Everyone and their nana has been claiming:
“AI is gonna spell the end of search.”
“AI will soon render traditional SEO obsolete”.
I don’t think so.
I have been working with Cannabis brands for close to 8 years now.
I have helped them sell millions of products through SEO.
One of the brands I was working with got sold for a whopping $28 Million.
In my view,
AI models are built on the same principle we’ve always trusted, i.e. Sourcing answers from high-authority sites.
Let’s see if this true:
This is the latest result from ChatGPT for the keyword: ‘Best Delta Gummies’
Look at the citations.
It lists out magazines like: Houstonia Magazine, ChicagoMag and ExtractLabs as sources, which are the same sites ranking on Google for ‘Best Delta 8 Gummies’
These are high authority sites with a high number of backlinks.
Which tells me AI tools are following the same rules as Google.
No reinventing the wheel here.
Getting back to our analysis, it is clear that both ChatGPT and Google are prioritizing ‘high authority’.
Now that our hypothesis is proven. Lets move to cashing in on these findings.
We started this process around two months ago, and now the brand is ranking while traffic has surged.
This is how the site looks now oh Ahrefs
Objective:
- Get featured in AI Tools-> Order a Digital PR service to place my clients’s Cannabis brand in high authority sites.
- Rank for ‘THCA Carts’ on Google-> Get high authority cannabis backlinks for my main site.
Prerequisites:
- A Cannabis brand site
- Digital PR service
- Trusted link building service
Process
Step 1) Place your ‘THCA Carts’’ on the Homepage with the exact anchor you want to rank for. It needs to be completely visible for the Google bots.
Step 2) Write blog posts on your main topic. Use AHREFs to find long-tail keywords. Top results for cannabis sites have high blog traffic in common.
Ex: Can I fly using THCA Carts?
Are THCA carts legal in Texas etc.
Step 3) Link your THCA Carts page from these blogs with Exact Match Anchors.
Step 4) Next we order the Digital PR package for the Homepage.
Step 5) For Anchors try branded and partial matches around your main categories.
Step 6) Ordered the high authority links package for the Homepage.
Step 7) For the anchors I’ll go with 50% Branded and 50% ‘Partial Match’.
Here my partial match will be around the keyword I am trying to rank my category page for.
Ex: Brand Name: Cadbury
Category Page: Milk Chocolate.
Partial Match anchors: Cadbury’s Chocolate, Chocolate bars, Milk Bars etc.
This will ensure our link building looks natural.
Step 8) Next I ordered the Premium 70+ DR backlink package for the category page that I wanted to rank. In this case it was ‘THCA Carts’
Step 9) For the anchors I went with 60% Partial Match and 40% Exact Match.
For this I analysed the top ranking sites and their anchors.
PS: I follow this guide by Webminati for Anchor Research.
Step 10) Now wait for at least a month for all the links to go live and 2 months for the Digital PR to get published.
Results
After two months, here’s what happened:
- All the links started showing up in around 3 weeks, while a few of them weren’t indexed. It took a total of 5 weeks before all of them were indexed.
- As for the rankings our main keyword jumped from the end of 3rd page to the bottom of the first page and page within the first 15 days.
- We saw a lot of volatility for the 1 week, but it settled on 12th for the main keyword.
- However in terms of traffic we saw a jump from 100 to around 2000+
After two months, the results are clear—a high-authority backlink and Digital PR strategy still works in ranking a Cannabis brand in 2025.
SEO is far from dead—if you know how to play the game.
