Mark Wallace, Co-Founder of Bud Authority – Interview Series

Faced with strict advertising restrictions on Meta and Google platforms, cannabis companies often turn to unconventional strategies to market their products and services. Chief among these is strategic search engine optimization (SEO). By prioritizing targeted keywords—ranging from specific product categories to regional locations—brands can significantly boost their visibility, outreach, and long-term growth. However, effective SEO involves a complex, data-driven methodology that extends far beyond simply sprinkling a few buzzwords across a website.

To explore the intricacies of cannabis search engine optimization and digital visibility, mycannabis.com spoke with Mark Wallace, Co-Founder of Bud Authority.

How did your studies at Iona University give you a deeper understanding of the issues facing the American criminal justice system?

Criminal justice at Iona, and my time in law enforcement, taught me to see every system as inputs, incentives, and outcomes. A law reads one way on paper, gets enforced another way on the street, and affects real people in a third way entirely. Cannabis was the clearest example. The ACLU found that even as legalization spread, Black Americans were still almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans, despite similar usage rates.

That’s why I take the legal market so personally. Every licensed dispensary that thrives proves a regulated, tested, tax-paying system works. Every one that fails hands a customer back to the illicit market. So I don’t see what we do at Bud Authority as “just marketing.” The next chapter of cannabis reform won’t only be written in statehouses. It’ll be written by legal operators who win, and I’ve made it my job to make sure they can write that next chapter.

From studying criminal justice, what inspired you to change your career path and go into sales and marketing? What aspects of successful sales and marketing most interested you?

My path took a turn after an unexpected injury, and I followed it into business development and sales, then digital marketing, then, ultimately, cannabis. Happenstance, mostly. But the reason I started never changed. I love working with people and helping them win. Today I get to be in the corner supporting owners building businesses that feed their families and employ their neighbors. That’s a pretty great trade.

What hooked me about sales is that it rewards curiosity. The person who asks the best questions, and actually listens to the answers, understands the situation first. Great salespeople don’t push. They diagnose. When I trained in NEPQ, a question-led approach, it put words to something I already believed: people commit when they reach their own conclusion, not when you shove them toward yours.

Marketing hooked me for a different reason. It’s psychology at scale. Why does someone drive past three dispensaries to shop at the fourth? I still find that question fascinating, and I’ve built a company around answering it. I also love that the scoreboard never lies. You moved someone, or you didn’t.

It’s why I don’t do RFPs (requests for proposals), and I don’t send a deck and hope. I personally get on the phone with every client, ask a lot of questions, and dig until we both know exactly where an operator is, where they want to go, and what’s standing in the way.

What were your first roles in sales and marketing like? Simultaneously, how did you best develop your skills in customer service and team management during those early roles?

I started leading people fairly young, running a retail store that grew into the top performer in its region for both sales and customer experience. That’s where I learned the unglamorous stuff that actually matters, like managing personalities, hiring well, and making the hard calls when you must.

Customer service: Retail lives on its regulars. They come back every week, or they don’t. That taught me the real job starts after the first transaction. Anyone can win a client once. Keeping them means doing exactly what you said you’d do, telling the truth when the news is bad, and picking up the phone before they have to call you. Our clients don’t get a rotating account manager. They get a team that knows their market and treats their growth like it’s our own.

Team management: The best leaders I’ve had led from the front and coached from the film. I run my team the same way. Every month we review last month’s tape together, own what didn’t work, and call the next play. And the top performer always teaches. A team gets sharper when nobody guards the playbook.

On the professional level, how would you say you benefited from working in sales and marketing for so many different industries and product types?

I’ve sold and marketed across retail, automotive, real estate, and, now, cannabis, and that range gave me pattern recognition. People buy on trust, clarity, proof, and a reason to act now, whether it’s a car, a house, or an eighth.

Each world handed me something cannabis needed:

• Retail: the experience is the marketing.
• Automotive: big decisions run on trust, and trust is built in the follow-up.
• Real estate: people search by neighborhood, not by company name. That’s exactly how they look for a dispensary.
• Agencies: what scales, what breaks, and what clients quietly resent paying for.

