Mike Downer: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Unlearning Lab. I’m your host, Mike Downer, and I am joined once again by the very handsome Kevin Wosmansky, founder, president, CEO, and head groundskeeper of JAR Consulting Group. How are we doing today, Kevin?
Kevin Wosmansky: Doing awesome, buddy. I haven’t talked to you for a couple of weeks. I’m happy you’re back working, right? Done with your vacation. Or at least I should say you’re done with your vacations for the week. Do we have another one lined up pretty soon?
Mike Downer: Not until October.
Kevin Wosmansky: Oh wow. Time to get to work. I love it.
Mike Downer: Not until October, so that’s going to be a long stretch for me, but I’ll try and make it through. I mean, you work me like a dog, so I’m used to it. I deserve five to six vacations a year, right?
Mike Downer: All right, Kevin, well, you and I discussed some things that we wanted to talk about today. I think what you want to talk about is how ChatGPT is now your new homepage. That sounds kind of weird, along with the 9.9 times traffic shift that nobody’s ready for. So let’s just jump right into this. Let me ask you this, Kevin. Let’s jump. Let’s go. Let’s just jump right off into the deep end. What does it mean when you say that ChatGPT is your new homepage?
Kevin Wosmansky: Mike, great question. It means the first impression of your business increasingly happens inside an AI conversation, not on your website.
I was reading something recently, and there was a study across 266 different sites covering 19 months. It found that monthly AI-referred sessions grew 9.9 times. Okay, that’s a big number. That reached over 644,000 sessions by May of 2026. ChatGPT was responsible for 92% of that standalone platform traffic.
So think about this. Before a customer ever sees your homepage, some AI has already summarized who you are, what you do, and whether you’re worth recommending. If AI doesn’t know you or gets you wrong, your beautifully designed website never gets the chance.
For instance, I’m Kevin, founder of JAR Consulting Group here in Des Moines, Iowa, and this is exactly the problem we help businesses solve. You have to think through that. It’s really imperative that business owners understand that the beautiful website we all spend a lot of money on, and where customers go to learn about us, is not always the first impression anymore. We have to start thinking that ChatGPT is going to be our homepage. How’s that for me?
Mike Downer: Okay. That kind of clears it up because it sounded weird when you think, “I have my own website. How is ChatGPT my homepage?” It sounded weird, but you cleared it up really well. Even a guy with my low IQ can understand it, which is great. I love how you talk to me like I’m a five-year-old.
Kevin Wosmansky: You’re used to talking to me.
Mike Downer: So, Kevin, let me ask you this. I know you sell these things, but how much traffic do AI platforms actually send to websites in 2026?
Kevin Wosmansky: It’s crazy. More than most business owners realize, Mike. It’s compounding, and it’s going to continue to compound beyond that 9.9 times growth number I just mentioned.
Eighty-eight percent of search visits are now AI agents, up 150% month over month between sometime in late 2025 and early 2026. Yet 81% of organizations still treat those visitors like old-school bots.
Humans behave differently. Average prompts are three times longer than traditional queries, and follow-up searches have grown more than 40% per month. People aren’t typing two keywords anymore. They’re asking full questions and having conversations, like, “Who’s the best blank service provider near blank city for this?” And AI is picking the winner.
The short answer to your question, Mike, is that so much more traffic is coming to websites now from sources other than humans. Those are called AI bots.
Mike Downer: So with all these AI bots going out there to these websites, and there are a lot of different AI platforms out there, which AI platform should a business optimize for first? I know there’s ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. What is your opinion on which one you should shoot for first?
Kevin Wosmansky: For starters, we work within all of the large language models: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Kimi, Gemini, Google AI Mode. I could keep going on and on.
But I’m going to give you an answer here. The AI platform your business should optimize for first is ChatGPT. Mike, the data says optimize for GPT first, and then expand beyond that. That’s what the data says, and we see time and time again a lot of validity in that data.
GPT sends the most standalone referral volume by a wide margin. Here’s the nuance most people miss: Claude has overtaken Perplexity for professional and technical audiences. So if you’re a law firm, an insurance agency, or a consultant, your buyers are increasingly asking Claude, not just ChatGPT.
The right move is GPT as your foundation. Claude becomes your professional audience play. And here’s the big part: consistency across all of them. All of these large language models cross-check whether independent sources agree about you. So start with ChatGPT, and then you definitely want to move to Claude, Gemini, and then the list goes on and on.
