Show Up or Get Left Out: Tailoring Your Digital Presence for AI Search w/ Erik Schlosser | IMC Live

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If you’re not referenced, you’re invisible.

That’s how Gorilla 76 founder Joe Sullivan frames AI search, and it’s the problem we take on in this episode. Keyword stuffing doesn’t work on an LLM. You either answer your buyers’ questions well enough to get cited, or you’re not in the conversation.

This episode is a recording of IMC Live from August 6, 2026. Gorilla 76 Strategist Erik Schlosser joins hosts Allen Fennewald and Chelsey Trevino, plus a room full of industrial marketers asking their own questions.

Erik says that most manufacturers respond to AI search backward. They feel behind, so they rush loads of blog posts, and rushed blog posts are worth less than three good ones. What actually earns citations is depth in a niche you own, published consistently, all of it pointing back to the same few things you want to be known for.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How AI builds trust in a source

• Which SEO fundamentals still apply, and which signals are genuinely new

• The content cascade: one pillar asset, cut down across channels, one through line

• The importance of starting with a strong pillar piece

• Heading structure, the inverted pyramid, and why FAQ pages get cited • Freshness, and how to handle it when your product is 70 years old

• Thought leadership from a person rather than a company

• Where a one-person marketing department should start.

We also went through two worked examples: An in-house motor blog, which now outranks their own product pages in AI search, and a construction company’s personal stories, which earn credibility with LLMs and get shared by the families of the people in them.

IMC Live runs twice a month inside the Industrial Marketing Collective. Next up on August 20: Brad Litwin on using Google retargeting to expand your reach.