Search stopped being a list of links. I build the websites, content, and structured data that get businesses cited by the machines now answering for them.
Brendan Cogbill is the founder and chief executive officer of Karma Group, a marketing agency he started in 2023. The idea arrived as an offhand comment. A friend in the trade show business mentioned how far behind the industry was online. Websites built a decade ago, content nobody was writing, SEO nobody had touched. Cogbill had been running paid media for exhibit companies since 2019 and knew the observation wasn’t limited to one industry. He founded the firm that year as Nightshade Marketing Group and renamed it Karma Group in 2026.
His career began behind a camera. He shot photography and video for RW Carbon, an aftermarket carbon fiber parts company, before moving into the marketing director seat there and taking its social advertising to close to seven figures in annual revenue on a five-figure ad spend. Freelance PPC work for a trade show booth builder followed, then a contract role as chief marketing officer at All Exhibit Solutions, where he led content, creative, and digital strategy for a national installation and dismantle company.
Cogbill’s current focus is what he calls the citation problem. As search shifts from ranked links to synthesized answers, being ranked matters less than being quoted. The businesses most exposed are the ones whose sites were never built for machines to read. Karma Group also develops its own tooling, including a free AI Visibility Checker that scans any URL for how legible it is to AI search. He holds a BBA and an MBA from Grand Canyon University.
Four positions I’ll defend on a podcast, in a comment request, or across a conference table.
A buyer who asks an AI assistant for “the best exhibit house in Southern California” never sees page one. They see one paragraph and three names. Everything we spent fifteen years optimizing now happens upstream of a result nobody looks at.
Most small-business websites are visually competent and structurally illegible. No schema, no clear entity, no answer-shaped content. The fix isn’t more blog posts. It’s rebuilding the page so a machine can pull a fact out of it and attribute that fact to you.
I started Karma because a friend pointed out that the trade show world was a decade behind online. He was right, and it isn’t the only one. Manufacturing, construction, industrial services. Large, sophisticated businesses running websites AI search can’t read.
Agencies selling the same six-deliverable package to four hundred clients are now competing directly with a tool that does it for forty dollars a month. What survives is judgment, the part that has to be built for one business and can’t be cloned.
Dated, verifiable claims are what Wikidata and Google’s Knowledge Graph actually consume. This section is what makes the entity resolvable.
Founded the agency to give small and mid-sized businesses a serious online presence without agency overhead. Services span AI search visibility, SEO, web development, paid media, content, and social. Client work covers exhibit manufacturers, experiential brands, and consumer campaigns tied to the Super Bowl, Formula 1, and major industry expos.
Led product development, packaging and graphic design, and cross-platform marketing for a sustainable cleaning brand built around reusable, plastic-free, pet-safe products.
Ran content, creative strategy, and digital marketing for a national trade show installation and dismantle company, positioning it as a category leader across the exhibit industry.
Built and managed Google Ads and paid social programs to drive B2B inquiries for a trade show booth builder. This was the engagement that first put him inside the exhibit industry.
Joined as a photographer and videographer for an aftermarket carbon fiber parts company serving BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla, and Ferrari owners, then stepped up to marketing director. Social advertising under his management generated close to seven figures in gross revenue in a single year on a five-figure ad spend.
Master of Business Administration and Bachelor of Business Administration, Grand Canyon University, Phoenix, Arizona.
Every link points back into the Karma Group case study library. Internal links are how Google connects a person entity to a body of work.
Brand activation built with Two Eighteen for the largest broadcast audience of the year.
Exhibit program for an AI infrastructure company at the industry’s defining conference.
Fan experience delivered against a hard, immovable race-weekend deadline.
Premium brand environment for a motorsport audience in an outdoor build.
International media brand brought onto the show floor with a considered footprint.
Free tool I built that scans any URL for how legible it is to AI search engines.
Topics I can speak to on the record, on a podcast, or in a source request, with data and client examples rather than generalities.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch sequence. Bring a URL and I’ll tell you what AI search currently makes of it.