I use a bar analogy all the time. If I search for the best bar in town and you show up number one, I’m going. But if I open the car door for my wife and the place looks rough, she’s getting back in the car and we’re going somewhere else. Dispensaries are no different. Marketing gets people to the door. The experience gets them through it, and back again.

That outside view is my unfair advantage. When the whole industry copies the same tired tactic, I can tell an operator, with total confidence, that it’s weak, and then show them what works instead.

How did your role with Range Marketing provide you with a more detailed understanding of the cannabis industry and the peculiar nature of advertising in the industry?

Cannabis is one of the only consumer industries where the two biggest ad platforms on earth are closed to you. That changes everything you have to do.

As a founding member of Range’s Business Development Team, I had a front-row seat to operators across the country, from single-store owners to multi-state operators. You learn an industry fastest by hearing hundreds of owners describe the same problems in different accents.

Here’s what makes advertising in this space so unusual:

1. The front door is locked. Google Ads and Meta both prohibit THC cannabis advertising in the U.S., so the playbook every other retailer runs on is off the table.
2. Every state writes its own rulebook. Age gating, imagery, discount language, health claims: what’s fine in one state can draw a violation in the next.
3. Organic is the battlefield. With paid channels closed, search results, map listings, and directories decide who gets found.
4. No two markets are alike. A dispensary in a college town and one on a state border are playing completely different games.

I’m grateful for that chapter. It’s where I got my reps, built invaluable industry knowledge and relationships, and it showed me through the good and the bad exactly what I wanted to build differently. Those four realities are wired into everything Bud Authority does today.

Why did you decide to co-found Bud Authority? What industry-wide issues did you hope to solve with the founding of the company?

I co-founded Bud Authority with my partner, David Peterson. David brings two decades of building software. I bring sales, strategy, and SEO. Together we set out to disrupt a status quo that, frankly, had gotten lazy:

• Templated websites with a handful of pages, and a surcharge every time you want one more.
• “Proprietary technology” that’s often a third-party plugin wearing a new logo.
• Set-it-and-forget-it campaigns that slow-roll clients for twelve or twenty-four months.
• Account managers who’ve never set foot in a dispensary.

Our model flips all of it. We take one client per market and never work with their direct competitors. That’s our draft pick, and we go to battle for them like the season depends on it. We launch with hundreds of researched, optimized pages, full schema markup, AI search optimization, and a twelve-month game plan, all included. Then we call audibles every month based on what the data tells us.

We don’t sell guarantees. We hold a standard: push the limit, raise the bar, and stay out in front on strategy, technology, and results. Same standard inside our walls as outside them.

My business partner hates when I say this, but it’s true: I’ll happily front-load a client past the point of profit to make them the dominant name in their market. When they win, that’s the best ad Bud Authority can run.

From a marketing standpoint, why are effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies so vital for cannabis businesses? How can those strategies change depending on what product format your client produces?

If an operator has a limited budget, I tell them to build two pillars first. One: get found where people search, in Google and now in AI. Two: keep those customers coming back through retention and loyalty.

Everything else is a nice-to-have until those two are rock solid. Billboards, programmatic, and geofencing all have their place, but retargeting is only as good as the traffic feeding it, and most of that traffic comes from search. And no, a geofence doesn’t buzz someone’s phone like an Amber Alert the second they walk into your competitor. I wish it did.

Discovery is also changing fast. SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index found that 52% of U.S. consumers used an AI tool to find a local business in the past 30 days, up from 9% a year earlier. Those AI answers are assembled from what the web says about you. If your content, data, and reputation aren’t there, you aren’t in the answer. I don’t chase impressions. I chase customers.

The strategy changes with the business model:

In some of the most saturated markets in the country, we’ve helped a New Jersey dispensary grow organic traffic 412% in 180 days, taken a New York City dispensary from position 14 to position 1 in 96 days, and put another New York dispensary at number one in the map pack across 14 neighborhoods.

How are the daily operations of Bud Authority and its services designed with the cannabis industry and the fluctuating needs and regulations of cannabis businesses in mind?

There’s no fixed monthly package at Bud Authority. Every month, we study what Google is telling us through Search Console, analytics, rankings, map visibility, conversions, and core algorithm updates. Then we adjust each client’s game plan based on what actually happened, not on what a template says should happen.

