Episode 3: AI search — how photographers get cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

Transcript

NATHAN: Welcome back to The Photography Marketing Podcast — the show about the business side of photography. I'm Nathan Cole.

LAURA: And I'm Laura Bishop. Today we're talking about the biggest shift in how clients find photographers since Google itself: AI search. And I want to start with a scene that's already happening. Somebody gets engaged. Instead of typing into Google, they open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask: "Who are the best wedding photographers in Nashville?" And the assistant doesn't give them ten blue links. It gives them three or four names, with a sentence about each.

NATHAN: And if you're one of those names, that is an astonishingly warm lead — the client arrives pre-sold, because a trusted assistant recommended you. And if you're not one of those names, you were never even in the running. You didn't lose the enquiry. You never existed in the conversation.

LAURA: So the question for this episode is: how do those names get chosen? Because it's not random, and it's not paid placement — you cannot currently buy your way in. It's about what the AI can verify about you. And that brings us to the word of the day: entity.

NATHAN: An entity, in plain English, is a thing the AI knows exists — a business with a name, a location, a speciality, and evidence backing all three. When the AI answers "best newborn photographer in Leeds", it's looking for businesses it can confidently identify as: one, real; two, photographers; three, newborn specialists; four, in Leeds; five, well regarded. Each of those five facts needs to be stated, consistently, in places the AI can read.

LAURA: And here's where photographers accidentally fail. Their website says "Capturing timeless moments" — beautiful, meaningless to a machine. It never says the words "wedding photographer in Nashville". Their name is spelled three different ways across the web. Their reviews mention photography but never the niche. The AI can't verify the entity, so it cites the competitor whose information is consistent.

NATHAN: Let's get concrete — five things that build your entity. Number one: consistent naming. Your business name, spelled identically, everywhere — website, Google Business Profile, Instagram, directories, every listing. If you're "Smith and Co Photography" in one place and "Smith & Co." in another, you're splitting your own signal.

LAURA: Number two: say what you are, in words, everywhere. On your homepage, in your GBP description, in your directory listings: "Emma Smith is a wedding photographer based in Nashville, Tennessee, shooting across the Southeast." That sentence feels almost too simple to write — write it anyway. AI systems build their understanding from exactly these plain factual statements. The first hundred and fifty characters of your homepage description and any directory listing matter most.

NATHAN: Number three: third-party corroboration. This is the big one. AI assistants don't just take your word for it — they look for other sources agreeing with you. Google reviews that mention what you shoot and where. Directory listings. Blog features, press mentions, podcast appearances. Every independent mention that ties your name to your niche and location is another vote the AI can count. This is why being listed in curated directories matters more than it used to — a listing isn't just a backlink any more, it's evidence.

LAURA: Number four: transcripts and text. AI reads text, not images, and barely watches video. So if you've been on a podcast, make sure there's a transcript online. If you blog, write about your actual work — "A summer wedding at Riverwood Mansion in Nashville" tells the AI far more than "Recent work". Photographers sit on a mountain of content and publish almost none of it as findable text.

NATHAN: And number five: reviews, again — because this is the second episode in a row they've come up, and it won't be the last. Reviews are one of the few large-scale, third-party, regularly updated sources that say what you do, where you do it, and whether you're any good — in customers' own words. When someone asks an AI "who's a good family photographer near me", review text is often literally what gets quoted back.

LAURA: Now, a reality check, because we promised no hype on this show. Today, AI assistants are a small slice of how clients find photographers — Google search and Maps still dominate, and word of mouth is still king. But the direction is unmistakable, the growth is steep, and the advantage goes to whoever builds their entity early, because these systems develop habits. Once an assistant has a confident answer for your town, dislodging the incumbent gets harder. The work we're describing is the same work that helps your Google rankings anyway — you're not choosing between them.

NATHAN: And this is exactly why our parent project exists. The Photography Marketing Podcast is produced by the team behind Top Rated Photographers — an independent directory that lists a maximum of ten photographers per niche per city, each reviewed against published criteria: Google reviews, website quality, specialism and consistency. A listing there is designed to be precisely the kind of independent, structured, text-based corroboration we've been talking about — name, niche, city, description, reviews, all in one machine-readable place.

LAURA: Homework this week, three checks. One: search your own business name in Google — is it spelled identically everywhere it appears? Two: read the first two sentences of your homepage and your Google profile — do they plainly state what you shoot and where? Three: ask ChatGPT who the best photographers in your town are, in your niche, and look at who gets named and what evidence gets quoted. That answer is your roadmap.

NATHAN: That wraps our launch trio — website, Google profile, AI visibility. From next week we're into the money episodes: pricing without discounting, packages that sell themselves, and where photographers' enquiries really come from. Stick with us.

LAURA: The Photography Marketing Podcast is a production of Top Rated Photographers. Show notes, links and full transcripts for every episode live at photographymarketingpodcast dot com. If you're finding the show useful, follow it — and tell one photographer friend who needs to hear it.