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Why 90% of dispensaries are invisible on Google (and losing $50K+ annually because of it)
Most cannabis operators think their website "looks good" so their SEO must be fine.
But your iframe menu is killing your organic traffic. Here's the proof + how to fix it 🧵:
From where I sit, what’s happening is the entire “awareness” phase in marketing is shifting to AI. Google is still part of the process, but the discovery is happening. More with AI before users move to Google and websites for research
Reddit's earnings call has exposed the new reality for thousands of companies.
"AI mode does not drive traffic. Not for us and not to anybody as far as I know. It used to be a traffic driver. Now it's not." - Reddit CEO.
The reality is that AI is fundamentally changing the way that humans access the internet.
Just 24 hours prior to this statement, Google's stock erased -$480 billion on the same issue: AI is disrupting the traditional search model.
For decades, the internet operated on a simple model. Search engines directed users to websites, and those websites monetized the traffic.
AI is destroying this business model, and it's happening at an accelerating pace.
The traditional model of internet traffic is rapidly becoming outdated.
The internet has entered a new era.
B2B businesses are sleeping on AI search right now when they seem to be able to benefit the most.
I just found this query in GSC for a super niche B2B client. Highly relevant question to their product and business.
Just because you are marketing B2B products, doesn't mean you can' get in on AEO.
Me to my wife after I’ve made questionable parenting decisions…
I just hit enter on a giant prompt into Replit and while I did said… “BANG MY LINE 1800 WUS HATNIN”
😂 For context youtu.be/eG9GDjrMQQ8?is=c3u-…
Brady Madden retweeted
Most SEO forecasts are BS.
Not because the math is wrong.
Because they're measuring the wrong thing.
They start with keyword volume.
Volume → CTR → traffic → conversions → revenue.
Nice spreadsheet. Completely backwards.
Keyword volume tells you how many times something gets searched.
It doesn't tell you how many of those searchers could actually become customers.
And it definitely doesn't tell you whether the market is valuable enough to justify spending $100k trying to rank in it.
I'd start with TAM.
TAM = Total Addressable Market.
Before I'm thinking about content, links or traffic projections, I want to know:
How much money is actually available to capture here?
Then I'd work backwards.
For SEO, the model looks more like:
Commercial TAM → Searchable TAM → Winnable TAM → SEO Revenue Opportunity
Let's say there are 50,000 potential customers in your market.
They're worth $5,000/year each.
That's a $250m TAM.
But only 20% of that market actively uses search during the buying journey. Now your search-addressable market is $50m.
Then you look at the actual SERPs.
Who's winning? How entrenched are they? What's the authority gap? How much of the query set could you realistically own?
If the realistic answer is 5%, you're looking at a $2.5m SEO opportunity.
Now I can decide what that opportunity is worth investing in to capture.
That's the bit most SEO forecasts miss.
Because search volume can massively distort where you put your money.
Imagine two markets:
🌲 Market A: 100,000 searches/month with $100 customers
🌲 Market B: 8,000 searches/month with $20,000 customers
Most keyword-led strategies gravitate towards Market A.
More keywords. More traffic.
Bigger numbers for the forecast.
But Market B could be worth multiples more to the business.
And that's how companies end up:
🌲 Spending six figures chasing traffic that barely monetizes
🌲 Ignoring "small" niches with insane customer economics
🌲 Building content strategies before they've proven the opportunity deserves the investment
Keyword volume isn't useless, it's just downstream.
It should be an input into your SEO forecast. It shouldn't be the foundation of your business case.
So before asking:
"How much traffic can we get?"
Ask:
"How much of this market can we profitably capture through search?"
Then work backwards into keywords, content, links and budget.
Because a forecast that predicts 500,000 organic visits but can't tell me what the market is worth isn't really a forecast.
It's an SEO report pretending to be a business case.
🌲🌲🌲
Most SEO forecasts are BS.
Not because the math is wrong.
Because they're measuring the wrong thing.
They start with keyword volume.
Volume → CTR → traffic → conversions → revenue.
Nice spreadsheet. Completely backwards.
Keyword volume tells you how many times something gets searched.
It doesn't tell you how many of those searchers could actually become customers.
And it definitely doesn't tell you whether the market is valuable enough to justify spending $100k trying to rank in it.
I'd start with TAM.
TAM = Total Addressable Market.
Before I'm thinking about content, links or traffic projections, I want to know:
How much money is actually available to capture here?