Mike Downer: Okay. So ChatGPT is kind of your basis, is what you’re saying.
Kevin Wosmansky: Absolutely. It has the highest query volume right now.
Mike Downer: Well, they were the first to the party.
Kevin Wosmansky: They were the first to the party. That is true.
Mike Downer: It’s kind of like Levi’s. They were the first jeans company, and everybody knows what they are. It’s kind of like that, in my opinion. Even though Jordache jeans are still my favorite, Kevin.
Kevin Wosmansky: That’s a child of the eighties if I ever heard one.
Mike Downer: Oh yeah. Seventies. Thanks for that little deflation in my age. I appreciate that.
Kevin, I know there are a lot of tricks out there, and at JAR Consulting, you guys know all the tricks of the trade. Do tricks like LLMs.txt files actually help you rank in AI search?
Kevin Wosmansky: Great question. I love this one. The short answer is no. This is where businesses can burn money. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around on the internet right now. Some people will say, “If you add LLMs.txt files, you’re going to rank.” That’s not necessarily true.
Does it help to add those? Sure. It doesn’t hurt. But if the rest of your website isn’t properly coded for AI bots to go in and find you, it doesn’t really matter what you add.
Depending on what you read, Google stated that LLMs.txt files don’t receive any special treatment in Google Search or generative AI. There’s no magic robot-file shortcut. Let me be clear about that.
What actually earns citations is original research, firsthand expertise, and clean technical accessibility. In other words, say something real. Say it clearly. Make it easy to parse.
AI systems don’t read like loyal customers. They extract patterns, compare sources, and compress. If your content is really fluffy, it’s going to get skipped.
If someone is telling you all you have to do is add a special .txt language to your website, pay them money, and you’ll show up on ChatGPT, no. That’s way, way incorrect. There’s so much more you need to do in order to get cited, mentioned, and recommended on ChatGPT and all of the AI models.
Mike Downer: I know a lot of small business owners around Des Moines, as you do too. I think one of the questions they have is: how can a small or local business get recommended by ChatGPT? It’s not just for the big dogs. How can a small business or a local business also rank up there with the big dogs?
Kevin Wosmansky: Going back to my Marine Corps background, I like to try and keep things simple. So I’m going to give you three steps.
Mike Downer: No, you don’t.
Kevin Wosmansky: Three steps.
Mike Downer: Okay, perfect.
Kevin Wosmansky: First, run a category-level AI visibility audit. Concentration varies enormously by vertical and category, and some categories are still genuinely wide open. That’s huge for local businesses. Whatever your niche is in your city, you may have zero entrenched competition in the AI answers right now. So step one: go do an AI visibility audit.
Second, publish answer-shaped content. Use real questions that your customers are asking you, and answer them directly with your name, your business, and your city very plainly stated.
Third, get talked about elsewhere. AI engines favor brands with consistent positioning across podcasts, different review sites, industry publications, and social channels. AI is always checking whether the internet agrees that you’re legit or not.
Mike Downer: Okay, that makes sense. That’s something any business owner could go out and do today on their own.
Now, once you’ve invested your time, resources, and money, I want to ask you this because I know that everybody listening is thinking the same thing: how do you measure whether AI engines are citing your business?
Kevin Wosmansky: There’s a really simple answer to that, and then there’s a deeper dive.
First, the best way for a business owner to see if AI engines are citing their business is to simply do a gut check. Go on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity, and ask the exact question that your customers would ask.
Ask, “Who is the best plumber in San Jose, California?” and see who shows up. Or ask, “Who should I hire for a legal issue I’m having in Billings, Montana?” Just ask and see who shows up.
A lot of business owners don’t like to do this because we’ll do this exercise together, and guess what? They’ll say, “My competitor shows up,” or, “I’ve never heard of this guy. How are they getting referred?” So that’s step one.
Now, there’s a little bit more. Most businesses aren’t going to have access to this, but there are a lot of technology platforms. The second-best way to measure it is if you’re working with a reputable agency that works with AI and large language model sentiment training.
We have some tools and resources that we utilize. What we’re actually able to do is track the prompts across all of the different AI models. We’re able to see how different AI models are answering those questions as they pertain to your business.
We’re also able to track agentic bot traffic. One of the things that is really important is, first of all, are the AI bots even able to go to your website?
Most people don’t know this, Mike, but there are three different types of bots: retrieval bots, learning bots, and indexing bots. These three different types of bots go to the website.
