Dear Rich,
I am under pressure from my CEO and CCO because they are increasingly obsessed with AI chatbots. Apparently the chatbots don't know much about our firm but can answer questions about our competitors. I am interim head of marketing and I'm feeling like I don't have long to address this before it harms my prospects for the gig full time.
I understand organic content is still valuable but how exactly do I get our firm and our products into ChatGPT or Claude?
Rebecca, Manchester
Dear Rebecca,
Your CEO and CCO have stumbled onto something increasingly real. To be fair to them, I think they are right, you need to treat this as a priority.
Prospective buyers are using AI tools to shortlist vendors before they ever land on your website. A CFO types "which platforms offer AI-powered forecasting" into Copilot. A procurement director asks ChatGPT "who are the main providers of X in the UK." None of them went to Google first (who would have said that just a year ago?!). And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. If yours wasn't one of them, you lost ground in a conversation you didn't know was happening.
The discipline you need is called AEO. Answer Engine Optimisation. It's what SEO was in 2008, which means the window to get ahead of your competitors is open right now, but it won't stay open forever. You can’t open LinkedIn or Instagram or any social media without someone talking about it or pitching a solution.
Here's what you actually do.
First, understand how AI decides what to say. Tools like ChatGPT were trained on web data up to a certain point. What they know about your company comes from that training: your content, your press mentions, your directory listings, third-party coverage. Retrieval-based tools like Perplexity pull live web data. Google's AI Overviews blend both. No single fix works across all of them. But the underlying principle is consistent. AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
Start with an audit. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]." Note where you appear. Note where your competitors appear instead. Run fifteen to twenty prompts. The gaps become your priority list. This also gives you something concrete to take back to your CEO this week, which, given your situation, is not a small thing. It shows you are on it.
(Important Note: We see the need, so B2B Marketing United have decided to build our own ‘AI Search Scout Report’ tool to conduct this audit for free and get you started. We’ll release it soon so sign up to the newsletter on our website for updates.)
Then look at your own website. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, and specific factual statements all increase the chance of being cited. A page that says "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability." Specific beats vague. Every time. Go through your most important pages and make them legible to a machine. This means leading each section with a direct answer, adding FAQ sections that mirror the actual questions buyers ask, and replacing any claim that a journalist couldn't quote with one that they could.
Build your authority footprint outside your own site. Here's the thing most marketers miss. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. AI models weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, bylines on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your brand as worth citing. One well-placed article in a credible trade publication does more for your AI visibility than ten posts on your own blog. I said it in our AEO how-to and I'll say it again here: PR is making a comeback, and this is the big reason why.
Fix your entity consistency. This is the unglamorous work that nobody wants to do and that most companies haven't done. Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your LinkedIn page, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. If your founding year, product description, or company category varies between sources, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Content and Comms teams must be loving that all their hard work insisting on ‘core scripts’ and ‘factbooks’ are now more than justified and back in vogue.
Use the language your buyers use. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. If your website speaks in internal jargon and your buyers are searching in plain English, the connection AI needs to make between your brand and their queries simply won't be there. Write for their vocabulary, not yours.
The pressure you're under is real. But the good news is that fixing this is visible work. You can show your CEO a before and after. The audit alone demonstrates that you understand the problem and are taking action. The content and authority work demonstrates that you're addressing it. Most of your competitors haven't even started. That's your advantage, and your argument for the full-time role.
Move fast. Document what you do. Show the change. Get that job permanently!
Onwards!
Rich
For a fast read on the full AEO playbook, our how-to is here: How to use AEO to get your B2B brand into AI answers. And if you want to know exactly where you stand right now, the B2BMU AI Scout Report will audit your AI visibility for free just get in touch with the team via the website at www.b2bmarketing.com
