How you show up with AI is your story: Make it a good one
10 minute read
Here's an uncomfortable truth: Now that AI has been integrated into every aspect of digital marketing, it's the main mechanism driving your brand's story. What's even more unsettling? Many of those brand stories aren't being told accurately.
Luckily, there's a lot you can do to correct the narrative. Today, we'll talk about how marketers are responding to new buyer behavior with research tools to boost AI visibility, structures for online content that drive AI citations, and ways to protect and build your brand by making AI a collaborator rather than an adversary.
Taking a fresh look at the full funnel
"Research shows AI‑powered search now influences up to half of consumer discovery and buying behavior, as people increasingly rely on AI‑generated summaries instead of traditional search," –McKinsey & Company
Since AI has dramatically changed how around half of customers find, consider, and purchase from different brands, marketing leaders are being forced to rethink full funnel marketing.
Customers are doing their research on conversation-based platforms and the AI summary up front and during the consideration phases, so by the time they reach a typical conversion juncture, it must be geared toward highly engaged segments that are ready to move forward, fast.
To support the online conversion experience, businesses may need to adjust teams, systems, and best practices to drive growth in a scalable way.
Tactical ways to improve full-funnel success for modern buyer behavior
Current buyers aren't moving in a straight line; if they reach your website or call, it's because you're already a contender. What happened to the website funnel? It jumped off the page and into the AI overview! But how do you get the right story into AI platforms so that buyers have the right information they need to make an informed decision? Use the right tools and strategies.
Tools for protecting and strengthening brand visibility
Semrush
You can track your brand's AI visibility in a tool like Semrush. The best part? That same tool will suggest ways you can fill gaps, allowing you to scale. For example, once you enter your URL, it will help you locate trending brand topics, see what your competitors are doing (that you might not be doing...), and ensure your site is crawlable, so it can be seen more readily by AI. Beyond that, it helps you understand which questions your brand should be answering by showing prompts that may work for your brand.
Other tools that provide a similar functionality include Profound, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, ZipTie, Similarweb, Ahrefs, and Clearscope.
Public relations (PR)
Okay, it's not a tool, but a service. Still, your presence on other platforms helps build your authority, making you more readily citable by AI.
Being helpful in the right place
"According to a study commissioned by Reddit and marketing intelligence company Profound, Reddit was found to be the number one most cited source across AI platforms such as Google AI Overviews and Perplexity," –BBC
This is also not a tool, but a strategy. As marketers, our highest calling is to help buyers make better decisions. You can do this by getting into the thick of it in forums like Reddit, where real conversations about products are happening.
But remember, if you aren't being genuine, inserting your brand could backfire, so only engage if you have something worthwhile to offer.
Content structure favored by AI
"93.8% of AI Overview citations were not from the top 10 organic results, according to a study by Authoritas. This means that traditional SEO ranking factors, such as backlinks and keyword optimization, no longer guarantee visibility within AI-generated summaries. Ranking high in traditional search doesn’t necessarily mean your content will appear in AI Overviews." –Digital Marketing Institute
SEO still matters (along with its structural best practices), but there's more to consider now. You need to engineer all aspects of marketing to serve SEO, AEO, and GEO because buyers are using all the tools they have to do research themselves.
You will now need to modify your paid media efforts to pair with buyer intent (commercial, informational, transactional, navigational), write web content with queries in mind (actual web pages and articles), and add FAQs where they're helpful. Beyond that, you will need to work harder than ever to get brand mentions beyond your website so that those other publications help build your authority (remember the PR we mentioned above?), so that there's a higher likelihood of AI pickup.
What are AI tools looking for?
AI agents and AI search tools look for specific things to answer buyers' questions about brands.
Page titles, descriptions, and H1s must include signals. Page titles should be summary-focused, descriptions need to provide context, and H1s will work best if they mirror the page title and give AI a taste of what's to come.
From there, you can spend time making sure your other H-tags work for you, further cutting up content that can be served up in an AI answer (think chapter titles), adding Q&As, including tables, lists, and charts, and finally, completing schema markup.
What are some general best practices when writing content for AI search?
- Break up content for easy scanning and parsing (bullets, lists, etc. NO giant text walls)
- Keep your content front and center, not in PDFs.
- For key information, avoid tabs and menus, as they sometimes hide it from AI.
- Be as clear and concise as possible.
- Write sentences that make sense, even outside of your original content piece.
Buyers are taking an alternative journey with AI
"AI search visitors convert 4.4x better than traditional organic search visitors," –Semrush
AI has also created a new buyer journey. Digital Marketing Institute outlined the differences between the traditional SEO and AEO/GEO journeys.
SEO's user journey: Search -> Click blue links -> Visit website -> Find answer
AI-driven search's journey is completely different: Ask AI -> Get synthesized answer -> Zero clicks are needed
So essentially, your website and mentions on other online sources need to support the answer AI generates, potentially using multiple sources. That answer is sometimes the end of the inquiry, and therefore, if it isn't what the customer wanted, it can kill a sale before your business development department even gets a chance to pitch. Why? AI is pitching now. You have to close.
The good news? The people who do find what they want via AI search will be ready to make a purchase.
What area will you be focusing on first? Even making a small change can make a big impact on how your brand is perceived by the people on the other end of AI tools, your buyers.
Want to talk more about your brand's AI visibility? Say hello.
