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How to Rank in AI Search
(The Human Edge)

Lawrence Hitches  ·  StudioHawk

Phuket Summit 2026

Lawrence Hitches

"Everyone has a
guitar now."

Prince had a guitar. So did millions of others.
Access was never the barrier.

AI can make music.

Does anyone listen to it?

Or do we bump Bad Bunny?

Talent. Discipline. Taste. That's what rises.

Everyone now has AI in their hands.

So what will be the true separator
for why someone should see your brand?

The StudioHawk Story

What we intentionally set out to build.

  • Australia's largest dedicated SEO agency
  • 115+ team across the world
  • The goal: most visible, most credible SEO brand
  • Not by accident – by design
StudioHawk team outdoor StudioHawk team event StudioHawk team dinner StudioHawk team lunch

Before 2021 (Pre-ChatGPT)

  • No idea where our MQLs came from
  • Heavily referral marketing based
  • Never done ads or paid media
  • We were our own worst enemy
  • The agency needed to practice what it preached
Early StudioHawk team

The Intentional Playbook

We planned to build up our SEO fundamentals, migrate to HubSpot, and build a real marketing engine.

SEO Fundamentals

Site architecture. Technical SEO. Content strategy. Entity optimisation. The boring stuff that compounds.

Brand Presence

Review pages. Awards submissions. Thought leadership. PR. Be everywhere your buyers look.

Multimodal Content

YouTube. Instagram. LinkedIn. Podcasts. Conference talks. Same message, every format.

Building the Machine

  • Built a dedicated marketing team
  • ChatGPT launched mid-build – accelerated everything
  • Helped us build out our topical map at scale
  • Full site migration to HubSpot
  • Content production went from ad-hoc to systematic
StudioHawk team

Then we went all in.

Full rebrand.
Full site rebuild.
Full migration.

Old StudioHawk branding

Before

New StudioHawk branding

After

AI search experiments started when ChatGPT got the capability of delivering that search experience.

4 Experiments

We didn't just build. We tested everything.

01  Self-Promotional Lists

Ranking ourselves on our own 'best of' list – testing AI pickup

02  Fake Business Test

Brand-new domain, same technique. Does it work from zero?

03  Kadi Ecommerce

Digital PR for a luggage brand. Tracking AI-influenced purchases.

04  StudioHawk Rebrand

Post-migration redesign. Measuring real pipeline impact.

01

Self-Promotional Lists

Published a "Best SEO Agencies in Sydney" list.
Ranked ourselves first. Waited.

AI search results for Best SEO agencies Sydney
2 Weeks

To appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

AI results Top SEO agencies results
02

The Fake Business Test

Brand-new landscaping site. Zero authority.
Same technique. Same result.

Fake landscaping site AI results for landscapers

Authority isn't a pure
gatekeeper anymore.

This is polarising. You can manipulate LLMs with the right hack.
Or you can build sustainable authority that compounds over time.
We chose to build.

03

Kadi Ecommerce – Digital PR

Luggage brand. PR campaigns driving AI visibility.
Then we tracked what happened at checkout.

Kadi luggage

The Kadi Campaign in Action

Digital PR driving AI visibility in real-time.

Instagram

Customer found us via ChatGPT.

Analytics said: Instagram.

Kadi Digital PR position changes
24%

Overlap between API tracking and real user experience.

Attribution is cooked right now. Tools like Peec and Profound are great directional indicators, but don't place too much weight on how they measure impact. Think of them like a Semrush – useful, not gospel.

Match it with your MQL data. That's where the truth lives.

04

StudioHawk Rebrand – The Big One

Everything we'd been building intentionally.
Now we could measure the real pipeline impact.

StudioHawk post-rebrand keyword rankings
65%

Of inbound leads came from SEO in 2025.

Channel efficiency data – SEO 65% share

AI-influenced leads close

10 days faster

18 days vs. 29 days average sales cycle

SEO 29 days vs AI Search 18 days deal velocity

This was the big revelation. The leads that came through AI search didn't just convert – they converted faster, with fewer price objections and higher conviction.

