Making AI a practical marketing lever

Over a year ago, we wrote a (somewhat cheeky) article on how AI will kill the SEO star. Just 14 months later and the prediction is not only startlingly accurate, but at an accelerated rate no business was ready for. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is now a key requirement in every marketing strategy. In fact, Gartner just forecasted a 25% decline in the use of search engines by 2026, attributing this drop primarily to the rise of artificial intelligence, specifically chatbots like ChatGPT.

As a result, lots of businesses, brands, martech companies and agencies are talking about AI and how to “get on top of it”. But here’s the thing. Businesses and brands don’t need to get on top of AI, they need to get inside it. 

In that same article, we highlighted the growing need to really invest in the levers that will unlock meaningful growth for business. Levers like your brand. No, not your logo and your pay off line. Whilst these remain really important, they are not the heroes in this AI story. The heroes of this magnificent AI production are, of course, the writers. 

Why you ask? Large language models (LLMs), aka AI models, are trained on massive amounts of text data. Therefore, we know what feeds these perpetually hungry machines. Words. Copy. Text. Language. Code. More specifically:

• Concise and comparative literature that directly feeds the “asked and answered” dynamic.
• Content from trusted zones and anchor domains. Meaning authenticity, authorship and earned media is critical for citations.
• Structured content. Cited content has a structure so format matters.
• AI models seek content in context. In other words, a match to a prompt or question.

We are not only writing for human consumption, we’re creating signals and answers the machines can read and assign trust and authority to. In short, the text that will either credit, discredit or completely discount your brand. 

Search is by no means dead. Not by a long shot. It remains crucial for driving intentional traffic to websites. On the other hand, AI-powered search delivers precise and personalised results in summary format. It satisfies our need for speed whilst appeasing our quest for truth by its aggregated nature. It’s no surprise then that 67% of Gen Z and 53% of millennials turn to AI tools.

So, what is stopping businesses from embracing AI?

There is a learned and unfortunately dominant tendency for many businesses to lean back from the unknown, versus lean into it. We see this again with AI. The irony is that AI is not new. It’s just become mainstream. It’s a natural and continuous evolution of machine learning that has scaled. The earliest machine learning program was introduced way back in the 1950s. Here’s one for the next quizz night – Arthur Samuel invented a computer program that calculated the winning chance in checkers for each side in 1959. 

We need to lean in and go to where our customers are. Audiences are building in AI platforms by the nanosecond.

OK, so how do we get inside the AI ecosystem?

Put simply, brands need a dual strategy. You have to show up in the ask economy as you have had to in the search economy. The need to show up prominently against key relevant search terms is well understood.

Now, with conversational search continuing to rise and with it, the depth and accuracy of the AI engines – you have to show up when a potential customer is asking a question that you are a relevant answer to: “What are the best solar providers in my area with rental payment options?” “How do we ensure our SME business doesn’t get hit by cyber security attacks?” “What is the best mobile plan if I need a lot of data but don’t want a contract?” 

Have you checked how your business or brands show up in AI tools? Check it out, it’s actually really fun. Whether you ask Perplexity or ChatGPT or use the AI overview feature in Google. Public service announcement though, do not recommend doing it 5 minutes before a meeting. It is a rabbit hole and you will be late. 

We’ve been looking into this for over a year now and have developed a really simple 3 step process to help businesses, brands and most importantly marketing teams, to get started on their AEO strategy and execution. We don’t think it should be scary, we think it should be exciting.  If approached methodologically, with the understanding of how to get inside the AI engine, we know brands will benefit massively. It’s based on 3 simple questions:

1. Determine your AI Market Share

• What is your brand’s AI visibility versus your competitors? (Which sites and cited content are feeding GenAI by platform and why?) 

2. Develop your AI Strategy/Roadmap 

• What are the actions we need to take to boost our AI visibility? How do you become a prominent answer in the ask universe?

3. Track & optimise your AI visibility and sentiment consistently

• How are you going to track your visibility and sentiment continuously and optimise accordingly, in order to build brand perception and consideration? 

Don’t just think about AI and how it applies to your business, jump in and start doing it

This is such an incredible time to learn and leverage new platforms to reach and engage your audience, both in the B2C and B2B space leveraging AEO. Yes, there are many unknowns. That can naturally be very scary. Without question, this is wildly exciting. More than any of this though, it’s necessary. And I don’t need to tell you what necessity is the mother of. 

Let’s explore this. Understand it. Build it. 

Are you excited or is it just us? Let’s chat.