Dave Burnett is the CEO and Founder of AOK Marketing, a digital marketing agency specializing in AI-driven SEO, paid media, and lead generation. AOK Marketing helps companies grow by optimizing their online presence through modern tools and strategies. Dave is a digital transformation expert who has mentored over 1,000 businesses and trained professionals through the Canadian Marketing Association. He previously co-founded Achievers.com, which was acquired for $110 million, and has started multiple other ventures, including PromotionalProducts.com.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:23] Dave Burnett recalls his first childhood lesson in fundraising and value beyond money
- [7:22] How the 2008 recession pushed Dave into digital marketing
- [10:35] Why traditional SEO still matters and what’s different now
- [16:19] How large language models actually learn and retrieve info
- [22:14] Value of mastering technical SEO to make your site AI and Google-friendly
- [28:51] Introducing LLMtel – Dave’s new tool to track AI search visibility
In this episode…
Google’s dominance in search is being questioned in the age of AI. With new tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity changing how people find information, is traditional SEO becoming obsolete? And how can companies ensure they’re still discoverable when clicks are disappearing?
Online marketing and AI expert Dave Burnett unpacks the changing landscape of online search and explains why businesses need to look beyond backlinks and keywords. Dave emphasizes that entity authority — how consistently your business is represented online — is now crucial for visibility in AI-driven search. He shares strategies for optimizing websites, tracking prompts, and maintaining your brand’s visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search results.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Dave Burnett, CEO of AOK Marketing, about the intersection of SEO, AI, and digital marketing strategy. Dave shares insights on entity optimization, tracking AI search performance, and the tools that help him scale faster. The conversation also touches on ABM campaigns, technical SEO, and building AI-friendly web infrastructure.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Dave Burnett on LinkedIn
- AOK Marketing
- PromotionalProducts.com
- LLMtel
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “There’s no faster way to kill a company than marketing a bad product.”
- “SEO today is about optimizing for entities, not just websites.”
- “Your website needs to be your source of truth in the AI era.”
- “Large language models are like high school grads; they still need help to answer complex questions.”
- “You can’t hack your way into AI search; you have to be genuinely good and consistent.”
Action Steps:
- Reframe your SEO strategy around entity optimization: It’s not just about website backlinks anymore. Ensuring consistent business details across third-party directories, Wikipedia, and review sites builds authority with AI platforms.
- Audit your online presence for trust signals: Align your website with PR mentions, business listings, and schema markup to strengthen your credibility. This will help you appear more consistently in both traditional search engines and LLM-based platforms.
- Leverage AI tools for content development: Use GPT-5 or other models to generate and test landing page variants quickly. This accelerates campaign deployment and improves conversion testing without excessive back-and-forth with developers.
- Track AI visibility with prompt testing: Instead of only relying on traditional SEO metrics, start tracking how your business appears in AI search tools. Tools like LLMtel.com can help monitor your rankings across multiple prompt responses.
- Embrace ABM for high-ticket opportunities: Personalized, account-based marketing strategies on platforms like LinkedIn can yield powerful results. As Dave Burnett’s case study proves, tailored messaging and landing pages can unlock massive deal potential.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about, Is Google dead? We’re going to be talking about the state of SEO, search engine optimization in the age of AI. My guest today is Dave Burnett. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:15
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:31
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show. And you know, if you have listened to this show before, you know, every week we bring to you smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, lots of great episodes. Check out the archives to learn all about it. And of course, this episode brought to you by Rise25, where we help B2B businesses to get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with Done-for-you podcast and content marketing. And if you want to learn more about what we do, you can go to our website, which is Rise25.com, and even learn about our platform, Podcast Copilot, which is available, and lots of information on our site about that. All right.
I’m so excited about today’s guest. Dave Burnett is the CEO and Founder of AOKMarketing.com. He’s an online marketing and AI expert. He’s mentored over a thousand different businesses in their digital transitions. He’s done training for the Canadian Marketing Association and has really deep expertise in search engine optimization.
I listened to another podcast interview that he did with my buddy Nir Zavaro. It was over an hour long, and it was just dripping with so much great knowledge that I felt like I wanted to talk to him directly and have him on the podcast. And he’s also started a number of different businesses, including Achievers.com, PromotionalProducts.com, and Achievers.com was actually sold ten years ago for $110 million. And he’s also written a couple of books as well, so we’ll get into that.
So Dave, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I always like to start by getting to know a little bit more about what people were like when they were younger, because I think that informs who we are today. And you’ve got this story. You were eight years old doing fundraising for a 10-K run. You and your dad are going door to door raising money for this, and I’ve got a now nine-year-old who would easily make this mistake. But you thought all that money was going in your pockets, didn’t you?
Dave Burnett: 02:23
I absolutely did. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, John. And so yeah, it was quite the traumatic experience for me as a child. You know, some people have these entrepreneurial upbringings. I really didn’t.
And so I was all excited going door to door, knocking on the door. And then my dad had to sit me down and just basically say, yeah, Dave, the money’s not for you. But I was like, But I’m going to be running. How is this not for me? And so it was a really good early lesson to understand that there are other things out there worth doing that you’re not going to get paid for.
John Corcoran: 02:53
So yeah, that’s a tough lesson to learn at eight years old. Yeah. It was. Yeah. I don’t get it. I have to do the running. Why don’t I get the money? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully you raised a lot of money for the cause.
