This is the first time I’ve ever spoken publicly of this new AI-SEO tactic for getting perfect-fit customers from search (quickly).

You’ll want to take notes…

In this edition:

• 💥 How I beat the “SEO takes 6-12 months” myth for a B2B startup starting from ZERO
• 🎯 BREAKING: Reddit is overrated for LLM citations for BOFU searches
• 🗞️ Stories to not doomscroll

💥 How I beat the “SEO takes 6-12 months” myth for a B2B startup starting from ZERO

Generating new paid customers within a month from content is actually pretty easy if I’m working with a new client that already has old content and an SEO presence.

But if a new client is literally starting from zero? Every SEO expert will tell you to expect to wait 6-12 months for results to kick in. And most of the time, they’re not even talking about new revenue.

I’m pleased to say, I just smashed that myth for a B2B startup that was starting with zero SEO traffic and zero content (besides just having a homepage set up).

Instead of defaulting to publishing blog content, we tried something I had never done for a client before: We published 8 new landing pages for specific industries and use cases, with about ~9 hours of work.

One month later, our client brought in their first customer ($200/m) from SEO — all because of the landing pages we published.

Here’s the play that you can copy:

1. Identify 1) the use cases of your product that cause customers to buy, and 2) the industries that your best customers are in. IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH SEARCH VOLUME KEYWORD TOOLS SAY THEY HAVE.
2. Instead of stressing about creating a bunch of perfect landing pages, just duplicate your home page and tweak the copy to align with each use case or industry. I spent ~1 hour on each. Were they perfect? Not at all. But they’re a great starting point for SEO and training LLMs for whom they should recommend your product.
3. Once published, we submitted the pages to Search Console and tracked their rankings with ProRankTracker and user engagement with GA4.

The optimizations I made to be visible in search and AI:

• Each meta title and H1 simply included the main “[category software / service] [industry / use case]” keyword and a short value prop that aligned with the target ICP.
• Meta titles were kept <59 characters to fit on Google
• The subheadline spoke directly to the target ICP’s pains
• For the rest of the landing page copy, I simply tweaked the pain points and unique selling propositions to focus on the target ICP

The end product for each was a 90% unique landing page based on the homepage.

The results within the first month:

• High intent (but low-volume) traffic started to roll in from ChatGPT — directly to the landing pages
• 4 of the 8 landing pages ranked on Google’s first page and showed up in AI Overviews as citations
• AI started to recommend my client’s brand for those specific industries and use cases
• The first trial and paying $200/month customer from Search

Why this worked:

• The keywords were extremely long tail and specific, so competition was low
• The pages were made for specific industries, use cases, and solutions, making it easy for LLMs to recommend our client’s brand
• The content was clear enough for Google and LLMs to understand who the product was for

The best part? My client told me the lead was a perfect fit and matched other customers they had helped before.

That’s the part most people miss. These pages aren’t meant to be huge traffic magnets. They’re for attracting perfect-fit buyers.

Want a similar strategy designed for your B2B company? Schedule a free strategy session to get a custom AI-SEO playbook.

🎯 BREAKING: Reddit is overrated for LLM citations for BOFU searches

Turns out… most of the studies coming out about what sources LLMs cite most are misleading due to broad industry bias.

This Grow & Convert study pushes back on the usual GEO advice that says “get mentioned on Reddit, Wikipedia, and Forbes.” That consensus is actually coming from studies that mash up citations across thousands of random queries.

Soooo, not exactly automatically relevant to your niche B2B industry.

When you take a deeper look into product-specific prompts, the sources change substantially.

Grow & Convert analyzed 120 prompts across 5 industries, totaling 2,440 citations, and found LLMs mostly cite sites that actually live inside the category.

Of the prompts analyzed across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, 60% were bottom-of-funnel, 23% were mid-funnel, and 17% were top-of-funnel.

What showed up in citations:

• ~59% were direct industry sites (1,444)
• ~26% were industry-adjacent sites (649)
• ~14% were general sites (347)

In other words, 86% of citations were within the industry ecosystem.

They also found LLMs cited their clients’ own content in 88% of the topics they tracked, a BIG reminder that “owned content that ranks” is still the most reliable starting point.

So what should B2B teams do with this?

• Start with your product-intent prompts, then reverse engineer the sources that appear there.
• Prioritize ranking your own pages for those topics.
• If you do outreach, target the niche sites already getting cited for your category, not generic mega domains.

Sure, big general sites showed up far more in mass-market categories, where review sites and big publishers dominate the ecosystem. But in niche categories, LLMs mostly stayed inside the niche.

😡 Demand Gen marketers when they see a signup form

“So, you’re telling me I can’t get everything for free???”

🗞️ Stories to not doomscroll

Google rolled out its December 2025 Core Update. Expect the rollout over the next three weeks, with ranking volatility until it finishes.

Google’s Nick Fox says optimizing for Google’s AI search is essentially the same as traditional SEO. His guidance is simple: build a great site and great content for users, not for algorithms.

Study finds ChatGPT frequently cites recently updated “best X” lists, including self-promotional ones. Ranking highly on comparison lists and keeping them fresh boosts AI visibility.

Thumbnail pro David Altizer says clicks come from simple composition and curiosity hooks. AI speeds up creation, but unique ideas still win clicks.

Google upgrades Search Live with Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio, making voice responses more natural and conversational. Rolling out in the US, it also boosts live translation and voice agents.

Google is rolling out Preferred Sources globally, letting users star “Top Stories” publishers to see more from them. Google also announced Spotlighting subscriptions, where it’ll prioritize surfacing citations from subscribed publishers in Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.

AI is reshaping search behavior, shifting users from searching keywords to conversational, visual, and multimodal queries. Searching for keywords is down ~45% since 2020, but conversational AI search is up 25%.

🤝 Need a hand with your content marketing?

I run Stat Digital, a fractional content marketing team for B2B SaaS companies.

We can help you:

• Create blogs that capture ready-to-buy leads from SEO.
• Launch and run newsletters to nurture the thousands of neglected contacts going stale in your CRM (like this one)

Want to uncover your top opportunities to generate new customers from your content? Schedule a free strategy session here.