David Peterson, Principal and Co-Founder of Bud Authority – Interview Series

As the United States cannabis industry moves further into the second half of the 2020s, one of the most pertinent questions for business owners is how technological systems, both hardware and software, can improve cannabis operations. That could mean installing intricate irrigation and precise lighting systems, improving seed-to-sale tracking software like METRC, or strengthening brand building and marketing. However, even these industry-focused technological advances may not solve the challenges that Google and Meta-owned platforms present to fully legal cannabis businesses. In some cases, addressing those problems requires more than conventional marketing.

For a deeper look into why search engine optimization can be such a successful strategy, mycannabis.com spoke with David Peterson, Principal and Co-Founder of Bud Authority.

Throughout your career in entrepreneurship, what were the most important lessons and courses from your Master of Business Administration program at Southern New Hampshire University? What were some successful ways you used those lessons from your studies?

The lesson that mattered most was that a business is a system, not a disconnected collection of talented people working hard. The operations and strategy coursework at SNHU forced me to write processes down, measure them, and find where they break. Everything I have built since, including Bud Authority, is an attempt to run a company that way.

Three specific lessons stuck with me. First, managerial accounting: know the unit economics of every client and every service before you scale it. Second, operations management: capacity is the real constraint in a service business, so size the work to the hours you actually have. Third, strategy: pick a vertical, win it, and resist the urge to be everything to everyone.

I applied the accounting lesson by running the agency on a Profit First cash model and by tying each client’s monthly work to its fee, so delivery and revenue never drift apart. I applied the operations lesson by building Sentinel, our internal platform, which measures every client every month, plans the work, confirms it was done, and grades whether it moved anything. I applied the strategy lesson by making Bud Authority cannabis-only at the start and only later adding sister brands for trades and healthcare, each run on the same system.

The PhD coursework I did at Keiser taught me another lesson: a number without a source is a guess. The JD work I am doing now matters in cannabis specifically, because reading regulation closely is part of the marketing job in this industry.

Prior to co-founding Bud Authority, what were some important roles in marketing and business building that you held? How did the roles change depending on which industry you were working in?

I have been self-employed or running someone else’s operation for about fifteen years, across web and software development, enterprise software, consumer products, content, online education, music and real estate. The job title changed with the industry, but the work underneath it did not.

My enterprise software years were at Trilogy, Versata, Aurea and Crossover under ESW Capital, where I worked with clients ranging from SMBs to 50% of the Fortune 500 and 75% of the Fortune 100 companies at the time. That world runs on metrics, playbooks and distributed teams, and it is where I learned to manage work I could not see in person. Later I was VP of sales and marketing at Namco Pools, a seasonal consumer business where demand arrives in a four-month window and the whole year is won or lost on lead flow and dealer execution.

As COO of WordAgents I ran a large remote freelance writing operation producing SEO content at volume. That role taught me how search rewards content, and how quality falls apart at scale unless the system enforces it. I also spent a year as COO of an online education business built on a founder’s YouTube audience, which showed me what a content-driven funnel looks like when it works. Before any of that I founded and ran The Mega Agency, my own web and software development agency, and after it a music management company. The agency is where I learned to build and ship software for clients, and the music business was my first education in building attention for a brand.

The roles changed in what the constraint was. In enterprise software the constraint was process discipline across hundreds of people. In pools it was seasonality and the sales pipeline. In content it was quality control. In cannabis it is that the normal marketing channels are closed, so the website and the search presence are the business. Bud Authority is where all of those lessons landed in one place.

Based on your experience with cannabis businesses, when did you first witness the need for Bud Authority? What did you and your co-founder have in mind when you created the company that became Bud Authority?

Mark and I came at the problem from opposite sides. Mark had spent more than a decade inside the cannabis industry and knew how dispensaries operate and what they are told to buy. I came from enterprise software and search, and the first time I looked under the hood of dispensary websites I could not believe what I saw.

Most dispensary sites were a brochure page with the menu loaded inside an iframe from the ecommerce provider. Google could not read a single product. The store had hundreds of items for sale and not one of them could rank. On top of that, the operator could not run Google or Meta ads, so they were paying directory sites a monthly tax to reach customers who were already searching for them by name.

Dispensaries have the hardest marketing problem in retail, the fewest channels, and the worst tooling. The agencies serving them were mostly generalists sending vanity reports full of branded clicks the client would have gotten anyway.

What we had in mind was narrow on purpose: a cannabis-only firm that treats the website as the dispensary’s most valuable owned asset. Build it so the menu is indexable, so every store ranks for its own neighborhood, and so every number we report is one the client would not have earned without us. We founded Bud Authority in 2025 on that premise, and we became a Dutchie certified partner early because the menu platform is where the SEO problem starts.

How did you design Bud Authority and the services the company offers specifically with cannabis operators in mind? How did you ensure that all cannabis company departments and areas of expertise are considered in those offered services?