Then I'd work backwards.
For SEO, the model looks more like:
Commercial TAM → Searchable TAM → Winnable TAM → SEO Revenue Opportunity
Let's say there are 50,000 potential customers in your market.
They're worth $5,000/year each.
That's a $250m TAM.
But only 20% of that market actively uses search during the buying journey. Now your search-addressable market is $50m.
Then you look at the actual SERPs.
Who's winning? How entrenched are they? What's the authority gap? How much of the query set could you realistically own?
If the realistic answer is 5%, you're looking at a $2.5m SEO opportunity.
Now I can decide what that opportunity is worth investing in to capture.
That's the bit most SEO forecasts miss.
Because search volume can massively distort where you put your money.
Imagine two markets:
🌲 Market A: 100,000 searches/month with $100 customers
🌲 Market B: 8,000 searches/month with $20,000 customers
Most keyword-led strategies gravitate towards Market A.
More keywords. More traffic.
Bigger numbers for the forecast.
But Market B could be worth multiples more to the business.
And that's how companies end up:
🌲 Spending six figures chasing traffic that barely monetizes
🌲 Ignoring "small" niches with insane customer economics
🌲 Building content strategies before they've proven the opportunity deserves the investment
Keyword volume isn't useless, it's just downstream.
It should be an input into your SEO forecast. It shouldn't be the foundation of your business case.
So before asking:
"How much traffic can we get?"
Ask:
"How much of this market can we profitably capture through search?"
Then work backwards into keywords, content, links and budget.
Because a forecast that predicts 500,000 organic visits but can't tell me what the market is worth isn't really a forecast.
It's an SEO report pretending to be a business case.
🌲🌲🌲
most of the time when SEOs think AI isn't helpful, its because their using vague inputs.
AI needs CONTEXT. give it data, context and more and you'd be shocked at how much better it will be for you
Brady Madden retweeted
Cannabis retail hasn't quite caught on to AEO yet.
Don't get me wrong, SEO is still valuable and where 99% of online traffic for retailers comes from.
But look at these prompts this one retailer is showing up for...
🌲 Michigan Cannabis dispensaries and reviews
🌲 Can you recommend some recreational cannabis shops near Lansing?
🌲 How do Reviews for House of Dank in Traverse City compare to other dispensaries? [I wasn't looking at the HOD domain when I saw this]
🌲 What are the best dispensaries in Lansing, Michigan?
🌲 What should I know before visiting a dispensary in Centerline, Michigan?
This is the search before the search.
Consumer asks an LLM to narrow down where to go or what to buy...
Narrows it to a shortlist, then googles each one...
Researches location, product, questions for the budtender...
Buys.
Awareness used to live entirely in Google. Now it starts in a chat window, and IMO cannabis retail hasn't noticed yet.
Cannabis retail hasn't quite caught on to AEO yet.
Don't get me wrong, SEO is still valuable and where 99% of online traffic for retailers comes from.
But look at these prompts this one retailer is showing up for...
🌲 Michigan Cannabis dispensaries and reviews
🌲 Can you recommend some recreational cannabis shops near Lansing?
🌲 How do Reviews for House of Dank in Traverse City compare to other dispensaries? [I wasn't looking at the HOD domain when I saw this]
🌲 What are the best dispensaries in Lansing, Michigan?
🌲 What should I know before visiting a dispensary in Centerline, Michigan?
This is the search before the search.
Consumer asks an LLM to narrow down where to go or what to buy...
Narrows it to a shortlist, then googles each one...
Researches location, product, questions for the budtender...
Buys.
Awareness used to live entirely in Google. Now it starts in a chat window, and IMO cannabis retail hasn't noticed yet.
Cannabis brands used to get a pass on SEO.
Retailers mostly handled search discovery. Your job was sell-through rate and getting people to ask for you by name.
The old flow looked like this:
🌲 Brand sells into retail stores
🌲 Retailer does the SEO work to capture "dispensary near me" and product type searches
🌲 Person walks in
🌲 Budtender sells them on the brands they already like
Brands could sit back on search because retail carried the search weight.
That flow is breaking.
People aren't just Googling "best dispensary in [city]" anymore. They're prompting LLMs with the kind of specificity you'd only tell a budtender in person.