It all runs on our six-vector framework: technical SEO, semantic entity building, map pack dominance, geographic expansion, authority link building, and AI search optimization. Around it, we built for the realities of this industry:

• Compliance is built in, not bolted on. Age gates, no medical claims, state-specific rules, and strategies built only on what platforms allow cannabis businesses to do.
• Security is a standard, not an upgrade. We stopped building on WordPress. It’s a jumble of code-bloated themes and plugins that have to be pieced together, and any one of them can open a vulnerability, a security risk, or just slow, clunky performance. We’ve watched malware campaigns hit cannabis websites with fake “verify you are human” prompts, and seen one business’s company card compromised minutes after an employee clicked through. So we brought in a security engineering firm and moved our builds to Next.js: clean custom code, fewer moving parts, and faster sites.
• Regulation moves, we move first. Medical rescheduling, the federal hemp definition change, new states coming online: we adjust content and site structure before the rules land, not after.
• AI multiplies a senior team. Advanced AI processes and software we have built internally handle the heavy lifting, so our strategists spend their time on strategy, while the final calls and relationships stay human.

We’re our clients’ guide, not their yes-man. On an initial call, I tell operators they have to pitch me on why they should be my client, because they become our reputation in their market. If the storefront is rough, the budtenders don’t know the menu, or the deals are stale, I’ll tell them, with love, that we control only what we control, to the nth degree. Everything else, we coach.

When do you envision Meta and Google changing their policies regarding licensed cannabis brands advertising on their platforms? Would a federal cannabis reform have to be implemented or would that be a decision made by the private companies themselves?

I’m not waiting for Meta and Google to open the door, and I tell my clients not to either. Technically it’s a private decision, but in reality, federal law sets the ceiling. Look at where things stand:

• Google Ads prohibits THC cannabis ads in the U.S. But it is running a pilot in Canada, which has a national legal framework, that lets licensed cannabis sellers advertise on search through the end of 2026. That’s the pattern: platforms move where federal law is clear.
• Meta prohibits cannabis advertising.
• In April 2026, the DOJ and DEA moved FDA-approved marijuana products and state-licensed medical marijuana to Schedule III. Adult-use cannabis is still Schedule I. The broader rescheduling hearing ran this summer and was put on hold in late September.

So, it’s years, not months. Schedule III for medical is a signal but not a green light. I’d expect tightly limited, medical-first pilots before anything else, and full adult-use advertising probably waits for federal legalization or a clear federal framework.

The day those ads open, every multi-state operator with deep pockets will be bidding on “dispensary near me,” and costs per click will spike overnight. The independents who already own organic search will be the only ones not paying that toll. So whether it happens next year or in five, the move is the same: build the ground you own now, and that’s what we offer clients.

How will Bud Authority evolve in the future as the cannabis industry continues to grow? At the same time, how do you see AI’s inclusion and usage in the cannabis industry expanding?

AI search is already here. In SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index, 52% of consumers had used AI to find a local business in the past month, but 67% of AI users had received wrong information about a local business at least once. AI is only as accurate as the information it can find, so the businesses with clean data, consistent details everywhere, strong reviews, and real expertise on their sites get recommended.

Bud Authority is evolving to meet this opportunity. We think of ourselves as an operating system for growth, not a traditional agency. That means deeper AI search optimization, faster expansion into new markets as states come online, and more advisory work helping operators decide where every dollar should go first.

We’re also building toward something I’m excited about: concierge-level advisory that stays with our clients to the finish line. Strong digital performance makes a business more valuable. Beyond growing our clients, we want to help them turn growth into options, whether that’s acquisition in a market that’s ripe for it, or walking into their exit with a valuation that reflects everything they’ve built.

What won’t change, no matter how big we get, is one client per market, and a team that supports every one of them.

Across the industry, I see AI moving into pricing and competitor monitoring, inventory decisions, review management, budtender training, compliance checks, and personalized loyalty. Eventually, AI agents will shop on a customer’s behalf. But technology amplifies whatever you already are. AI won’t fix a rough storefront or a budtender who doesn’t know the menu.

Our job is the same as it was on day one: go to battle for our clients, make them impossible to ignore, and tell them the truth the whole way there.

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