We started from how a dispensary makes money and worked backward. A dispensary sells to people within a few miles who search for a store, check a menu, and either drive over or order for pickup or delivery. So the services are built around that path and nothing else.

The core offer is a custom-built site, usually 150 to 300 pages on Next.js, with the ecommerce menu served through our own layer so Google can read every product and every brand page. Around it sit the pieces a dispensary needs that a generic agency never thinks about: one page per location that ranks for its town and the towns around it, brand pages for the house brands and the brands on the shelf, Google Business Profile work for every storefront, and now AI search visibility, because a growing share of “best dispensary near me” questions are being asked to ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google.

Covering every department was a matter of asking who inside the operator touches the website. Retail operations owns hours, store openings and closures, and the menu, so our system watches for those changes and updates the site and the profiles with them. Compliance owns what can be said, so our content and review replies run through a compliance screen that blocks health claims and product effect claims before anything publishes. Purchasing and brand managers care about sell-through, so brand pages and product category pages are built to rank and are tied back to menu engagement. Finance wants to know what the retainer returned, so our reporting separates branded from non-branded traffic and reports Google Business Profile actions as the proxy for store visits.

Multi-state and multi-store operators get the same system at scale, one page and one profile per location, reported per store. The design rule throughout is that if a department cannot see its own outcome in our reporting, the service is not finished.

When first meeting a new cannabis client, what are usually the most common issues and roadblocks that they’re facing? Do those challenges change depending on either what state market they’re in or their product category?

The first problem is almost always the same. Google cannot see the store. The menu is in an iframe or on a subdomain the operator does not control, the site has been rebuilt by a web shop that retired the URLs that were ranking, or the ecommerce provider’s own store pages are indexed as duplicates of the dispensary’s pages and outrank them. We have taken on clients whose location pages dropped from the top three to page six after a relaunch that nobody connected to the traffic loss.

The second problem is the Google Business Profile. Website links on the profiles point at dead URLs, categories are missing, a closed store is still listed as open, and competitors are stuffing “NOW OPEN” and “RECREATIONAL DISPENSARY” into their business names to game the map pack. For most dispensaries the map pack is where the customer actually decides, so this is where the money leaks.

The third problem is measurement. No analytics, or analytics installed but blocked by the site’s security headers, so conversions have never been tracked. And the reports the previous agency sent counted branded searches, which means the client was paying for traffic it already owned.

State market changes the competitive landscape more than the problem list. In mature markets like Michigan or Colorado the fight is a saturated map pack, price compression and review volume, and proximity decides a lot. In the newer East Coast markets, New York especially, licensed stores are still opening, unlicensed shops muddy the search results, and the first operator with a properly built site in a neighborhood can take and hold the position.

Product category changes the playbook entirely. A dispensary is a local business and wins on location pages and the map pack. A brand cannot sell direct, so its site has to win on strain and product pages, a retailer locator, and being named in the lists and AI answers that shoppers use to pick a product. Delivery-only operators have the hardest version, because they have no storefront for the map pack to anchor to.

From your experience with Bud Authority, what cannabis markets show the most promise and potential in the upcoming years? Why do you think those state markets are so promising compared to other state markets?

New York first, and it is not close. The state went from roughly 50 licensed stores in 2023 to several hundred today, cumulative licensed sales passed $3 billion this spring, and the market is still growing at double digits year over year while most mature Western states are flat or shrinking. Stores are still opening every week, demand is still moving from unlicensed shops into licensed ones, and New York City is the densest retail cannabis market in the country. Most of our client base is there, so I am biased, but the numbers back it up.

Ohio is second. Adult use launched in August 2024, the market passed $1 billion in its first year, and it is still growing above 25 percent. It is a large population with an incumbent-friendly license structure, which means the operators who are in now will be the ones competing for search for years.

After those two, Minnesota is early and slow, but the demand is obviously there and the retail buildout is just starting. New Jersey keeps expanding its retail licenses, and the rest of the Northeast, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, is a cluster of mid-sized markets with customers who cross state lines, which makes local search a regional game.

Why those markets: in every one of them, search demand is growing faster than the number of well-built dispensary sites. In a saturated market, SEO is a fight over a fixed pie. In a growing market, it is a land grab. The operator who owns the location pages, the map pack and the AI citations for a neighborhood before the market fills up gets to defend that position instead of attacking it later. That is a much better business.

Despite the numerous issues that Google and Meta cause for legal and licensed cannabis brands trying to advertise, why are successful SEO strategies still so crucial?

Because it is the only channel a licensed cannabis business actually owns. Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and Amazon are closed. What is left is paid directories, which rent you access to your own customers and keep the relationship, and organic search, which compounds and belongs to you.

The search demand is enormous and it is not going anywhere. Every day people type “dispensary near me,” “weed delivery” and “best dispensary in” their town, and the results are a Google Business Profile map pack and a set of organic pages. Nobody can buy their way into either one. That is unusual in retail, and it is why SEO in cannabis is not a nice-to-have, it is the acquisition strategy.

