How To Build A Full-Funnel AI Search Strategy, Part 3: Bottom Of The Funnel | Victorious
Episode 12 · The Search Signal
How To Build a Full-Funnel AI Strategy, Part 3: Bottom of the Funnel
September 10, 2026·47 min·Hosted by Michael Transon
How To Build a Full-Funnel AI Strategy, Part 3: Bottom of the Funnel - YouTube
About this episode
The conversation
A buyer used to do the comparison on your website. They read your service and pricing pages and weighed you against two or three competitors there. Now that comparison happens before anyone visits your site, inside an AI answer assembled mostly from pages you don't own. What does that mean for your bottom-of-funnel strategy?
In the third of four episodes on building a full-funnel AI search strategy, Michael Transon makes the case that whether an AI system names your company is decided almost entirely by what other websites already say about you. Watch to learn the two signals that predict a brand mention, how to turn the prompts you're already tracking into a list of sites to pitch, the four kinds of sites that name companies in your category, and what your bottom-of-funnel pages need to do now.
Michael's POV in 60 seconds
The comparison now happens inside the AI answer, and other websites decide whether a company's name is in it.
One thing
Buyers are taking their research to AI platforms. They start there to work out what their problem actually is, and they stay there when the question turns commercial, asking which companies solve it and who they should hire.
So what
The shortlist gets built before anyone visits a website, so a company that goes unnamed in the answer never enters the running. Getting named has little to do with what sits on a company's own site. Research across roughly 150 brands found the volume of other websites saying its name beat every signal on its own pages.
Now what
A full-funnel AI search strategy has to include two things at the bottom of the funnel: 1) it has to focus on building mentions on the third-party pages that buyers' questions pull from, and 2) it has to update bottom-of-funnel pages so they validate what a buyer already learned on an AI platform and help them convert.
Questions this episode answers
What you'll learn
How do I build a list of sites worth targeting for brand mentions? Start with the commercial and transactional prompts you're already tracking, the shortlist and ready-to-buy questions. Pull the citation list from the last several times each prompt ran, then check each cited site for whether it mentions your brand. Every citation that doesn't mention you yet becomes an outreach target.
Once I have that list, how do I go after the mentions? Sort the sites into four types: 1) directory and review platforms where you can directly control listings, 2) ranking roundups where you reach the writer, 3) forums where genuine participation works, and 4) news or editorial coverage.
What does my website need to do once someone finds me through an AI recommendation? It has to validate and convert – confirm what the AI told them, that you can be trusted, that you've done it before, and that there's a clear way to get started.
Sound bites
Worth quoting
What predicts whether your company gets named is how much of the rest of the internet talks about you.
Michael Transon
The evaluation already happened inside of the AI answer. So we must treat these bottom-of-funnel pages as destination pages.
Michael Transon
Chapters
Resources mentioned
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This wraps up this episode of The Search Signal. Thank you for listening this week. If this was useful, please subscribe. Part four is coming next, focusing on how to measure all of this.