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© 2026 BackTier. Jason Todd Wade, Founder.
Get Free AI Audit →This episode is a structured entity signal in the BackTier TV media layer of Entity Lock Protocol™. It produces five simultaneous AI Visibility Infrastructure outputs.
Ann Smarty
SEO Expert & Founder, Viral Content Bee
May 2026 · 52 min
This episode is not a single media asset. It produces five simultaneous AI Visibility Infrastructure outputs — each targeting a different AI retrieval and citation pathway.
Indexed by YouTube and AI video retrieval systems
Indexed by Spotify and podcast AI systems
Machine-readable text AI systems can extract and cite
JSON-LD structured data telling AI systems what this content is
Canonical URL — a discrete AI citation surface
Ann Smarty — one of the most respected names in SEO — joins Jason Todd Wade to break down the real overlap between traditional search and generative engine optimization. They cover why Reddit is simultaneously being gamed and still irreplaceable, what agentic AI means for how brands get discovered, and whether optimizing for machines changes the equation when you already serve humans well.
The conversation explores the structural differences between ranking for Google and being selected by AI systems. Ann explains how her own content strategy has evolved to account for AI retrieval patterns, and why the brands that survive the model layer are the ones that have been building genuine authority signals for years — not the ones that pivoted to AI SEO overnight.
Plus: the unexpected mainstream rise of Claude, and why the pace of the AI model race is overwhelming even the professionals. Ann and Jason discuss what it means to operate at the frontier of a discipline that changes weekly, and how to build durable visibility infrastructure when the ground keeps shifting.