About Josh Linkner
Josh Linkner is a five-time tech entrepreneur, a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder and managing partner of an early-stage venture firm. He has delivered more than 1,300 keynotes to Fortune 500 audiences on topics including innovation, creativity, and AI.
Josh partnered with Petra Labs to own how AI tools recommend keynote speakers and turn that visibility into booked engagements. In the first 60 days, AI-referred leads had become the primary source of Josh's inbound demand, and Petra's work had lifted his top line revenue by ~9%. In just these initial two months, the entire annual engagement was paid back several times over.
Why Josh Came to Petra Labs
Petra Labs is the end-to-end AEO partner for enterprise brands, spanning measurement, execution, and attribution. It pairs a proprietary platform with a team of AEO experts who do the full work in helping brands understand their visibility in AI answers, improve it, and tie it back to real business outcomes.
Booking a keynote speaker is a subjective, reputation-driven decision, with organizers selecting from a crowded field based on relevance to the topic, credibility, and fit for the audience. For most of Josh's career, speakers were discovered through referrals, speaker bureaus, repeat bookings, and search, and Josh had built a strong presence across all of them.
AI has changed how buyers approach that decision. Instead of a narrow keyword search or a bureau's list, an organizer can describe exactly what they need and receive a tailored set of recommendations. That makes tools like ChatGPT a natural place to start a shortlist, especially for a choice as specific and subjective as a keynote speaker.
Josh had already seen this himself. The CEO of a large, well-established company found him through ChatGPT while researching keynote speakers for a strategy conference of ~1,200 leaders. In his query, the CEO described his full situation, his company's position in a mature market, the mindset of the leaders in the room, and the specific shift he wanted the keynote to drive. The model surfaced Josh as the fit. A Google search cannot take in that much context about what a buyer actually needs, which is what makes AI a real channel for how organizers find and evaluate speakers. It was that single lead which prompted Josh to invest in his AI visibility.
Josh wanted a partner who could understand how these tools decide which speakers to recommend, improve how often they recommend him, and connect that visibility back to closed-won revenue. He brought in Petra Labs to own this end to end, from software to strategy to execution, while measuring and analyzing his visibility to understand what was actually driving new business.
How We Did It
Building the Prompt Map
We start by building a prompt map, the full set of questions people are actually asking when it comes to finding, evaluating, and choosing a keynote speaker. It covers both the topic-level questions buyers ask when they do not yet have a speaker in mind and the branded questions from people already researching Josh by name. We build that map from four sources:
Panel data captures the real prompts users enter into AI tools
Traditional search data shows established search volume and trends from Google search
Intake call transcripts surface the exact language, priorities, and objections of Josh's own buyers and team
Web scraping reveals organic conversation data on social platforms where real people are discussing this today
Software + Hands-On Strategy
With the map in place, Petra's platform runs simulations across the major AI models to see how Josh shows up in LLM responses. For each tracked question, it measures how often he is mentioned, where he ranks against other speakers, and the sentiment behind how they describe him. It also ties each result to the exact sources the models pull from.
Petra operators sift through the platform data on Josh's behalf. Each week the team reviews where Josh stands, decides which questions are worth pursuing and what it takes to win them, and turns that into actionable next steps. The platform shows what is happening across AI answers, and the Petra team brings their expertise in how to act on it.
End-to-End Execution
Petra goes beyond strategy, executing on the interventions we recommend. It's important to us not just to provide strategy, but to own the actual work that drives the outcomes. On Josh's owned site, we make targeted content and technical updates. For earned media, we secured placements on the lists, publications, and speaker directories that carry weight. On social, we guide Josh's team on building an authentic presence in the discussions happening today.
Our AEO experts are enabled by the Petra Labs Agents Platform, which allows us to deliver targeted insights in real-time, across prompts and models, and based on millions of rows of real citation data.
Results and Attribution
Within two months, AI search had become Josh's primary source of new business, and the annual engagement had already paid for itself:
AI Visibility: ~3x across unbranded prompts
AI-Referred Site Traffic: 5x in under 2 months
Inbound Leads from AI Search: 90% of total
Here's how we built the attribution pipeline to prove it.
Every intervention we execute on, whether a new page on Josh's site or an earned media placement, is logged in the Petra Labs system of record. Petra's agents then monitor each one for the first sign the models start citing it. When a citation climbs, the team checks whether that lift carried through to Josh's visibility and whether it drove real traffic to the specific owned pages cited under those questions.
The next question is what converts. Questions that do not move traffic get set aside. The ones that take off get more investment and branch out into multiple different niche variations of the same queries. We've worked with Josh's team to set up systems that track how many AI-referred visitors go on to book a call, a conversion rate that runs well above traditional Google search, and also ask every lead how they found Josh. The agents also monitor attribution gaps, flagging pages that pull in AI traffic Petra isn't tracking yet. This keeps the prompt map up-to-date and aligned to the questions buyers are asking.
Because the models put Josh in front of the right buyers for the right topics, these leads arrive already qualified and ready to talk. What began with a single ChatGPT lead now drives the dominant majority of his inbound business, and it closes at nearly twice his overall win rate.
A Long-Term Partnership
AI has become the front door for booking a keynote speaker, and Josh got there first. The next phase is about extending that lead, moving into the adjacent topics and questions buyers are already asking, holding the top spot as more competitors wake up to AI search, and continuing to turn visibility into booked engagements. The way people search for and choose a speaker has already changed. The goal now is to continue making sure Josh Linkner is the name that comes up when they do.