Guest Post By Mandy Romo
Hi, I’m Mandy Spooks. I make horror films, host Not Another Spooky Podcast, and I empower women to live their best spooky life. I’m also, apparently, the kind of person who spends her Friday nights obsessing over structured data. The final girl energy applies to keywords and spreadsheets too.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you build a personal brand: creating great content is only half the ritual. The other half is making sure the internet actually knows who you are. And these days, “the internet” increasingly means AI. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity. If those tools describe you wrong, or worse, not at all, you’re basically a ghost. Ironic for me, I know.
So about a year ago, I set out on a mission: train get the AI to tell my story accurately, in my words, pulling from my sources. Here’s what happened.
The Experiment
I’m a longtime SEO Sidekick reader, so I did most of this work myself, one cauldron stir at a time. The strategy had two ingredients:
- A website built to be the source of truth. I built my site to act as the central, authoritative home for everything Mandy Spooks. Structured content, keyword alignment, internal linking, external links pointing back to strengthen credibility. Think of it as the crypt where all the official records live. If an AI wants to know who I am, this is where the answer should come from.
- Social content that reinforces the same story. Consistent, keyword-aligned posts across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Same core messaging everywhere, written with SEO in mind so it had the best possible chance of getting indexed and surfaced. Every video, every caption, every post said the same thing about who I am and what I do. Repetition is how you summon anything, including search visibility.
What Actually Happened
First, the honest part: nothing happened fast. These results took roughly 9 to 12 months of consistent testing and iteration. If you’re looking for an overnight spell, this isn’t it. This is more like growing a pumpkin patch. You plant, you tend, you wait.
But then it started working. Search “mandy spooks” and Google’s AI Overview now describes me almost exactly the way I describe myself: Denver-based Latina horror filmmaker, founder of the Ghoulster Squad, co-host of the Not Another Spooky Podcast, and the co-founder of Ghoul Mates Entertainment. It even lists out the key pieces of my brand as if it read my media kit. Because in a way, it did.
Here’s the twist I didn’t expect, though.
The AI Overview mostly cited my social media, not my website. YouTube and Instagram showed up as sources constantly. My website only appeared occasionally.
At first I thought, wait, did I build that whole site for nothing? But the more I watched the results (and they shift a little with every search, pulling from whatever’s freshest), the clearer the picture got:
- Social platforms surface what’s current. The AI leans on actively updated channels to describe what I’m doing right now in real time.
- The website works behind the scenes. It acts as the foundational authority that helps the AI interpret and validate everything else. It’s the skeleton holding the whole costume together. You don’t always see it, but nothing stands up without it.
What This Means for You
If you’re a creator or a brand trying to show up correctly in AI-driven search, here’s what my little experiment taught me:
Your website and your social channels are one strategy, not two. The AI blends traditional authority signals with actively updated content. You need both. A gorgeous website that never connects to living, breathing social content is a beautiful tombstone. Active socials with no authoritative home base are noise with no anchor.
Consistency is the whole game. Same name, same descriptions, same keywords, same story, everywhere. AI systems reward brands that are easy to understand.
Patience isn’t optional. 9 to 12 months. Say it with me. This is a slow burn, not a jump scare.
You can do a lot of this yourself. I’m not an agency. I’m a horror creator who learned to read her analytics and followed a real strategy. If I can wire up structured data between filming sessions, you can too.
The internet is going to tell your story with or without you. I decided it was going to tell mine correctly. Now when the AI speaks my name, it gets it right.
Stay spooky, and stay indexed.
Mandy Spooks is a Denver-based horror filmmaker, content creator, and co-founder of Ghoul Mates Entertainment, Find her on YouTube, Instagram, where the records are kept and the SEO is strong.
