ALISA SCHARF

Alisa Scharf has worked in SEO since 2010 and spent more than a decade at Seer Interactive, climbing through the agency's search ranks to Chief AI Officer, where she now runs the AI practice across every client account. She studied Film & Media Arts at Temple University before any of that, and the training stuck. She treats data as material for a story, which is why she's as comfortable correcting what a model believes about a brand as she is talking a C-suite down from the AI visibility numbers they walked in proud of.

Her credibility rests on research run at a scale most agencies can't reach. One Seer study put more than 15,000 prompts against over half a million pages and found the websites earning the most ChatGPT citations sat at domain authority 20 to 40, well below the high-authority names a decade of SEO tooling taught everyone to chase. A second study from her team measured how often models name a specific brand as the recommendation, not just cite it or mention it, and landed on 2.3%. Alisa spends a lot of her LinkedIn presence arguing that citations are closer to a page-two Google ranking than to revenue, a leading indicator people keep mistaking for the outcome.

The work she pushes clients toward is deliberately unglamorous. Before a brand competes for category terms, she wants it to find out what ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini already get wrong about its founding, location, products, and competitors, then fix the record at the source. The frontier that interests her more is everything past visibility: the distance between getting cited in an answer and getting an agent to complete a purchase or open an account on a customer's behalf. She's blunt that the diagnostics for that second problem barely exist yet, starting with the basic question of whether the bots reaching a website even identify themselves in its logs.