Your Brand Just Got Skipped. Here's Why.
ChatGPT has been asked to give the opinion of the best digital marketing agency in their city.
The name of your competitor was mentioned. Yours didn't.
No algorithm update. No penalty. No warning. You were just not there in the discussion and the lead had taken off before they could even bring up a browser tab.
It is occurring thousands of times a day, in all industries, in any market. And the majority of brands are totally oblivious that it is costing them.
The uncomfortable truth? Google is no longer the only gatekeeper. The AI Overview of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google are now the default choice of millions of purchase decisions. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT alone has more than 100 million weekly active users (Source: OpenAI, 2024). In the meantime, Google AI Overview is now featured in almost half of US search results (Source: Search Engine Land, 2024).
These aren't browsers. They're buyers. And they are questioning AI, not Google, what to believe.
The question is, when they request, does your brand appear?
AI Doesn't Rank. It Remembers.
One of the greatest misconceptions is that there is in the field of strategy before we discuss it.
ChatGPT doesn't crawl your website. It doesn't index your pages. No AI version of wait and submit a sitemap.
In fact, AI tools are recollecting. They have been trained on a colossal portion of the internet, consisting of articles, forums, reviews, knowledge, Reddit posts, and news items. They amuse brands that they have heard and seen again and again, in plausible situations, connected with real expertise.
Here's the simplest way to think about it:
AI suggests brands that it has been trained to believe in. It is your duty to teach it.
And you do so not by optimising a single webpage but by creating a presence that is so consistent and believable on the internet, such that AI models cannot help but become aware of you.
The Brands Already Winning and What They Did Differently
Take HubSpot. HubSpot appears when you ask ChatGPT virtually anything related to CRM, inbound marketing, or email automation. Every single time.
That's not luck. Years of writing the most useful, well-researched material in their niche. Millions of specialist articles. Consistent brand voice. References in all the leading marketing magazines. Authentic G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot reviews.
HubSpot didn't optimise for AI. They established actual power, and when AI came, it merely reflected what was true of them on the internet.
That's the model. So, now we can discuss how you can duplicate it, even without the budget of HubSpot.
How to Get Your Brand Featured in AI Results
- Have 3 to 5 Topics Under your Belt.
Quit attempting to rank at all. AI models have confidence in the deepest, most credible voice on a particular range of subjects.
Select the 3 to 5 topics that your brand owns. Then post articles that provide answers to all the actual queries your readers have about those subjects in detail, comprehensively, and in a way that makes sense. Not thin articles. Not repurposed listicles. In fact, useful, specialist level material that leaves a reader feeling that these individuals have a clue what they are talking about.
It is that reputation that AI learns.
Step 2 Get Mentioned Where AI Pays Attention
Your website is not sufficient on its own. AI draws on the bigger internet, and it implies that you must appear on websites it trusts.
Consider writing guest articles in industry magazines, quotes in Forbes or other sources, comments on Quora and Reddit, and directories. Any authorised external reference is an indicator that builds strength to the way AI perceives and explains your brand.
A single article on a high-authority web page is worth a thousand blog posts that you published on your own web domain.
Step 3 Write for Answers, Not Just Keywords
This is the essence of AEO, which is an acronym of Answer Engine Optimisation. AI pulls information that provides direct, structured responses. Your content should be constructed in that manner.