So you started this business while you’re in college. You had 50 employees while you were in college. And I want to hear about what this business was because I was in college once, and I like making money. And I also like drinking alcohol in college. And somehow, you created a business with 50 employees that involved drinking alcohol, or at least giving out samples of alcohol, while in college. That sounds amazing.
Dave Burnett: 03:29
It was. I couldn’t have scripted anything better. So what we did was I actually worked in the third year of university, as you said, and I had 50 employees province-wide. We were working with clients like Bacardi and Labatt’s and a few others, and what we would do is we would go into bars, and this is going to sound really bad, but I would literally buy the entire bar a round. We would supply the alcohol into the bar and then pay the bar to actually give the alcohol out because of the rules here in Ontario.
I’m based out of Toronto, and because of that, I was I, I like to think I was popular in university, not just because I had a minivan.
John Corcoran: 04:07
Well, either way, I mean, it must have made you the most popular guy in the bar. You walk into a bar and order a round for everyone. That’s crazy.
Dave Burnett: 04:15
It was literally I would go, I, you know, a few people would ask me, so, Dave, where are you going? Because it was every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we’d roll into the bars. But that was one side of the business. The other side of the business was kind of the Costco-style sampling, where instead of giving out a free cracker or whatever may be, we were actually giving out shots of alcohol. It might be a small glass of wine, it might have been a beer.
But here in Ontario there are liquor stores and beer stores. You can’t. Well, it’s expanding now. You can get them at more places, but at the time you can only get the alcohol in those places. So we were very controlled, very much so that you’d walk into the liquor store and be like, hey, would you like to try this new Bacardi? Whatever. And people. People did so.
John Corcoran: 04:54
Wow. So you were your customer. Was the Bacardi or the distributor or something like that? Who would hire you to do these things to to exactly give out these samples? Yeah.
And so this must have attracted the most, only the most responsible, upstanding of employee. And you had 50 of these across the province. How did you supervise this and keep track of all this and make sure that they weren’t just drinking the product?
Dave Burnett: 05:17
Well, I have to also point out that this was in 97. I’m fully dating myself. So this is before texting before. Well, I mean, texting was there, but it was before all of the phone calls, and yeah.
John Corcoran: 05:28
It was yeah.
Dave Burnett: 05:29
It was literally phone calls. Maybe some emails. Yeah. So it was a little difficult to manage. The worst part was because it was Thursday, Friday, Saturday was actually getting people to show up for these sampling events, getting people to show up and run the events where you actually go into the bar and buy the bar a drink, no problem.
Everybody showed up for those. But getting people to give out free alcohol samples in the liquor stores across the province was a little more difficult. So yeah, it wasn’t the most upstanding people. It was anybody with a heartbeat who was in whatever small town may have been, because we’re running all the events. So it was basically 0 to 50 people, all running events all at the same time.
And of course, I’d get calls and this person didn’t show up. This person didn’t show up. It was a bit of a nightmare. But once we got it going, got a good crew on board, then it worked out really well.
John Corcoran: 06:16
Okay. So this is so as we said, it’s kind of like the early internet era. How do you get interested in digital marketing. Where does that come in your story?
Dave Burnett: 06:24
So that’s a little bit later on. So after I sold that business to my partners I got into the promotional products field. So, you know, T-shirts, hats, pens, all that kind of stuff. And in that promotional products business is where me and my partners co-founded Achievers.com. It was originally called Love Rewards, but that was a rewards and incentive company that that I exited back in 2002 but then sold later for, you know, a lot of money, as you mentioned earlier on.
But back after I started the promotional products, my own promotional business back in 2002, we were going along doing great. That was my EO qualifying company back in oh six. So I’ve been in EO for a long time. For those who are listening, it’s a great organization. But then the Great Recession happened, and I started losing $70,000 a month, and I couldn’t keep doing that.
That just really wasn’t sustainable. So what I did was I realized, okay, I got to get good at online marketing. So I went out and I bought 3000 URLs. I put up 500 websites, €3,000.
John Corcoran: 07:22
So you don’t do anything half assed, do you?
Dave Burnett: 07:24
No, no, I’m pretty much a go all in type of guy. Once I realized what I wanted to do.
John Corcoran: 07:28
Wow. So 3000 build out all these URLs or they’re just parked somewhere.
Dave Burnett: 07:32
500 built out.
John Corcoran: 07:33
Built out 500 of them. Because you’re just, like, testing different stuff to see what attracts people. Okay.
Dave Burnett: 07:39
So back then, exact-match domain names were a big thing. So we own, for example, like promotional products or promotional products, whatever. com we now actually own promotional products and promotional products. But back in the day that that was what we did. So we put up all these websites, all these different things and became a really good lead gen source.
And as a result of that being really good, lead gen people said, hey, I found you online, can you do this for us? So the SEO side of the business evolved out of that, and that really started in oh 9 or 2010-ish and then grew from there. We got into paid social, paid search, all that kind of stuff to help people drive leads.
John Corcoran: 08:20
So you’ve done a bit of all those different types of things now. And so talk to me a little bit about the state of the SEO world today. We teased it a little bit by saying Is Google dead? What’s your thought on that. Just holistically Google versus gen AI where do you land?
Dave Burnett: 08:40
So I land in the fact that It’s all this is from my perspective, is a fragmentation of search. So the overall overall total, if you took a look at Google and all the AI searches, is still growing, right. More and more people are doing that. So if you look at it holistically, it’s still growing.
John Corcoran: 08:59
It’s just I saw some stat the other day that Google’s searches went up 20% last year in 2024.
Dave Burnett: 09:05