Get Weekly Marketing Tips
Join 30,000+ marketers and get the best marketing tips every week in your inbox
Google’s search revenue is up another 17% year-on-year (YoY), and that money is coming from advertisers paying more for the same traffic.
This is why so many marketing teams feel stuck. Organic traffic is being squeezed by AI platforms, competition is tougher, and paid ads are absorbing more of the marketing budget every quarter.
The businesses that have escaped that squeeze did it by building visibility they own rather than visibility they rent.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, shares the playbook the team used with Value Capital Funding to take them from heavy reliance on paid ads to over 180 keywords in the top five positions, traffic coming in from AI Search, and organic leads up 640%. It works in competitive markets, because this one is.
Get to the top of Google
Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).
Why Renting Visibility Is Getting More Expensive Every Year
Paid ads work. The problem is what happens when they are the only thing working.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen explains what separates the businesses that are trapped in that position from the ones that are not: “The businesses that aren’t in the PPC vice are the ones that have built their own organic visibility on search and, of course, in AI platforms. That means they own that visibility. They’re not having to rent visibility from Google per click.”
He is blunt about the direction of travel: PPC costs are “going pretty wild”, and Google’s revenue growth is the evidence.
For marketing leaders, the commercial logic is simple. Every month you spend on ads buys you that month. Every month you spend building organic and AI Search visibility compounds into an asset that keeps producing leads after the invoice stops.
The client in this example, Value Capital Funding, is a family-run business helping US companies restructure debt. Getting them out of that vice took three steps, and each one builds on the last.
Step 1: Rebuild the Website Around How Customers Actually Talk
Most conversion advice starts with calls to action (CTAs) and form fields. That is rarely where the real problem sits.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen describes what the team finds far more often: “We often notice a bigger issue, that the website isn’t talking the language of the customers that it’s trying to attract.”
We used our Brand and Positioning Accelerator, which includes customer research with the client’s real customers, to uncover that disconnect. Prospects “weren’t searching for a solution”. They were searching for “the symptoms of financial stress”: missed payments, cash flow problems, legal threats, the fear that the business was about to collapse.
Competitors were all fighting over the same head terms. Meeting customers at the symptom stage opened up a whole layer of demand nobody else was serving.
That research reshaped the website rebuild. Benefits led over features, with emotional payoff made explicit rather than implied.
Find the Blocker That Stops People Acting
The same research surfaced something more serious. Prospects who knew they needed help often did nothing, because they were in denial or too ashamed to ask.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen is clear that this kind of finding outranks everything else on the list: “It doesn’t matter if you do everything technically correct. If your audience is facing a blocker like this, unless you remove it, they just simply won’t be able to take the next step.”
Your blocker is probably not shame. But there is almost always something. A high-ticket buyer worried about getting a big investment wrong after months of research. A B2B champion who has already chosen you, but is nervous about how the decision will look to their management.
The old site asked for contact details in a single form, which by standard conversion logic should perform well. In practice, as Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, “asking them to go all the way on the first date can be a bit of a turnoff”.
It was replaced with a multi-step debt restructuring calculator, framed with deliberately low-pressure wording, that let people get comfortable before handing anything over. This resulted in monthly conversions growing from 53 to 393, a 640% increase.
“So the job of your marketing is to identify what these blockers are, and then the job of your website is to answer them before you ask the customer to move forward. That way, the website visitors will feel ready to become leads,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.
Step 2: Build SEO Foundations That Still Hold Up in 2026
There is a temptation right now to treat Google as yesterday’s channel. The numbers say otherwise.
“Google is still processing 16 billion searches per day. Good SEO is definitely not optional,” states Tim Cameron-Kitchen.
Technical SEO came first, because it is “table stakes in 2026”. This included crawlability, indexation, site performance, page titles and meta descriptions rewritten in the customer language the research had uncovered, and schema markup implemented for both traditional search and AI Search.
Local SEO mattered too, even though this is not a local business. When AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Mode recommends a brand, the next thing most people do is search that brand name. What they find is the website and the Google Business Profile sitting next to it, complete with reviews, reputation, and posts. That profile is now part of your AI Search conversion path.
Then came industry-specific landing pages, stronger internal linking, FAQ sections, and CTAs matched to where the audience actually is in their thinking.
Fix the Content Sprawl Before Publishing Anything New
AI has made content cheap to produce, which has created a very specific problem:
“What they’ll do is point their new AI slop cannon at their blog and press fire, hoping for the best. What this can lead to is a huge number of posts with very generic information all overlapping each other with no clear strategy behind them,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.
This happens without AI to any site that has been publishing for years without a content marketing strategy. An audit of 268 existing blog posts found heavy overlap that was “diluting their topical authority”.
Everything was consolidated into four content pillars, with the strongest pieces rewritten and expanded around the problem aware searches the customer research had identified.
The results across a year:
- Blog traffic more than doubled, and conversions from the blog increased 10x
- Keywords ranking in the top five grew from 130 to 187
Step 3: Get Into the AI Search Conversation
Buyer research has moved, and the data on this is no longer speculative.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen sets out why this applies to every business: “It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, AI Search is a part of your customer’s decision-making, so you need to be in those conversations.”
He cites Forrester research from January 2026 finding that 94% of B2B buyers used AI in their buying process, with twice as many naming generative or conversational search as more meaningful than any other source. G2 found 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in AI Search, and 69% ended up buying something different from what they had planned because AI told them to.
The AI Search Optimisation work itself came down to three things:
- Content built for the long tail queries people use in AI tools
- FAQ sections on as many relevant pages as possible because AI Search tools “love FAQs”
- Getting the brand mentioned on the sites those tools already cite
ChatGPT sessions rose 231%, and conversions from that traffic rose 1600%. Perplexity sessions grew 33% and became a lead source for the first time.
“The first thing we did, as always, is benchmark their visibility against competitors. We want to know how often Value Capital Funding is showing up against their competitors. Once we’ve benchmarked it, we can then improve it over time,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.
Why Your Analytics Will Under-Report All of This
If you are judging AI Search on your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) numbers alone, you are seeing a fraction of the picture.
Tim Cameron-Kitchen explains where the visibility goes: “In your analytics platform, this won’t show up as an AI Search visitor. This will just show up as a direct visitor.”
Prospects started telling Value Capital Funding’s sales team they had found them through ChatGPT, sometimes saying they had asked for the best company in the US offering that service and been recommended top. None of that appears in the data unless someone clicks a link.
What happens often is that people are discovering brands in AI tools, then typing the URL straight into the browser.
As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it, this is “frustrating for marketers, but it’s just the new reality”. Which makes brand mention tracking and proper AI Search benchmarking a reporting necessity, not a nice extra.
If your lead generation leans harder on paid ads than you would like, the fix is a system rather than a single tactic. Book a consultation with our expert team and we will show you where your website, your search visibility and your AI Search presence are leaking revenue, and what to do about it first.
