong DR 11 into the 2026-07-20 snapshot. So the “deprecation fix” was really a defect fix that had been available all along.

Rule: before scheduling work to satisfy a vendor’s new requirement, check whether the credential you already hold satisfies it. A deprecation notice describes the vendor’s default caller, not your setup.

2. The instruction had already rotted in five of six copies. The block telling agents to prefer the free endpoint lived in six skill files. On July 27 the cutoff moved from August 1 to August 10, and exactly ONE file — weekly-brand-maa.md — received the correction. On August 3 the other five still read “Until August 1, 2026 keep using public-domain-rating-free first”: a deadline that was both wrong and two days expired, still actively instructing agents toward the dying endpoint. Nobody noticed, because each file was individually plausible and nothing compares them.

The fix was not to propagate the new date. It was to delete the date: the rule is now unconditional — use site-explorer-domain-rating, always — with the dated version struck through beneath it as the record, plus a pointer at the top of the section so an agent reading top-to-bottom cannot hit the stale narrative first.

Rules:

1. Prefer the instruction that cannot go stale over the one that is merely correct today. “Use X”

survives indefinitely. “Use X until DATE, then Y” is a maintenance obligation in every copy, forever, and it fails silently and invisibly — an expired conditional reads exactly like a live one.

1. **When a correction lands on a duplicated instruction, grep for the other copies in the same

breath.** This is the same shape as the standing rule in Skill-Learnings/README.md that “a standing contract recorded in one file is not a standing contract,” and the same shape as the July 29→31 gap between a rebuild gate being learned and the runner being changed. Three independent recurrences means the default is wrong: assume duplication until a grep proves otherwise.

1. A date copied out of a vendor’s warning is the least durable thing in a skill file. Where one

must be written down, write it as “as of <Month D, YYYY> the API said X” so the staleness is visible on the page — and pair it with a dateless instruction that stays correct if nobody ever revisits it.

1. Check the whole fleet of callers, not the one that surfaced the problem. Of 31 scheduled task

prompts, only two named the dying endpoint and two others were already on the authenticated one. Grepping the mirrored prompt set answered in one call what would otherwise have been six file reads and a guess.

Learned August 3, 2026.

Other skills: boil-the-ocean · client-access-checklist · client-relationship-cadence · content-agent · content-factory · definitive-article-writer

The full run order is on the skill-pack directory. Every skill here is one task from the Task Library — the library is the catalogue of what can be done; a pack is the subset you install; an agent is who runs it.