MAXVolume: The Future of Search

Is Your Brand in the Data That Trains ChatGPT?

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0400

“If you are not in the crawl, you are not in the model.” That one line from the Common Crawl Foundation reframes the whole AI-visibility question. In this episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum explains why being baked into an AI’s training data is becoming the new page one, the proxy for whether the market, and now the machine, treats you as a real player. You can’t read OpenAI’s training set, but you can check the thing it was built from: Common Crawl, the open-web archive behind a majority of major models. Brian breaks down the two signals that matter: whether the crawl captured your site at all, and how much authority you carry inside its web graph, and introduces the free AI Training Data Visibility Check that pulls both. He’s candid about what it is (a proxy and a diagnosis) and what it isn’t (a window into any model’s weights), and where the deeper paid Audit picks up.

Run the free check at aio.maxplaces.com. MAXVolume is the show about turning up your signal in AI search, from Brian Winum and the team at MAXPlaces.

How to Become the Source an LLM Quotes (Not Just the Site It Scrapes)

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The big AI models have already read almost the entire public internet, so being “in there” alone is worth nothing. When a model answers a question, it quotes a handful of sources and leaves everything else on the floor. In this episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum draws the line between being scraped and being cited, and lays out the citation stack that decides which side you land on: a clear entity the model can name, genuinely quotable claims instead of marketing fog, and corroboration across the web. Then the part most businesses miss: you can deserve the citation and still lose it to friction, because you made the machine work too hard to understand you. Brian explains the strategic fix: hand the model a clean, authoritative version of yourself directly, and where LLMS Amplifier fits for WordPress sites that have to build that layer themselves.

MAXVolume is the show about turning up your signal in AI search, from Brian Winum and the team at MAXPlaces.

The Difference Between GEO and AEO (and Why Doing One Isn’t Enough)

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400

GEO and AEO get used interchangeably every day, by smart people, by agencies charging for it, and the confusion is quietly costing businesses real money. In this episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum settles it with one mental model: an AI answering a question works like a reporter on deadline, who first decides which sources to trust and name, then pulls the sharpest quote from them. Generative Engine Optimization is the work of becoming a source the machine trusts and names. Answer Engine Optimization is the work of having the perfect, liftable answer ready. Do only one and you fail quietly. Your answer gets credited to a competitor, or the machine knows you but can’t find a sentence worth quoting. Brian breaks down why they’re two distinct jobs, why they have to be wired together, and the one question that tells you which half you’ve been missing.

MAXVolume is the show about turning up your signal in AI search, from Brian Winum and the team at MAXPlaces.

What an AI Readiness Audit Actually Finds (and Why It’s Invisible in Your Reports)

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:00:00 -0400

A marketing director’s CEO texts on a Sunday: a prospect said ChatGPT told him the company doesn’t do commercial work anymore — a line that’s thirty percent of the business. Every dashboard was green. In this episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum takes you inside the AI Readiness Audit and the eight things it scores — from whether AI crawlers can even reach your site, to whether the machines know who you are, to what they’re actually telling buyers when your name comes up. The unnerving part is why none of it shows up in the reports marketing teams already live in. The reassuring part is how fast most of it is to fix. If you’re not sure what the machines are saying about your business right now, this is the conversation to start with.

MAXVolume is the show about turning up your signal in AI search, from Brian Winum and the team at MAXPlaces.

You Can Rank #1 and Still Be Invisible

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0400

For twenty-five years, one number ran digital marketing: position one. In this episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum makes the case that the game quietly changed. Search stopped being about ranking #1, and most businesses are still spending every dollar chasing a prize that no longer pays out. He breaks down why you can rank first and still be completely invisible when an AI writes the answer, the shift from being found to being chosen, and the two disciplines that decide who wins now: Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization. The surprising part? The new game is tilted in favor of smaller, sharper businesses — if they move before the window closes.

MAXVolume is the show about turning up your signal in AI search, from Brian Winum and the team at MAXPlaces.

Do LLMS.txt Files Actually Work? (Watch What Google Does, Not What It Says)

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:25:48 -0400

In the debut episode of MAXVolume, Brian Winum tackles the question he gets more than any other right now: do LLMS.txt files actually work? Google Search says you don’t need one — then, the same week, Google’s own Chrome team added an LLMS.txt check to its Lighthouse audit tool, and Google’s own developer docs quietly shipped the file. Brian unpacks the real skeptic case (it’s a proposed standard, the bots barely request it), why the smarter move is to watch what Google builds instead of what it says, and the hard truth most people miss: an LLMS.txt file does nothing in a vacuum. It only works as the front door to a site that’s genuinely built for AI. If you’re waiting for Google to announce this matters, you’re already late.

Welcome to MAXVolume — turning up the signal on AI search, from the team at MAXPlaces.