AI for Founders with Ryan Estes The New SEO Is Happening Without You
The theme of Q1 2026 is "I feel behind." Every founder, from the scrappy solo operator to the venture-backed exec, is feeling the same anxiety. Site traffic is dropping. AI chatbots are answering questions that used to send customers to your website. And the brands that wait to figure this out are not just losing clicks. They are losing the narrative.
Justin Inman spent nearly a decade at Google selling enterprise ad tech to the world's largest marketers, companies like Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, and Unilever. He watched those companies resist the digital shift, then scramble to catch up. When he left Google and started watching his own AI usage explode, and then noticed his mom casually quoting ChatGPT, he knew something bigger was coming. He got demos of the biggest players in the AI visibility space. One demo was so underwhelming, so narrow in its thinking, that he started his own company the very next day. That company is Emberos, and it is building what Justin calls the operating system for AI brand visibility.
The core insight Justin brings to this conversation is deceptively simple: your brand exists inside AI systems right now, and you have zero control over what those systems are saying about you. Every LLM, from ChatGPT to Gemini to Perplexity to Grok, has formed its own opinion about your pricing, your product, your genre, your identity. And those opinions are often wrong. Emberos measured 500 brands and found that 90% have factual errors across at least one major language model. One small studio picked up a festival film that every AI in the world had mislabeled as a violent thriller with a John Wick comp. Nobody dies in that movie. It took four weeks of strategic fix packs to correct the narrative.
The Framework: Paid, Owned, and Earned Across the AI Layer
Justin's central argument is that most players in the AI visibility space are thinking too small. Their answer to the problem is to publish more AI-generated content, flood syndicated publishers, and hope the LLMs pick it up. Justin calls this "push to publish," and he says it is not only ineffective, it is dangerous. LLMs will get smarter. The brands that played these hacks six months ago are already getting delisted.
Emberos takes a fundamentally different approach, mapping AI visibility across the full digital footprint:
- Paid: Connected TV ads, programmatic spend, and paid placements all feed signals into AI systems. Emberos is running live studies with major streamers to measure the correlation between TV exposure and generative AI search behavior.
- Owned: Your website, FAQs, schema markup, and YouTube captions all contribute to how LLMs read and cite your brand. If your site is not structured for LLM readability, it is invisible to the systems now acting as the front door of the internet.
- Earned: Podcasts, PR placements, influencer content, and press all create citations inside AI systems. Remarkably, Emberos now recommends podcast appearances as a strategic fix pack for brand visibility, because podcast transcripts are among the cleanest, most credible training data available to LLMs.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinman11/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
https://kitcaster.com/application