How to Get AI to Recommend You to Your Future Coaching Clients
Before AI completely changed the way we run our online businesses, Google and SEO was the spot to be. The whole game was simple. You wanted to show up in Google when somebody searched your niche. You stuffed the right keywords in the right places, you crossed your fingers, and you hoped the algorithm liked you that day.
That game is over.
Because of AI, SEO alone is not going to cut it for you anymore. That is not where your future coaching clients are searching. They have moved to ChatGPT to research their next big investment. They have moved to Perplexity. Even Google has changed how it presents answers, because people are not searching the old keyword way anymore. They are asking for summaries. And AI is the one deciding which coaches it recommends inside those summaries.
Either you are on that list, or you are not.
I want to show you how to get on it.
I Didn't Even Realize AI Was Sending Me Clients
Late in 2025, a client on one of my coaching calls said something completely offhand. She goes, "Oh yeah, ChatGPT recommended you to me." And I did not think much of it. It felt like a fun little fluke.
Then 2026 hit. And I had about six brand new clients tell me they found me because ChatGPT recommended me when they searched how to build a YouTube strategy for business owners.
Six. In a short window. All pointing back to the same source.
That is when I knew we were dealing with a real change, and I had to jump on it. So I went digging.
Here is what I found. Over 60% of US consumers are now using AI to research high-investment purchases. Things like your coaching program. Just last year, in 2025, that number was only 41%. That is a massive jump in a very short amount of time.
And here is the part that matters most for you. That jump is coming from established buyers. The people doing their research on AI have the money. They understand the value of investing in a high-quality coach. These are not tire-kickers looking for a freebie. These are the buyers you actually want.
Which is exactly why it matters so much that you are the one AI recommends. Not your competitor.
Google Isn't Dead, But It's Not What It Used to Be
I am not going to sit here and tell you SEO is completely worthless. There is still a place for it.
But you need to sit with this number. Around 60% of Google searches now end with zero clicks. Zero. AI summarizes the answer right there at the top of the page, and the person never clicks through to a website at all.
So if you want to be at the top of that page inside the summary, you cannot rely on the old playbook. You have to create content that AI will actually pull from. And I need you to understand why this shift is happening while so many people are pretending it isn't.
Why the Gurus Are Steering You Wrong
So many marketing gurus and business coaches, people we have listened to and trusted for years, are still telling us to double down on the stuff that worked for them in 2020 and 2021.
The same launches. The same funnels. The same challenges. The same repurpose-to-every-platform grind. The same Facebook ad strategy.
They have stuck their heads in the sand. They have not looked up to see what is actually happening to businesses right now.
They hit the gold rush back in 2020 and 2021. And good for them, they did. But here is the thing. I was there too, and I was having babies and balancing being locked up at home with my kids, so I wasn't really scaling hard at that time. And yet I am still here today. I am still closer to where you are than where they are.
They are not trying to make 10k months. They are not trying to make 30k months. They are well past that. So they genuinely do not understand where the rest of us get stuck. They are handing you a strategy they have not personally run in the last couple of years, because they do not have to.
I love a good Real Housewives reference, so I will say it plainly. A lot of them are giving very Lisa Barlow energy, refusing to take accountability that things have changed.
Look at the people who are paying attention. Amy Porterfield is not running the same strategy she ran a few years ago. Why? Because what used to work does not work the same way anymore. AI changed the game. The smart ones adjusted. The rest are repeating a script from a season that already ended.
So what do you actually do about it?
AI Trusts YouTube More Than Almost Anything Else
Here is the first thing you need to understand. AI pulls recommendations by looking for sources it can trust. And one of the biggest sources AI trusts, one that most coaches have no idea about, is YouTube.
AI loves long-form content. And YouTube has quietly become one of the top recommended resources for AI, beating out Reddit.
According to a study by BrightEdge, YouTube is the number one cited domain in Google's AI overview. And I have watched this happen in real time. I was just messing around the other day, asking Google some long, detailed questions, and my own YouTube video popped right up in the answer.
YouTube is cited around 200 times more in Google's AI overview than any other platform. And it is not just Google. Perplexity leans on it. Even ChatGPT, which has absolutely zero reason to favor a Google-owned platform, still leans on YouTube to find experts to recommend.
The reason is simple. Your YouTube footprint creates off-platform signals that ChatGPT can trust.
What This Looks Like in Practice
When somebody opens ChatGPT and asks who is the best coach for X, or who can help me grow my business with this specific thing, AI scans its sources. It looks for consensus. Then it starts naming names.
And the names AI pulls most often come from YouTube transcripts.
Not your Instagram content. Not your TikTok content. Not even your beautifully designed Substack. Those platforms are not feeding AI the way YouTube is.
