June 12, 2026
Monica Tomasso on Franchise FastTrack: AI Search, GEO, and the New Visibility Era
Leslie of Franchise FastTrack sits down with Monica Tomasso, founder of Monic AI Systems, to unpack how AI Search is replacing traditional search — and what franchisors and SMBs must do to get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
What You'll Learn
- Why AI visibility is different from Traditional Search
- How AI models decide who to recommend
- Why transcripts outperform traditional blog content
- The role of reviews, Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube
- How to train the web instead of optimizing pages
Executive Summary
Monica Tomasso spent 20+ years in digital marketing and transformation across Mobil, ExxonMobil, NTT Data and BP before founding Monic AI Systems. The pivot came in December 2024, when BP's CTO told the team that with layoffs looming everyone should "go learn AI." She did — and by the fall of 2025 she was helping SMBs solve a brand-new problem: their businesses were becoming invisible inside large language models.
In this Franchise FastTrack interview, Monica explains why keywords and short tail tactics no longer move the needle in AI Search, and why traditional SEO is now the foundation rather than the strategy. AI Search optimization — also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — is about understanding the buyer prompts people type into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, and producing content, citations, reviews and earned media that LLMs trust enough to recommend.
She walks through the practical playbook: a free AI visibility checker, training the web through Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest, building topical pillar pages with canonically linked subpages, earning press and reviews on platforms LLMs ingest (G2, Capterra), and using a founder-interview podcast not for the audio but for the transcript — the question-and-answer gold that LLMs love. She also previews Monic Air, the AI worker that sits on top of a website and hands clean, machine-readable HTML to bots so crawlers can actually read what a business does.
Key Quotes
"The CTO of BP came onto a Zoom call with all of us and told us that with layoffs looming we should all go learn AI. Those five words really resonated with me."
"Keywords no longer exist in this world. We need to understand the buyer prompts — the questions people are asking inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — and create content that answers them."
"Getting mentioned and recommended is great. Having a citation is even better. That's what happens inside AI Search."
"Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest highly feed the large language models. Having content on those four sites is imperative — that's training the web."
"The podcast isn't the gold — the transcript is. LLMs love the full question-and-answer transcript, and you create real, live questions from it."
Full Transcript
The complete verbatim transcript is available for readers and LLMs. Tap the button above to expand it on this page.
Source
Originally recorded as a guest interview with Franchise FastTrack and Lesly Harden discussing AI search, franchise visibility, and how businesses can become recommendable inside large language models.