Keeping your brand visible in the age of AI agents

For 25 years, you've controlled the digital conversation with your customers. Yes, you've fought for their attention through search and advertising, but once you had it, you owned the message, the relationship, the tempo. You've built sophisticated content, skills, and tech stacks around this direct connection.

But the world has already changed. Your content, skills and technical stack haven’t.

You’re likely seeing it starting already: customers aren’t talking directly to you anymore. They’re talking to ChatGPT. They’re talking to Copilot. They’re talking to Gemini. They’re asking for a market report that mashes your carefully crafted creative into a muddy mess of received opinions and competitor pitches, and the worst thing is: they prefer it.

New behaviours are quick to emerge, but new standards aren’t, which means you’re aiming at a moving target. You need to address your immediate loss of connection with your customers right now so you can survive to address the future that right now is only hypothetical - where should you invest your attention?

1. Research your customers

New AI brand metrics providers are emerging to fill some of the visibility gap: Evertune, Profound, Peec, Scrunch and others. But there’s a problem: most insights you’ll see come from simulated customers, not actual customer interactions with the AIs (with the honourable exception of Google AI mode queries).

To see what your customers are really doing and what they really want when they talk to AIs, you’ll need some good old-fashioned customer research – ask what they want and observe what they actually do, and build your monitoring and implementation strategy around that.

2. Fix your visibility issues

Address basic hygiene first: make sure that you aren’t blocking AI bots somewhere behind the scenes (Cloud-flare does this by default on new accounts). And make sure that your core SEO is up-to-scratch, especially with respect to semantic and content structuring and XML sitemaps.

Once your basics are in shape, you can turn your attention to agent-specific tools and content structures: llms.txt, product feeds, micro-formats, question-answer pairs, and crawler/search agent tuning. And if you’re not already investing in Digital PR, this is now essential as public brand sentiment is a critical influence on AI recommendation.

These are the foundations that help AI understand and recommend your brand accurately.

3. Measure AI sentiment and response quality

You’re going to have to rethink how you measure conversion funnels and drop out points to interpret indirect measurements - AI crawler and search agent hits, Google AI mode queries, brand clicks to homepage.

And because your content is continually being rewritten and recontextualised, you’re going to need to focus harder on sentiment and accuracy metrics - for instance, how often AI recommends you for relevant queries versus competitors. Focus not just how well 3rd party AIs (and your own AI features) communicate your brand values and product details, but also how well they direct customers towards conversion goals.

4. Invest in features with immediate value

People process information incrementally, constantly checking and adjusting the internal story they’re building. This translates well into conversational interactions, but that doesn’t mean you should swap your website for a chatbot. Highly crafted visual design and creative copy is still incredibly important to brand experiences for customer confidence and emotional engagement, and to provide the fully-assembled story once they’re ready for it.

Even though your current CMS probably hasn’t been set up as a content repository for crafted, optimised AI-driven experiences right now, remember that 3rd party AIs are already using your webpages to enable your customers have conversations with your content: you can too.

Identify customer-focused target features you can build right now without having to rebuild your entire Experience stack. Semantic search queries, personalised content synthesis and summarisation, dynamic recommendations and signposting – these can be incremental rather than fundamental investment.

5. Plan your next generation experience capabilities

With your basic AI hygiene in place, you’re in position to address the current disruption. But you do still have to plan for the revolution to come – this is going to be an extinction-level event across most sectors.

Key focuses for your thinking:

· AI engagement models: how AI agents will build deeper integrations with your own content and functionality agents, and how they’ll commercialise their relationship with you – we’ll provide a starting place in our next article on this topic (stayed tuned!)

· Technology capabilities: the role and functionality you need from key experience platforms are about to change dramatically (in-depth advice on this coming soon!)

· Content and data architectures: consider how your content and customer data will need to be structured for optimal AI consumption – semantic chunks rather than pages, adaptive customer profiles rather than segments

· Operational modelling: the future isn’t low-effort generative blog posts, it’s crafted adaptive content which needs new skills and processes for content seeding, micro-audience planning and agent skillset design

You have a lot to do. Your customers are already moving. If you want help moving with them, we can do that.