Morning All,

The leadership team want you to take on this extra project at work. Don't worry it'll be good for you..."it'll increase your visibility...". Now I know I'm not the only one who has been fed that line before. Heck, you might've even used it on a junior colleague. Because it's a time honoured adage that it's not enough to do great work, you have to be seen to be doing great work.

Visibility is currency.

A maxim not only for corporate life but wider business too

...and AI visibility is the new reserve currency.

The digital petrodollar.

Traditional search drives 68% of all website traffic and current projections predict AI search will surpass it by 2028.

If AI visibility is the strongest currency of the future, how do we go about stacking the most of it? That's what we're discussing today...

That's the VP/GM of Google Ads telling the world what the future looks like according to the people with the most power to shape it. This past week at Google I/O they launched a suite of products that give users the ability to conduct deeper research, compare products, plan activities and complete tasks...all without leaving the Google platform. The implication is loud and clear, the days of purely providing links and information are in the past. The very near future is about enabling outcomes, where AI systems perform actions on behalf of users that they would traditionally have searched for and then manually completed themselves.

The compressed buyer journey

The traditional funnel was built on multiple touch points, multiple opportunities for your brand to show up, make an impression, and build the trust of the potential customer. AI search collapses this entire journey into a single interaction. Discovery, evaluation, and consideration CAN all happen in one response now. If your brand isn't in that initial answer, you don’t exist in the decision making process.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, brand or marketer, being visible in these AI systems is as important to you as the money markets are to nation states. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of economics will know that if a country doesn't have access to the money markets, things will get dark really quickly...and for AI visibility, similar principles apply. For any business that wants to stay viable and relevant "optimising for AI" is now the new norm. And, to further complicate things not all AI visibility is made equal.

The 3 types of AI visibility

Type 1: Brand mentions

Your brand gets featured in AI-generated answers, generally without a link to your site. Mentions often come from reputation signals like

• Reddit posts,
• Media coverage
• User reviews
• Social discussions

These are cool, you're a part of the conversation, which builds brand awareness but the potential for converting this into sales is low.

Type 2: Citations

Citations are linked references included in AI-generated results. Your brand becomes a source of truth in AI responses and gains credibility by signalling your brand is an authoritative voice on the subject. These are big drivers of high intent traffic and equally high potential for conversion.

Type 3: Recommendations

This is the most impactful layer for brands and entrepreneurs. This is the type of visibility that compresses the buying journey and effectively merges discovery and purchase into one place. Products and services can show up with pricing, ratings, and other details. Showing up in the list of recommendations makes your brand a part of the decision process. Users can compare specs, prices, and reviews and even complete the transaction right in the AI chatbot.

Clearly those 3 distinct outcomes require different strategies depending on what outcome you're optimising for. Right?

Well, it depends who you ask. According to Google, there’s no difference between “optimising for AI” and “SEO,”:

• ​LLMs.txt - Not needed
• ​Markdown pages - Not needed
• “Chunking” content (i.e. breaking it into short paragraphs for AI retrieval) - Not needed
• Writing in an “AI-friendly” way (whatever that means) - Not needed
• AI systems do evaluate brand and product mentions across the internet, but, like traditional Google search, they can tell real mentions from fake ones. “Seeking inauthentic mentions” may flag your site as spam (like traditional SEO).
• No “special” structured data, such as from Schema.org, is required, though it helps generate rich snippets in organic results.

Source: Optimising your website for generative AI features on Google Search​

So does that mean business as usual? Entrepreneurs, brands and marketers can just keep doing what they've been doing? Well, not quite. The winners of traditional search won't necessarily be the winners of AI search. The above bullet points are Google's guidelines, but annoyingly different AI systems respond to different stimuli, and those same guidelines will not make you successful in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. However, what is universal is that all AI systems respond to credibility. In order to be confident in recommending you, the system has to receive certain signals that say you're the right answer to the question being asked.

So how do you make that happen? The following are 5 universal things you can do to build authority and credibility across all AI systems.

1. Deliver Clarity. Whether you're assessing yourself, your business, or your brand it has to be consistently and clearly defined across every platform AI systems draw from. If your website says one thing, but your Google Business Profile says another. If your LinkedIn tells a different story to industry directories, it creates an ambiguity that AI systems dislike. Which they resolve by simply not including you in recommendations or answers to queries.
2. External validation. Press coverage, citations in credible publications, and mentions in trusted directories give AI systems the third-party validation they need to confidently recommend your business.
3. Structured data (For everyone apart from Google). Schema markup gives AI systems clear machine-readable information about your business. Organisation schema, FAQ schema, Review schema, and service-specific schema help to communicate your business identity, expertise, and client outcomes in a format that AI systems can easily digest
4. Topical authority. AI systems prefer businesses that can demonstrate consistent, deep expertise in a specific niche, rather than having expertise an inch deep and a mile wide. Creating answer focused content that speaks to the specific pain points of your ICP is the content decision that brings the highest ROI.
5. The Victory Lap. AI systems value evidence over claims. Verified client testimonials and results shown on trusted platforms will dramatically increase the likelihood of your business being recommended.

Now you're probably thinking, that's all well and good, but what does that look like in practice?

AI visibility as a discipline is still in it's infancy, and consequently the rules are rapidly changing. But there are clear patterns to differentiate which brands get seen from the ones that don't. Three driving forces at play are consensus, consistency and content.

Consensus

This is why delivering clarity is so important. No single source determines your likelihood of being mentioned or cited. With AI search it’s the pattern of consensus across multiple platforms that does this. With traditional search, brands built domain authority through link building and digital PR. Now, LLM's build their opinion from a consensus of reddit, youtube, industry reports, customer reviews, community discussions and trusted publishers. Each trust signal on its own is valuable. But when they're combined, LLMs seeing a pattern of independent sources saying the same thing is far more impactful.

Consistency

LLMs don’t crawl and rank pages the way traditional search engines do. This is why data hygiene is crucial for building AI visibility. All sources need to tell the same story with the same data. The inconsistency that comes from having differing messaging on different platforms could make the AI tool less likely to include any information about your business.

Content

Traditional search focused heavily on short keywords such as “accounting services” or “online personal trainer” Today, people search differently. Instead of typing short phrases, users ask complete questions like “What’s the best Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, London?" AI search systems understand user intent instead of simply matching keywords. In addition to the type 1 content from above, AI systems love the following:

• Publisher listicles
• Comparison posts
• Long-form articles,
• FAQ pages,
• Buyer/ Client guides
• Specific tools for your ICP

Playing the game of AI Search visibility is non negotiable if you want a viable business. Now you know the rules, it's time to go and play...and stack that currency!