There is a second reason that is newer. The AI answer engines pull from the same signals: the location pages, the reviews, the directory listings, the best-of lists. A dispensary with weak SEO is also invisible in ChatGPT and Perplexity. The work that wins Google is the same work that gets you cited in an AI answer, so the return on it has gone up, not down.

And there is a practical reason. A directory listing or an ad can be switched off tomorrow by a policy change you do not control. A well-built site with indexed menu pages, a location page per store, and a few years of accumulated authority is an asset on the balance sheet. When I see dispensaries cut SEO in a down month, they are selling the one thing they own to keep renting the things they do not.

As the cannabis industry evolves, how could utilizing AI systems benefit cannabis brands’ overall success and sales? Do you think that level of success could fluctuate depending on a variety of factors?

AI changes two things for a cannabis brand: how customers find it, and how much work it takes to be found. Both matter, but the second one is where the money is right now.

On the first, a growing share of shoppers now ask an AI assistant where to buy instead of scrolling through Google. We track which prompts a client appears in, which sources the engines cite, and where the client is absent. A brand that shows up in “best dispensaries in Maine” on ChatGPT and Perplexity gets customers it would never have reached through the map pack. That is a new channel, and most operators have no idea whether they are in it.

On the second, we run our clients on an internal AI platform called Sentinel. It collects every signal for every store every month, writes the plan, confirms the work was shipped, and grades whether it moved anything. It writes and publishes a reply to every Google review every day, with a compliance screen so nothing medical and no product effect claim ever goes out. It drafts location pages and brand pages that follow the rules of the client’s state. The point is not that AI writes faster. It is that a dispensary with eleven stores can get the attention that used to require an agency team of ten.

The success does fluctuate depending on four things. The quality of the data going in: an AI planning off bad analytics writes a confident, wrong plan. Compliance discipline: one health claim in an AI-written reply is a regulatory problem, so the guardrails matter more than the model. The state of the site: AI cannot fix a menu Google cannot read. And honesty about failure: when an AI pass fails, it has to say “not measured,” not report zero, or you end up making decisions on fiction. The operators who get the most out of AI are the ones who treat it as a system to be audited, not a magic box.

With Entrepreneur Media, what are some subjects that you write about as a contributing writer? Why do you feel like those topics are so relevant to cover?

I write about the unglamorous parts of building a company: buying a business instead of starting one, running remote teams, treating a side business like a real one, and most recently, the mistake of hiring the moment business picks up. My latest piece is about a hire we made that we thought was capacity and turned out to be a messenger, and what that taught me about building systems before adding headcount.

Those topics are relevant because most entrepreneurs are not raising venture money and launching an app. They are buying a plumbing company, running a four-person agency, or trying to turn a weekend business into an income. The advice they get is written for a different kind of founder. I try to write for the operator.

The hiring piece is the one I think matters most right now, because AI has changed the math. The default response to growth used to be a new hire. Today, for a lot of service businesses, the right response is to build the system first and hire into the gaps the system cannot close. We run three agencies on a two-principal team because of that principle, and I think a lot of owners are about to learn it the expensive way.

What I want to write about next is what we see every day in cannabis: how AI search is quietly replacing the map pack for a slice of buyers, and how a small business can measure whether it is being named. That applies far beyond cannabis.

How do you envision the fields of cannabis marketing and PR changing in the upcoming years? How much of an impact do you think AI will have on cannabis marketing strategies and operations?

The front door is moving. For years the front door to a dispensary was the Google map pack. Over the next few years a meaningful share of it will be an AI answer: “where should I buy near me,” “what is a good edible for sleep,” “best dispensary in Portland.” Those answers are built from citations, and the citations come from location pages, reviews, directory listings and editorial lists. Marketing and PR are going to converge on one job, which is being the source the engines cite.

That changes PR the most. A press release that lives on a wire and gets no pickup does nothing for an AI engine. A placement in a regional outlet’s “best dispensaries” list, a correct listing on the directories the engines trust, a review profile that is active and answered, and a page on your own site that plainly answers the question a shopper asks: those are the PR deliverables that matter now. PR becomes measurable, because you can check whether the engine names you this month and did not last month.

The second shift is operational. Agencies serving this industry are going to shrink in headcount and grow in client count, because most of the monthly work, reviews, posts, drafts, reporting, planning, is now system work. The agencies that survive will be the ones that own the system and keep humans on judgment and relationships. The ones that resell AI output without measurement will get found out quickly, because the client can run the same tool.

If the federal picture changes and the ad platforms open, that will add channels but it will not replace search, because search is where intent lives. My view is that AI will touch close to every part of cannabis marketing operations within a couple of years, and roughly none of the strategy. Deciding which neighborhood to fight for, which brand to build, and whether a number is real is still a human job. The operators and agencies that keep that line clear will do very well.

Thank you for joining us, David! For more information on Bud Authority, please visit its website.