In short:
- AI is changing discovery: If you’re not appearing in AI answers, your brand isn’t being found.
- Earned Visibility matters: Citations, consistency, and personalisation are now the keys to getting AI to recommend you.
- Act now: Earn mentions in trusted places, align your brand story, and stay ahead of AI shifts to stay visible.
AI has changed the SEO game
People don’t find brands the way they used to. Getting in front of your ideal customer is no longer about focusing on getting your site into the top ten shiny blue links of a search result. More and more, customers are going to AIs for the answer.
I’m not saying that people trust CoPilot or Gemini fully – yet (66% of people are using AI regularly, but only 46% actually trust them). But you can’t argue with the fact that ChatGPT reached 100 million users within 2 months of launching. To put that into perspective, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users. AIs are growing fast and are already handling billions of queries a month.
In short, if you’re not featuring in AI’s answers, then you’re not being found by your users.
‘Gaming’ the system is much harder
In the ‘old’ world, there was a set of established rules to help you fight to get onto page (or even position) one. And if that didn’t work, you could always pay your way to the top via ads.
AI doesn’t work like that; there are no sponsored links (although that’s likely to change), and they cite sources they trust. Enter Earned VisibilityTM.
What is Earned Visibility?
Earned Visibility is how we define and approach discoverability in the world of AI. It’s how we get Chat GPT to recommend your business. We’ve broken this down into three key components:
- Citations – Are you being mentioned, quoted and referenced in quality, trusted locations?
- Personalisation – Do you truly understand your audience and are you answering their specific questions?
- Consistency – Are you saying the same thing about your brand everywhere? And is your strategy to keep on top of Earned Visibility continually evolving?
How does Earned Visibility get Chat GPT, CoPilot, Gemini (and others) to recommend you?
Simply put, the three elements of Earned Visibility are the key ingredients to making sure you’re being recommended by AI:
- Citations matter – Think of AI a bit like a university academic. When it’s looking for the best information on a subject, it will look at multiple references before trusting a claim. Articles, interviews, reviews, and podcasts, all of these are more likely to get you trusted in an answer. Just like an academic wouldn’t trust a brand’s ‘About us’ page to tell the whole story, neither will AI.
- Consistency matters – You need to be saying the same thing across the whole landscape, telling the same story about what you do and who you do it for. What’s more, this isn’t ‘one and done’; the game is now changing rapidly, and you need to keep up to keep getting cited. The trick here is to find expert sources on AI (and Earned Visibility) and stay abreast of developments.
- Personalisation matters – People are now asking very specific questions and looking for very specific answers from AI. It’s no longer ‘marketing agency in x town’, they’re now asking: “Which marketing agencies specialise in earned visibility and have good reviews?” As a result, it’s now a non-negotiable that you have to understand your audience, what they’re looking for, and how to answer this question.
Practical tips to appear in ChatGPT
So, what can you do about it? Well, here are a few ways to get started:
- Start thinking about where you want to earn citations – Explore, in your world, what does a ‘trusted source’ mean? Think about this as if you were a smart consumer researching your sector for the first time, where would you go? This is where you want to be mentioned.
- Spend time getting into your audience’s head – Persona mapping has a mixed reputation in the marketing world now, but it’s a great way to start really thinking like your customer. What are they looking for, and what might they be asking? Once you’ve got this, start thinking about how you can specifically meet these needs across marketing.
- Do a brand touchpoint audit – Look at all of your externally facing channels (from your site, to your social media, to your press release boilerplate, to your Wikipedia entry), are you saying the same thing about who you are and what you do?
- Keep pace with AI – Find one or two trusted sources for this information, and get yourself up to speed. Then stay involved.
Because this is only the beginning of AI Search
The AI discovery game is still in the early phases. Brands that embrace Earned Visibility now will be the ones AI assistants recommend tomorrow.
We’ve spent – and are still spending – huge amounts of time digging into what Earned Visibility really means, today and into the future. If you want to stay ahead, sign up for our fortnightly EV update – short, simple, to-the-point, tips on what’s going on in the space and what you need to prioritise today.
If you’d like to talk to us in more detail about how to appear in ChatGPT we’d be happy to talk you through it.