AI systems answer at the entity level. They pick out the things in a question, then assemble an answer from what they have stored about those things and how they connect. Michael lays out what an entity strategy is, how you build one, and the two things that have to be true before any of it can work.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why checking whether you appeared for one exact prompt tells you almost nothing
• What an entity is, and why AI systems assemble answers at that level instead of the page level
• The two ways AI systems get a brand wrong, and why the second one costs more
• Two checks you can run in a browser to see whether AI crawlers can read your site at all
• Where to start, and what to fix before you publish anything new

You can find all the resources for this episode at:
https://victorious.com/podcast/full-funnel-foundation/

0:00 Intro
1:18 This Week in Search: Microsoft Clarity Adds an AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio

3:42 Shopify's Q2 Data: AI Referrals Up Almost 200%, and Converting Better

6:41 Google Research: Models Store Your Facts and Still Fail To Retrieve Them

9:05 Today's Topic: Building a Full-Funnel Strategy for AI Search

11:55 The Reframe: Search Used To Be Deterministic

14:19 Why Entities Are the Foundation

15:36 How AI Systems Get Your Brand Wrong

17:40 Building Your Entity List

20:37 Keywords, Anchor Pages, and Prompt Research

29:17 Can AI Reach Your Content? Rendering and Blocking

34:35 What You Declare About Yourself: Schema and Disambiguation

38:15 Getting Corroborated Off Your Own Site

40:55 Where To Start

Microsoft Clarity, “Microsoft Clarity adds AI Scrape-to-Referral Ratio insights report,” August 13, 2026 https://clarity.microsoft.com/blog/scrape-to-referral-insights/

Shopify, “AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic,” August 13, 2026 https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/blog/ai-search-category-behavior

Google Research, “Empty shelves or lost keys? Recall is the bottleneck for parametric factuality,” August 17, 2026 https://research.google/blog/empty-shelves-or-lost-keys-recall-is-the-bottleneck-for-parametric-factuality/

Vercel, in partnership with MERJ, “The Rise of the AI Crawler,” December 17, 2024 https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler

Cloudflare, “Your site, your rules: new AI traffic options for all customers,” July 1, 2026 https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-ai-options/

Victorious, “Q2 2026 Quarterly Search Report, Findings 1 and 2,” July 2026 https://victorious.com/quarterly-search-report/

Google, “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings,” May 16, 2012 https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not/