This is why you are going to see more and more coaches move to YouTube as their discoverable platform. But here is the good news, and it is a big one. As a coach on YouTube, you do not have to play YouTuber games.
You do not have to chase subscribers. You do not have to chase views. You do not have to go viral. Because what you are building is a searchable asset for the coaching business you already have.
When someone asks AI to recommend a coach for a specific problem, AI is going to pull from the assets you built on YouTube. Not because you blew up. Not because you have tens of thousands of subscribers. It pulls from the content where you clearly solved the exact problem they are searching for.
The Proof That Views and Subscribers Don't Decide This
I have a client who has not posted a brand new YouTube video in over a year. Not one. And her old videos are still pulling in over 200 views from ChatGPT.
She is not promoting. She is not showing up on social media at all. AI is finding her content, citing it, and sending her traffic. That is not about consistency. That is about compounding. The work she did a while ago keeps working for her now.
Now I told you subscribers do not matter, so let me back that up with actual data.
A study of 100 million AI citations found one clear thing. The subscriber count of the channels behind the recommended videos does not matter. 40% of the cited videos AI recommended had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.
Read that again. The size of your channel does not decide whether AI recommends you. The number of views on your video does not decide it either.
What decides it is the clarity of what you talk about.
That is exactly why, when I work with my clients inside the YouTube Coaching Experience, the very first thing we get crystal clear on is this. What do you want to be known for? What is the specific problem your future clients are actively searching for? Then we build the whole YouTube strategy around that one topic.
We do not go broad. Broad does not get you recommended. I help my clients get specific, because specificity is what increases the chances that AI finds you and puts you in front of your future clients instead of your competitors.
You do not get recommended because you went viral. You get recommended because your name is consistently tied to a specific problem across the sources AI trusts.
YouTube Is One Piece, Not the Whole Thing
I am always going to shoot straight with you, so I am not going to pretend YouTube is a magic button. It is one piece of the puzzle. An important one, but still a piece.
To keep being the source AI pulls for your topic, you want other things working alongside your videos. Guest podcast appearances. Blog posts, which I teach my clients how to create directly from their YouTube videos, by the way. You want other people talking about you and what you do.
Now, you cannot fully control who talks about you out there. That part is not in your hands.
But you can control getting videos up on YouTube for the specific problem your coaching program solves. That is your flywheel. That is what builds trust day in and day out, without you needing to show up on social media every single day, and without you needing to become a YouTuber to get the sales you want.
Here is another one that still gives me chills. I had a client with fewer than 10 subscribers, whose video was getting fewer than 20 views, and she booked over $19,000 in sales from it. Because we got specific on the exact problem she solves, and we got the video up on YouTube to answer it.
Fewer than 10 subscribers. Fewer than 20 views. Nineteen thousand dollars.
That is what happens when you stop chasing the wrong metrics and start building assets.
Why AI Traffic Converts So Much Higher
Let me be fully transparent with my own numbers, because I think it helps to see the real version.
In 2026 alone, I have had over 100 views come directly from ChatGPT to my YouTube videos.
Now, 100 does not sound like a lot, and it isn't a flood of traffic. But here is why it matters more than it looks. People who come from ChatGPT convert at a higher rate. They were already doing their research on AI before they ever landed on your video. Your video is what closes them.
So yes, it is less traffic. But it is a much warmer audience than almost anywhere else. A viewer coming from ChatGPT is already in buying mode. They have narrowed down their sources. They are checking you out to decide if you are the right fit.
Those are the warmest leads you can catch. And you catch them by posting one video a week, cutting back your daily social content, cutting your ad spend, and taking off Fridays if you want to. YouTube does the heavy lifting for you.
The One Thing to Do Today
You are probably thinking, okay Trena, this all sounds great, but what do I actually say? What does a script even look like?
I've got you. I created a quick mini course built around my Video Game Plan. Inside it, I walk you through how to write a video game plan, how to hook your content, and most importantly, how to come up with titles and thumbnails that actually get the click. Because it does not matter how good your content is if you do not win the click. Nobody watches what they never tapped on. You can grab that entire mini course at trenalittle.com/videoplan.
But if you only do one thing today, do this. Pick one problem that your ready-to-buy viewer has. Just one.
Then create a series of videos on that single problem, going deep into it from every angle you can think of. Because AI does not recommend people who dabble across ten topics. It recommends the coaches whose content goes deep and consistently ties that same problem across multiple videos. That is what builds the flywheel.
So look at your content right now, whether you are on YouTube yet or not. What is the one problem you want your name tied to?
If you cannot answer that in a single sentence, AI cannot either. And that is exactly why you are not getting recommended. Fix that clarity problem first, before you create a single piece of content.