Things like:
🌲 "What are the best cannabis brands to try in [state]"
🌲 "I'm a 60 year old with low back pain, what cannabis products or brands are best for that in [location]"
🌲 "I'm traveling to [city], what local cannabis brands [or dispensaries] should I try"
I asked Claude one simple version of this myself: "What are the best cannabis brands to try in Michigan?" [screenshot below]
Look at who got named. I'm not commenting one way or another, but I'll say some of my favorites aren't even listed. Now imagine that's the ONLY list a tourist or new consumer ever sees before they walk into a store.
The retailer still matters here. But now the BRAND has to earn the recommendation before the person ever reaches the counter.
New flow:
🌲 Consumer prompts an LLM with their specifics
🌲 They research the brands it names and where those brands are sold
🌲 They walk into the dispensary already decided, or ready to ask the budtender to confirm their pick
If your brand isn't in that LLM’s list, you're not even in the conversation. There are lots of various acronyms people are using for this today, but AI search or AEO [Answer Engine Optimization] are my favorites.
Try this today. Open your LLM of choice and run:
🌲 "What are the best cannabis brands to try in [state]"
🌲 "What cannabis brands and products are best for [health issue]"
🌲 "I'm a [age/sex] with [health problem], what cannabis brands in [state] would help"
🌲 "I'm visiting [state/city], what local brands and dispensaries should I check out"
See who shows up. Does your brand?
Retailers built their visibility around Search Engines for years, and now are focused on LLMs. Cannabis brands [IMO] haven’t fully realized yet that they need to do the same.
🌲🌲🌲
#SEO #AISearch
Today did not go as planned.
Internet's been down for 24 hours. My son got sent home from daycare sick (he's fine, he was just milking it).
My wife had a full day of meetings. I had a light one, so I picked up the slack.
None of it was in the plan, but all of it will be handled.
That's the job some days: adapt, adjust, keep moving forward.
So instead of working this morning, my son and I got some yardwork done and just hung out. [Thankfully I had some help pushing these 40lb bags of top soil around!]
Some other things we accomplished:
🌲 Enjoyed some pastries by a creek
🌲 Threw rocks into said creek
🌲 Found some frogs
🌲 Dunked a basketball 893937494 times
🌲 Threw some more rocks into the woods
🌲 Read some books about cows
🌲 Watched some airplanes
🌲 Played in the dirt
🌲 Drank smoothies
Still making it to the Catalyst Collective event tonight because good things come from showing up anyway!
🌲🌲🌲
Number of lead generation agencies:
193838959271891919191811
Number of them I trust to actually get me good leads:
0
"We fixed every local citation because someone told us that's why we weren't ranking."
"Spent three weeks cleaning up NAP consistency across 40 directories. Rankings didn't move an inch."
This is one of the most common wastes of time I see in local SEO.
Citations matter, but they're rarely the reason a business isn't ranking. They get blamed because they're easy to point at and easy to "fix," so tools and agencies love pushing them.
Instead, I see these things as the most common items holding rankings back:
🌲 Your Google Business Profile category or service list doesn't match what you actually do. Search Engines rank based on relevance signals inside GBP itself, not just what directories say about you.
🌲 Review velocity and recency are weak. A business with 12 reviews from last month often outranks one with 200 reviews from three years ago. Recency signals activity.
🌲 Proximity is working against you. In dense markets, you can do everything right and still lose to a competitor who's simply closer to the searcher. No citation fix changes geography or a bad location.
🌲 Your website doesn't back up what your GBP claims. If your profile says you offer a service but there's no page on your site about it, Search Engines have less confidence putting you in front of that searcher.
A local service business client came to me convinced their citation inconsistencies were tanking their map pack rankings. Citations were fine, a few minor mismatches at best. The real issue was their GBP had generic categories and their site had zero service specific pages for their highest volume searches.
We tightened the GBP categories, built out four service pages, and started a simple review request process. Map pack rankings improved within five weeks. Citations never got touched.
Before you spend time on citation cleanup:
🌲 Confirm your GBP categories and services match your actual search terms
🌲 Check your review count and recency against the businesses outranking you
🌲 Look at proximity. Are you actually losing, or just naturally further away. Is your location bad?
🌲 THEN clean up citations if everything else checks out
If you changed your address, or have changed it in the recent past, that’s usually a good sign citation clean up will be helpful.
🌲🌲🌲
#SEO #AISearch
Keyword targeting: you optimize for what people type.
Query fan out: you optimize for what the AI searches after being prompted.
Someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode one question. Behind the scenes, the model splits it into 5-10 smaller searches, pulls answers for all of them, and blends the results into one response.
