Lefty Media Co

06/19/2026

New on the Lefty Substack : the two layers of AI discoverability, and why most businesses only know about one.

GEO is whether AI knows who you are. The structural foundation.
Pick Rate is whether AI recommends you for the competitive query. The hard part.

Real KC case in the piece. Years of SEO and PPC, still nearly invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. We restructured their foundation and moved GEO Readiness from 52 to 72 in 8 days.

GEO moves fast. Pick Rate is the daily work.

This is what comes after SEO.

Links in the comments

06/16/2026

I keep getting asked if AI is gonna take people's jobs. And honestly, I think about my people more than I think about the business, so that question hits with me.

I know you're not supposed to say that out loud as a business owner. I don't care. It's true.

Took me years to find the right people. The kind you find and then quietly decide you're gonna protect. We work hard, we got each other's backs, and we roast each other into the dirt, which around here is just how you say someone is kinda okay.

I'm not studying AI every day trying to figure out how to need fewer of them. I'm studying it trying to figure out how to give them more of their life back.

Because the folks I know don't want more money near as bad as they want more time. Time with their kids. Time to not be wore out at the end of the day. Time that's actually theirs.

So what if AI didn't take your job. What if it took your Friday. Same work, done in less of it, and a whole day handed back to the people who earned it.

I'm not there yet, I'll be straight with you. We're remote and it's something I'm building toward, not something I've got figured out. But it's the direction we will be soon because of how I study AI for my team not against my team.

Maybe that makes me a bad businessman. I think it might make me a decent one.

Stucker Construction Incorporated CONTENTkc

06/15/2026

Ask ChatGPT for the best home builder in Kansas City. Then ask it about a shop you know is great. See if the machine even knows they exist.

A lot of good KC businesses are finding out the hard way that AI has no idea who they are. Not because they did anything wrong. They did everything the old way told them to. Website. SEO. Years of it. Real money.

Problem is, all that work was built for Google. The AI tools your customers are reaching for now read the world completely differently.

Tomorrow I'm writing about a KC business that learned this firsthand. Did everything right by the old rules, still nearly invisible to AI. We got under the hood, rebuilt how their site talks to the machines, and their AI readiness jumped from a 22 to a 76 in thirteen days.

There's a name for that first layer, and a name for the harder one. I break both down tomorrow.

I'll be straight with you. Nobody in KC is really doing this work yet. That is the window.

Link to read it is in the first comment.

06/08/2026

New Lefty article hits the Substack tomorrow morning.

Title: "There is no such thing as an AI expert right now (and I include myself)."

Three weeks of writing this newsletter. Three pieces published so far. One on why I quit selling SEO. One on why AI keeps recommending the big national names over the small KC shops. One on what missing the internet in the late 90s taught me about not missing AI now.

Tomorrow's is the one I needed to publish before any of the others fully make sense.

If you run a small business in KC and you have been wondering whether all the people calling themselves AI experts actually know what they are doing, they do not. None of us do yet. Anyone telling you different is selling you something.

The newsletter is weekly. Same time every Tuesday. The purpose is to write honestly about AI search and small businesses without the hype.

Link in the first comment.

06/06/2026

Evil machines!!! AI will wipe us all out at some point but until it does we make them be nice to your business and recommend you. Check out are free scan tool to see how much we would need to slap them around to get them to recommend your business.

See what Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity say about your business right now. Answer in 30 seconds. No email gate.

06/04/2026

Got a close friend in KC whose old website was last updated in 2007. Stock photos. A couple of paragraphs per page. Never ran ads, never did SEO, never wrote any content. Just a Google Business Profile and that's it. For 18 years.

We built him a new site on WordPress and put our AI discoverability work on it. He still doesn't run ads. Still doesn't do SEO. Just the site we built and the AI layer, and our Discovery Me Service.

In the last 30 days his Google Analytics shows 132 organic visits from Google and Bing, plus 4 direct referrals from ChatGPT and Claude.

That 4 from AI is just the part that got tracked. Most AI citations don't show up in Analytics at all. The real number is likely a lot higher.

For most KC service businesses, one qualified lead a month from AI traffic would be worth more than the work itself. For a roofer or contractor, one job from this could be the difference between a slow year and a great one.

This is what the work looks like once it's in. AI starts knowing you. Customers start finding you.

If you're a KC small business and AI doesn't know you exist yet, you're missing customers who haven't even opened Google yet.

06/03/2026

What is our incentive to use AI??? To save time when we currently never have time to save time. Honestly we just wanted to say something weird and this hit for us.

06/02/2026

Fool me once.......

I was in college in the late 90s when the internet hit. I had every reason to be in front of it. Hand-coded binary. Cisco certified. Network security stack. Certifications nobody my age had.