Intentional

  • SEO fundamentals
  • Site rebuild + migration
  • Brand positioning
  • Content strategy
  • Entity consistency

Unintentional

  • AI search visibility
  • Compressed sales cycles
  • AI-driven lead quality
  • Cross-platform attribution
  • Brand authority in LLMs

We didn't optimise for AI search.

We optimised for humans.
AI search followed.

AI Search leads appearing over time

"AI search doesn't replace discovery.
It compresses the consideration phase."

Awareness → Consideration → Conversion funnel

The New Consideration Era

B2B and B2C consideration era diagram

SEO in the Age of AI

  • Stop measuring prompt appearances
  • Measure sales velocity and lead quality instead
  • Clarity over creativity in positioning
  • Address comparison, risk, and pricing
  • Entity consistency across every channel
  • The consideration phase is where AI lives
How AI Search works – LLM flowchart

So what's the system
behind all of this?

Authoritymaxxing

My System for AI Search Revenue

Stack every authority signal until AI has no choice but to cite you.

The Authoritymaxxing Pyramid

Podcasts
1 per month
Whitepapers
Once a quarter
Speaking Events
1 per month
Company LinkedIn + Key Figures
3x a week + key figures posting
Case Studies / Social Proof
Post one every week
SEO Foundations
Always on, constantly iterating
Personal
Branding Instagram LinkedIn YouTube Always on

Each layer compounds the one below it. The more you stack, the harder you are to ignore.

AEO Whitepaper

studiohawk.com.au/ai-search-whitepaper-download/

  • Original research on Answer Engine Optimisation
  • Data AI systems can't find elsewhere
  • Practical checklist for becoming AI-ready
  • This is the kind of content that gets cited

📄

AI Search Whitepaper

Original Research

Beyond the Fold Podcast

studiohawk.com.au/beyond-the-fold-podcast/

  • Third-party citations and brand mentions
  • Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
  • Each episode = a new citation opportunity
  • Brands are 6.5x more likely cited through third-party sources

🎙️

Beyond the Fold

Business Podcast

Hawk Academy

hawkacademy.co

  • Free, evergreen SEO training platform
  • Fundamentals through advanced technical SEO
  • Taught by people who actually do the work
  • Brand asset that builds credibility and entity recognition

🎓

Hawk Academy

Education + Brand Asset

Claude Is the
Next Barrier

Not just using AI – building systems with it.

  • Custom skills for content ideation
  • YouTube packaging + hook engineering
  • Automated research + topic mapping
  • The human decides. The AI accelerates.
$ claude
/youtube-package AI Search SEO
→ Generating hook variants...
→ Building thumbnail concepts...
✓ Package ready

The Content Production System

YouTube Packaging

Custom skills to package video ideas based on outlier analysis

Instagram Scheduling

Automated posting and scheduling workflow

Video Editing Pipeline

YouTube editing is painful – we systematised the entire process

B-Roll Tagging

AI-tagged video B-roll library for easy access and reuse

The New Baseline

The web is being flooded with
new average websites.

The winners will be those who can
max out their skills – and design new ones.

Average is automated. Excellence is human.

Average Excellence tipping point

Personal Brand

Something AI can't penetrate as easily.

YouTube

Long-form thought leadership. Deep dives on experiments. Built with Claude-powered ideation.

Hawk Academy

Education + community. Teaching what we learn in real time.

Instagram / Reels

Short-form brand visibility. Consistent output. Humanity at scale.

"There is no limit
to experimenting."

Oh, and one more thing.

An SEO agency won an award
for its own SEO campaign.

Very meta.

And that award?

It feeds back into our credibility signal.

SEO builds brand. Brand wins awards. Awards build credibility. Credibility strengthens SEO.

Every output becomes an input.

THE
FLYWHEEL
SEO
Brand
Awards
Credibility

Every output becomes an input. The flywheel never stops.

Same tools.
Different artists.

Be the artist, not the tool operator.

One More Thing For You

Phuket SEO Brain

Everything I know about SEO, packed into a Claude Code skill. Yours for free.

Scan to download. Merge it with yours.

QR code to download skill

Thank You

Lawrence Hitches

StudioHawk  ·  @lawrencehitches

Lawrence Hitches LinkedIn

Phuket Summit 2026