Your page might never rank for the original question. But if it answers three of the hidden sub-questions well, you may get cited anyway.
So the old playbook of one primary keyword plus a handful of secondaries per page is incomplete. It still matters for traditional rankings, but AI visibility comes from covering the cluster: the related questions, comparisons, and follow-ups a model generates on its own.
🌲 Practical move: Take your top money page. List every question an AI would need answered to recommend you. Cost, fit, alternatives, timing, who it's for. Then check how many your page actually covers.
Most pages answer one. The brands winning AI search answer the whole fan out.
Last note: The marketing finesse involved here is finding a way to speak to many or all of the fan out terms without making the page a giant wall of text with 20+ FAQs at the bottom of it.
🌲🌲🌲
#SEO #AISearch
SEOs [especially me] historically haven't been great at communicating our FULL value.
Even though the work we do touches nearly every channel in marketing.
SEO ≠ blogs
SEO ≠ links
SEO ≠ content
These things are PART of what needs to be done, but are maybe 2 of the 5 main layers.
🌲 Getting found on Google
🌲 Showing up in AI Overviews
🌲 Getting recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity
🌲 Owning the comparison searches in your category
🌲 Showing up on the sites that influence all of the above
You can't buy your way into that with a blog calendar and some backlinks
It takes technical foundations, content, brand signals, and third party trust all working together.
This is exactly why I've been pushing clients to think in terms of "Search Engines & LLMs" [aka SEARCH] instead of just "Google rankings."
The channel has expanded, but most SEO reporting and tactics still haven't caught up.
Credit to @jakezward for the framework of this post and the graphic below. Great breakdown of how to think about this as we near Q4.
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This. SEOs (especially me) historically haven’t been very good at communicating their FULL value despite everything we do touching every channel in marketing.
SEO ≠ blogs
SEO ≠ Links
SEO ≠ content
It’s so much more than that, and collectively we need to be better at helping C suite leadership understand it.
SEO is now WAY bigger than ranking #1 on Google.
Not because Google matters less, but because the job of SEO has expanded.
Today, SEO is also about:
1. Getting found when someone searches on Google
2. Appearing in AI Overviews for Google searches
3. Getting recommended in ChatGPT answers
4. Owning the comparison searches in your category
5. Showing up on the sites influencing all of the above
And you can’t do that by JUST:
- Writing more blog posts
- Building more backlinks
- Adding schema
- Tracking a bunch of AI prompts
- Renaming SEO to “AEO”
You need the entire system working together.
Here’s how I think about the 5 layers of SEO in 2026:
"We doubled our budget on Google Ads to cover the traffic we lost."
"Six months later, budget's still up and we can't dial it back."
Traffic drops, panic sets in, and paid search becomes the fix while the real problem never gets touched.
The issues with this are:
🌲 Ads don't solve the reason you lost visibility. If your page lost to a better one, or intent shifted, or your site is sending weak trust signals, none of that gets fixed by raising a bid.
🌲 The second you stop paying, you're back to zero [or worse]. Every dollar spent was rented visibility, not built visibility.
🌲 Budgets creep. What started as "just to get through the dip" becomes a permanent line item.
🌲 Analytics is usually looking at last click attribution so paid gets credit at times when another channel actually captured them.
🌲 It masks the actual diagnosis. Nobody goes back and asks why organic tanked once ads are covering the gap. The real issue sits untouched, sometimes for years.
A local service client came to me spending $4k/mo on ads after a 30% organic drop, convinced paid was the only lever left. We pulled the SERPs for their top service terms and found three competitors had rebuilt their pages with pricing, reviews, and video, none of which this client's page had.
We rebuilt two pages for their top target terms, amongst a few other clean up items. Rankings recovered in about 10 weeks. Ad spend got cut in half, and the organic leads converted better than the paid ones ever did.
Before defaulting to paid search to cover a drop:
🌲 Confirm the drop is real, not seasonal or a tracking issue
🌲 Check what's now outranking you and what those pages have that yours doesn't
🌲 Decide if the fix is weeks [content/UX] or months [authority/trust]
🌲 THEN decide if ads are a bridge, not a permanent patch
Same trap is showing up in AI search now. Businesses are buying visibility through mentions and placements instead of fixing why they're invisible to LLMs in the first place.
If your ad spend keeps climbing and nobody can explain why organic dropped, my DMs are open.
🌲🌲🌲