Now, here’s the secret: we really want to know how many indexing bots are actually going to your website. Can they even find your website? Can they read what’s on your website? If they can’t find your website and they can’t read what’s on your website, then you’re not going to show up and start getting cited and recommended.
So the best way for a business owner to measure whether the engines are citing them is to go to the different AIs right now and ask the questions your customers ask. Then see what shows up.
Mike Downer: All right. Let’s kind of wind this one up. I know that you and I don’t sit here and do this because we like to look at each other’s faces on the screen. You’re doing this as a professional, and in my opinion, you’re with the premier digital marketing company in the Des Moines, Iowa area, maybe the region.
Tell me why podcasting is one of the best ways to get cited by AI.
Kevin Wosmansky: Mike, great question. Every episode creates exactly what these engines feed on. They want transcribed, structured, first-person expert content tied to a real name.
When I answer a question on this show, that becomes source material that ChatGPT or Claude can quote when someone asks the same question. It’s firsthand experience. It’s original. It builds presence across trusted channels. This all matters as AI search grows more.
The thing about creating content, and I love this about where things are going, is that I’ve said this in other shows: you can’t black-hat, trick, or fake your way into it like you used to. You can’t just outspend your competitors with keywords and bidding on search results.
This goes back to expertise. If you’re an expert in your business and your craft, then you should be able to talk about it. You should be able to share this type of knowledge with people.
In the past, when people were creating content and podcasting, it was to really grow an audience. That stays the same today. But I think the biggest change is that today, when we’re doing podcasting, we’re doing this because we hope we’re helping other business owners learn something and sharing our information with them, but we’re also sharing it with all these AI bots.
That’s probably the biggest shift in why podcasting is one of the best ways to get cited. It helps humans, and it helps AI bots learn what you do. It helps them understand that you’re an expert.
Mike Downer: Perfect. Once again, you have answered a lot of questions. I think you’ve made a lot of business owners, even small business owners, feel better about knowing that they have an opportunity.
In my opinion, the nice part about this AI shift that we’ve been talking about over the last three or four months is the fact that it kind of levels the playing field. Now you have just as much opportunity as Jeff Bezos does if you get the right stuff out there. Correct or incorrect?
Kevin Wosmansky: That’s correct. But Jeff Bezos has more dollars in his pocket than I’ve got, so he can—
Mike Downer: You know what I mean.
Kevin Wosmansky: I know. You know what? If you put in the work and you put in the time, and you start to really show people your knowledge and what you do, the biggest difference today is that that’s what the AI models are looking for.
They’re not looking for somebody who created 20 blog posts using another AI model. They know it was AI-created. They’re looking for what a human is actually saying, and that’s very important today.
In a world of artificial intelligence, human knowledge and real human experience matter so much more than they ever did before.
Mike Downer: One hundred percent. I just like how, by doing this with these companies, we help the little guys compete with the big guys. I’m not saying they’ll pass them, but at least they can compete.
Kevin Wosmansky: It gives all the small businesses such a huge opportunity to surpass the bigger competition that can quite frankly outspend them. You’re absolutely right about that. One hundred percent.
Mike Downer: I love that. I love what we’re doing.
I think that’s going to wind it up for today. You’re probably tired of looking at my ugly mug. Plus, Kevin, real quick side note: the grounds need mowed, and you’ve kind of been slacking on your groundskeeping duties.
Kevin Wosmansky: You mean my T-shirt today, right? I have my JAR shirt on, so we’re 100% up.
Mike Downer: Hey, put a hat on so you don’t burn the scalp. I mean, I don’t have to worry about that, but anyway.
Kevin Wosmansky: We just bought a whole bunch of JAR hats, so I can find one of those.
Mike Downer: Anyway, it’s good to get in front of the camera with you again, partner. I’m excited to know that you’re not taking more vacations until October.
Kevin Wosmansky: October. I’m going to October.
Mike Downer: All right, buddy. Sounds good. We’ll talk next time, and I’ll find a new job for you to do. This is the seventeenth one, and I just look forward to what you’re going to say. You’re actually pretty senior.
Kevin Wosmansky: You’re going to run out of job titles. I think I’m already struggling.
Mike Downer: All right, Kevin. Until next time, thanks a lot, and we’ll figure out something fun to talk about on the next one.
Kevin Wosmansky: Thanks, Mike. Take care, buddy.
Mike Downer: See you, bud.
