Chapters
The problem looked obvious. It wasn't.
Mike Santaniello runs Verde Mining out of Midland, Texas. His company teaches oil and gas operators how to convert stranded or flared natural gas into bitcoin mining revenue. It's a real operational play: take a waste product or a commodity selling below pipeline economics, and turn it into cash flow.
When we started working together, Mike's marketing situation looked straightforward. Verde was invisible on Google. If you searched "natural gas bitcoin mining," a keyword getting about 1,000 searches a month, Verde didn't show up anywhere. The only thing that ranked was a couple of YouTube walkthrough videos. Small email list. Almost no published content. By any normal digital marketing measure, he was starting from scratch.
Mike knew all of this. He was already working on the standard fix: SEO, lead magnets, email sequences, content calendars. The usual grind.
What nobody had thought to check was what happens when you skip Google entirely and just ask an AI.
Google couldn't find them. Every AI chatbot could.
During one of our sessions, I ran a test on a whim. I typed "natural gas bitcoin mining training" into ChatGPT. Then Claude. Then Gemini. Then Perplexity.
Every single one recommended Verde Mining first. Not as one of several options. As the answer.
ChatGPT named Verde Mining in Midland, Texas, identified the lead instructor by name, and listed Mike as the training contact. Nobody asked it to. No ads, no SEO tricks. The model just understood who actually does this work.
"I've checked every AI chatbot I can think of, and they all put us first. They say, 'oh yeah, this seems to be the people.'" - Mike Santaniello, Verde Mining
This wasn't news to Mike, actually. He'd already tested it himself and gotten the same result everywhere. What he didn't have was a strategy for what to do about it. That's where the session turned.
The reason every chatbot points to Verde is simple: they're the only company offering structured training in this space. There's nobody else. Google's ranking algorithm, which cares about backlinks and content volume and domain authority, had nothing to work with. AI search, which cares about whether you're actually the answer to the question, already knew.
Stop chasing Google. Own the thing replacing it.
Once we saw this, the whole content strategy had to change.
Before that session, Mike's plan was the standard 12-to-18-month SEO build. Write content, build authority, hope Google notices. Reasonable, but slow, and uncertain in a keyword space this small.
After, the question became something different: how do we lock in AI search dominance across every chatbot, and expand from the training keyword (20 searches a month) into the broader "natural gas bitcoin mining" keyword (1,000 a month), before anyone else figures out this channel matters?
Mike got there fast. "Natural gas bitcoin mining training gets 20 searches a month. Natural gas bitcoin mining gets a thousand. If we could come to dominate that, that could be a game changer for us."
He also landed on an insight I think most businesses are going to arrive at eventually, just later: "Gemini on Google is maybe even more valuable going forward to dominate than the first search result."
That reframe changed how we thought about everything. If the goal is for AI models to cite and recommend Verde, then content needs to be on the open web, not gated behind email forms. A 6,000-word guide on natural gas bitcoin mining isn't just a lead magnet. It's the document that AI models ingest and cite when someone asks who to learn from. And because nobody else is in this niche, every piece of content Verde publishes makes the moat wider. Traditional SEO still benefits from all of this, but it's no longer the primary target.
Mike's summary was cleaner than mine: "If you just assume the market's going to head away from Google to AI chats, we're already the top search result."
15 blog posts from material already on his hard drive
Over the next few sessions, we put together the content system to back up this position.
I ran Claude's deep research tool against Verde's market and pulled 500+ sources to build an ICP profile and competitive landscape. It correctly identified two of Verde's three core customer profiles: oil and gas producers looking to profit more from stranded and wasted natural gas, and bitcoin miners seeking cheaper energy input costs through natural gas. That validation gave us a foundation we could build content against with confidence.
Then we took everything Mike already had, training video transcripts, YouTube walkthroughs, client interviews, the deep research output, and mapped it into a content architecture. A long-form guide broken into chapters that each work as standalone blog posts. A shorter downloadable guide repurposed from an existing five-day email course. A checklist lead magnet. Three months of social content pulled from the guide.
He went from zero published content to a plan for 15+ blog posts and three lead magnets, all built from material that was already sitting on his hard drive.
As Mike put it when the plan came together: "You go from 0 to 15 pretty much overnight."
We also rebuilt his one-page sales sheet into a two-pager with real client testimonials, a revenue calculator concept based on actual network economics, and better CTAs. Did that using a cross-model workflow, Claude for copy, Gemini for visual design, iterating between the two, that Mike can now run on his own.
He'd already won a race nobody knew was happening
Mike came into coaching with what looked like a marketing problem. No search presence, thin content, small list. What we actually found was that he'd already won a race most businesses don't know is happening.
The strategy flipped from "how do we get Google to notice us" to "how do we make sure every AI chatbot keeps recommending us, with more specificity, as this channel grows." That changed what content to create, how to distribute it, and what to prioritize. It turned a gap on Google into a lead on the thing replacing Google.
Over five sessions, Mike went from using AI mostly for quick questions to running multi-model workflows, building content from his own proprietary materials, and scoping his first automation. His take on the work: "These sessions have been super practical for what I'm trying to accomplish."
I keep coming back to the fact that this insight was just sitting there. Mike already had the dominance. He just didn't have the frame to see it as a strategy instead of a curiosity. That's the part I think is worth paying attention to.
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This case study is from a 1:1 executive AI coaching engagement run by Leon Coe through Amplify Intelligence. Client details shared with permission.