I love when someone saves me months of work. Check out the free summary of months of research around how to get recommended by AI platforms.

Let’s dive in.

It’s really frustrating when all of the influencers are screaming ‘hire me!’ to build your AI recommendation strategy, yet none of them agree or can explain why they achieve results. ‘Trust me’ seems to be the mantra.

Yeah, no. I prefer data.

I spent the past few months gathering all of the formal research from established firms such as semrush to figure out what is worth my time. That data was synthesized into a short report that I use to guide Claude in my AI recommendation strategy. I use it every day. CorZen is now recommended by ChatGPT 87% of the time for three queries. I will continue to build out the system, with a goal of recommendations from Claude and ChatGPT 80% of the time for 60 queries by the end of the year.

If you want AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude to recommend your company, you may find value from what I learned. The report is offered here for free.

Download “What 10,000+ AI Queries Reveal About Why AI Isn’t Recommending You”

Takeaway: Create web content that feeds AI by using data, examples, and simple answers to common questions.

“Your account has been suspended because you are a scammer.” That is a short description of the email that an increasing number of companies are receiving from their domain provider. It’s a real email and not a phishing scam. What happened?

They purchased email lists from lead providers and scraped emails from the web (thank you ChatGPT) for a cold outbound email campaign. One or more of those emails were a spam trap. Dang.

A spam trap is an email account created by email service providers, security companies, and domain companies (Go Daddy) to catch people who send bulk, unsolicited email (spam). It accepts email like a regular account but since it’s a fake email, it isn’t possible that they opted-in.

This matters because companies are sending emails to lists scraped off of the web (in violation of multiple laws). AI makes it easy to collect emails and so people are doing it. These emails are now showing up in purchased leads as well.

What are you supposed to do? Stop growing your email list? Not exactly. The best option is to only send to people who have actively opted-in to receive your emails. If you have a legitimate business interest, you are allowed to cold email corporate domains but not personal emails. This means that you should avoid Gmail and Yahoo but [email protected] is acceptable if you have a legitimate business need.

The next best option is to use list rental services from reputable providers. This service involves the email being sent from the providers email account to opted-in prospects. They don’t give you the email addresses, They give you the results. Most reputable vendors will insist on this strategy. Be cautious with any company who offers to sell you the email addresses - they acquired them easily and likely contain spam traps.

The other thing you should do is run all newly acquired email lists through the Spam Trap Check Agent in CorZen. It gives you a red, yellow, or green risk rating for each email, along with a simple explanation of how it earned the score. Go ahead and send to green emails. It’s best to check the yellow and red emails using a paid verification service such as ZeroBounce.

Who cares? Companies caught in spam traps have their ability to send email turned off completely. Some win their appeal but it can take months. In the interim, they can’t send an email to anyone for any reason. The consequences are fairly significant so it’s worth taking 5 minutes to scan new email addresses.

Takeaway: Run newly acquired email addresses (that were not acquired using an opt-in form) through the Spam Trap Check Agent in CorZen.

We are being forced to learn micromanagement….