Cannabis SEO and marketing guides, grouped by task

Read these first if the terms are new. AEO and GEO are about being quoted in AI answers, and Bud Authority measures that for its own site with a panel of 27 buyer prompts run across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, in a pass dated October 2, 2026.

• The dispensary marketing guide: the all-in-one overview, for a reader who wants every channel in one place before choosing where to start.
• What cannabis SEO is: the technical, content and local pillars cannabis SEO rests on, and how search engines treat pages about cannabis.
• SEO, AEO and GEO compared: how the three disciplines differ and where they overlap.
• What AEO is: how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity each choose the sources they cite for a cannabis question.
• What GEO is: what generative engine optimization means, and how it relates to the answers AI assistants write.
• Cannabis SEO for beginners: a month-by-month plan for an operator who has never run an SEO program.

Once the foundations hold, growth comes from what you publish, who links to you, how the brand reads, and where people find you outside search. Per Bud Authority's search data for 31 active clients from July to September 2026, home pages carried a median 77.5% of a client's Google clicks and menu pages a median 10.5%. Publishing and earning links are how the other pages on a site start to draw search clicks of their own.

• Cannabis content marketing: what a cannabis business should publish, and who each piece is for.
• Cannabis link building: which cannabis trade publications, industry associations and local directories will link to a cannabis site, and how to pitch them.
• Cannabis branding: how to define a brand's identity, audience and point of difference, then write brand guidelines that keep it consistent.
• Cannabis social media: what works for cannabis on each social platform, one platform at a time.

Read these three together. One covers what paid search can do for a cannabis business, one covers the rules your marketing has to follow, and one covers how to tell whether any of it is working. Advertising rules are set state by state. New York's adopted advertising regulations, for example, bar cannabis advertising in the form of a billboard.

• Cannabis PPC alternatives: what paid search can and cannot do here, and the alternatives to it.
• Cannabis compliance marketing: how to keep campaigns inside the advertising rules that apply to cannabis.
• Cannabis analytics: which numbers to track to know whether your marketing is paying off.