I missed it.

Not because I didn't have the skills. I had every skill. I missed it because I listened to the wrong voices. The ones saying it was a bubble. That nobody would shop online. That email would kill real communication.

All of them were wrong.

The next twenty years I spent catching up on what people who got in early built.

AI is the same shape of moment. Same kind of voices. "It's hype." "It's not real." "Nobody actually uses it for business."

If you're a small business owner in Kansas City right now, I get the hesitation. I really do. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of garbage.

But here's the question I should have asked myself in 1998 and didn't.

Is this thing inevitable?

It was then. It is now.

I'm not making that mistake twice. Built Lefty Media Co specifically because I saw the wave coming and I knew KC small businesses were about to be the ones who got buried under it if somebody who actually cared didn't start doing the technical work for them.

That's the why.

Full piece in Lefty Notes, link in the comments.

P.S. for anyone reading this who remembers what it felt like when the internet was new, you already get it.

05/26/2026

Try this for me real quick.

Open ChatGPT on your phone. Type "best HVAC company in Kansas City." Hit go.

Now ask Claude the same thing. Then Perplexity.

You might get three different answers. Sometimes a local KC shop. Sometimes a national name. Sometimes something else entirely.

Here is what bothers me: AI does not have ads. There is no "promoted" tag on AI search. So why are the answers all over the place, and why do the same handful of national brands keep showing up across categories?

Wrote about it this morning. It is not money. It is signals. And every signal the big name has, a local business can build.

Whole article in the first comment.

If you are a KC business owner getting beat by the chain in AI search, this is the answer.

05/25/2026

Memorial Day. Today I want to talk about Vietnam.

The wars we usually hear about on this day all deserve to be honored. Pearl Harbor. The Civil War. World War 1 and World War 2. Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran. Korea. Every war America has been in. Every man and woman who served and was lost in any of them earned the honor of being remembered today, and I do not want anything I say to take away from that.

But Vietnam is the one I rarely hear about. The one that seems to get skipped over to me at least. And the man who taught me what I know about service, work, family, and showing up, fought in it.
My dad was drafted into the Army. He fought in Vietnam. He has never wanted to talk about it. He has said that he saw and had to do things no one should ever have to see or do. He has softened a little over the years and told some stories in which our whole family is silent and hangs on every word. But for most of my life he carried the whole thing in silence.

For a lot of my younger life I was rebellious about all of this. I hated war. I hated how corrupt and greedy I thought our government was. I made noise about it, even though in reality I was ignorant of it all. This was ultimately disrespectful because I simply didn't understand.

I have since spent years since doing my own homework. Reading what I can find. Watching documentaries that try to tell the truth of what that war actually was. People disagree about which sources tell it straight and which ones don't, and I respect that, but the reading and watching has changed how I see it.

What I have come to understand is that Vietnam is a war nobody really wanted. Not the men who fought it. Not the country that sent them. And most certainly those here back home during the war that protested it.

Those who served and survived came home, while entirely too many came home in caskets.

Some of them got off the plane and were called baby killers. Some were spit on in airports while still in uniform. Most of them got nothing at all. No parade. No handshake. No one waiting at the gate. Just silence. After everything they had seen, everything they had to do to survive, everything they would carry for the rest of their lives, they came back to a country that acted like it could not be bothered to notice, or judged them without walking in their boots. Maybe this is why no one really talks about Vietnam as much because of how we treated those who served in a war no one really wanted, yet so many gave their lives for.

Dubby was talking a bit about the war with our family once. We would joke at times with him about it during the conversation. The kind of joking you do when something is too heavy to talk about straight. We asked him if he had to do it over again, what injury would he fake to get out of it. Or would we all be sitting in Canada right now.

He looked at us with the most serious face I have ever seen on him. Contradicted by the smallest smile. And he said:

I would not change a thing. Not one thing.

We sat there stunned. After a long pause he was asked why.

He said: because my country asked me to go. So I went. And I would go again right now if they asked me.

There are men and women who have said that for as long as this country has existed. There are men and women saying it today. There will be men and women saying it tomorrow. That is what makes them different. That is why the bar is set where it is set. And for me, personally, that bar is one I will never come close to reaching. This has always been why I know I could never possibly be the man my father and those who served are and will be.
But because of him, I will not stop trying to be the way those who serve are and will be. Even though that bar is too high for me one way I can and do honor my father is I will never stop trying even though I know I will ultimately fail.

I asked him once how I could honor him properly on Memorial Day. How could I possibly equal what he gave when all I do is grill burgers and put a flag up. He said:

Just say thank you.

So today to my Father, to all those who have served and will serve, thank you.