Original Insight
“No one Googles executive search — if people Google executive search, it’s already too late. So, what did they Google? It was really seeing the problem, not from my angle, not from the customer angle. It was really what’s below the lines.” — Dirk Ohlmeier
“The clarity you’re getting now is because SEO doesn’t unmask that. When you go into the ontology and you start talking about causal relationships and buyer psychology, then you have the opportunity to bring that to the surface.” — Lou
“What we’re trying to produce is content or knowledge schema that helps the AI figure out who’s asking, why are they doing this, what’s the intention beneath the question, and what have they asked in my history with the AI that I can bring to the table.” — Lou
Expanded Synthesis
Classic SEO is built on a fundamental assumption: that you can infer what someone wants by looking at what they searched. This assumption has always been partially true and partially wrong. It’s true that search strings contain intent signals. It’s wrong in a consequential way: the words someone uses to search are almost never the words they would use to describe their problem to themselves or to someone they trust.
Dirk Ohlmeier made this concrete in this session with a deceptively simple observation: his clients — executives in transition — don’t Google “executive search.” By the time they’re doing that, they’ve already decided they’re looking for a recruiter, which means they’ve already crossed through multiple layers of self-awareness about their situation. The clients he wants to reach haven’t gotten there yet. They’re in the fog. They’re Googling the experience they’re having: leadership stress, team performance concerns, feeling stuck at a ceiling, wondering whether their current role can still grow them.
That is an ontological layer beneath the keyword layer. It’s the layer of causal relationships — the chain of experience, emotion, behavior, and circumstance that eventually leads a person to type a particular phrase into a search bar or an AI prompt. SEO can map the phrase. Ontology maps the journey.
Lou added a critical dimension: AI engines, unlike search engines, don’t just match keywords. They model the searcher. They track what has been asked in prior exchanges, they infer the emotional state behind the language, and they try to match the response to the full context of the query — not just the surface string. This means that content and schema that is mapped to the ontological layer (the causal journey, the psychological triggers, the beneath-the-surface experience) is more likely to be retrieved and cited by AI than content that is only mapped to keywords.
This is a major strategic insight for coaches, consultants, and any expert who relies on discoverability. The people who most need your work are not typing your category label into search. They’re typing their confusion. They’re describing their discomfort in the language of their daily life, not in the professional vocabulary of your domain. If your content and schema speak exclusively in expert language, you are invisible to the people who haven’t yet realized they need an expert.
The ontology exercise that Dirk described — using a prompter framed as “the best ontology expert” to map the causal structure beneath his target market — produced a distinctly different picture than traditional avatar or keyword research. It forced the question: not what does my client want, but what is happening to my client that will eventually lead them to want what I offer? That pre-intent layer is where the richest content opportunity lives.
Lou connected this to the knowledge graph work he and Ken are developing for GEARS. The psycho-causal graph — a knowledge graph that explicitly models the psychological state and situational context of a buyer at each stage of their journey — is designed to give AI engines the map they need to connect a seemingly unrelated query to a highly relevant expert. The graph doesn’t just say “this page is about leadership transitions.” It says “this page is relevant to someone experiencing a specific set of doubts and frustrations, who hasn’t yet named them as a leadership transition challenge.”
For PowerUp Coaching, this insight creates both a diagnostic tool and a content brief. The diagnostic question is: what experiences, behaviors, and emotions precede a client’s arrival at your door? The content brief is: write to those experiences, not to the transformation you eventually provide.
Practical Application for PowerUp Clients
The Beneath-the-Surface Mapping Exercise:
- Name the transformation your coaching delivers in one sentence. (This is where most content lives — and where the search misses.)
- Ask: What is the client experiencing six months before they even consider coaching? Name three to five specific situations, emotions, or behaviors.
- Ask: What do they Google, say to their partner, or complain about at work that reflects those experiences? Collect exact phrases — not concepts.
- Feed those phrases to an AI model with this prompt: “These are phrases used by people who will eventually hire a [your category] coach. Map the causal chain of experiences, fears, and decisions that connect these phrases to the eventual hiring of that coach.”
- Use the output to develop content that addresses the pre-coach experience, not the coaching solution.
Coaching Questions:
- What are your clients experiencing before they know they need you?
- What words do they use to describe their situation to someone who doesn’t know what coaching is?
- What do they try first, before they find you, that doesn’t fully solve the problem?
- Where in their journey are they most open to a new perspective — and is your content reaching them there?
Ontology Prompt Template: “Act as an expert ontologist specializing in buyer psychology. Review the following [niche/market description] and map the causal chain from a client’s first symptoms of the problem to the moment they actively seek a solution. Include: emotional triggers, behavioral indicators, search behavior at each stage, common misdiagnoses, and the language they use with peers versus with professionals.”
Additional Resources
- Alchemy by Rory Sutherland — on the gap between rational language and actual human motivation
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick — how to extract honest signal about real problems without leading the witness
- Insight - Map the Symptom Layer to Attract Before You Solve — companion insight with the symptom-focused content strategy
- Insight - Teach One Era Ahead of Your Audience, Not Eight — related framing on speaking at the right level of audience sophistication
Evolution Across Sessions
This session deepens the ontology and GEO work that has been building since mid-2025. The distinct contribution here is the below-the-keyword layer: the difference between what clients search and what they’re actually experiencing. This maps directly into the psycho-causal graph architecture that becomes central to the GEARS alpha (January 22 and 29 sessions). Dirk’s use of a prompter-framed ontology expert also previews the insight Lou notes: the line between a human expert and an AI prompt has become conversationally invisible.
Next Actions
- For me (Lou): Build the “pre-coach experience map” for PowerUp Coaching’s primary client type. Feed it into the GEARS ontology intake as a psycho-causal layer.
- For clients: Assign the Beneath-the-Surface Mapping Exercise as pre-work for the next session. Have clients bring their maps and compare: where do the pre-coaching experiences differ by client segment?