A growing number of your prospects are forming an opinion about your company before they visit your website, before they talk to your sales team and before they even know your name. They’re asking AI first. And if AI can’t find you, that question is getting answered for you—by your competitor.

Listen to “If AI Can’t Find You, How Will Your Customers?” Deep Dive

Recently, my fellow AI marketer and friend David Berkowitz (not the one you’re thinking of) published a whitepaper that makes this point in a way that’s hard to ignore. His premise is simple: The traditional audience for a press release—e.g., a reporter sifting through PR Newswire for a great quote or a newsworthy story—is no longer human. AI is now the first reader of corporate communications. Every piece of digital content your company has ever published now has a new first reader, and it’s not a human being.

“A Forrester survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers found that generative AI and conversational search are becoming the go-to source of vendor research.”

At last week’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the conversation among Fortune 500 CMOs and global advertising leaders shifted from how to win human attention to a much more urgent question. How do you influence an AI model? The New York Times reported that brands like Pepsi, Expedia, and Zoom are now openly grappling with what one industry leader called “tectonic shifts” in how their companies are discovered. The blue search link is dead. Being invisible to AI is no longer a future concern. It’s a real threat to any brand or business that relies on being discovered.

David also makes the case that the structure of the press release, unchanged for over 30 years, needs to be overhauled for AI readability—i.e., structure over style; facts over narrative flow; every claim a standalone, citeable sentence; full attribution on every quote, because AI will pull it without your headline; and linkable evidence for every assertion, because if it can’t be retrieved, it won’t be trusted. And if ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other LLM can’t reach it, it doesn’t exist. It’s something we called out late last year about how AI search was already making websites invisible.

But here’s where I’d take David’s idea further: the first reader shift doesn’t stop at press releases.

What a Company Thinks AI Knows Versus What AI Actually Returns

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running preliminary AI audits for companies in the BioTech, Professional Services and Franchising spaces, as well as for a dental practice. Each of these sectors and organizations have multiple audiences, each with different questions and different ways of asking them. The common thread across all of them is that out of the six to 10 initial questions their audience would search by, they are only being cited a few times and on just one LLM. When they are cited, it’s either through a press release or a specific service that aligns with the prompt. This isn’t a one-off; I’m seeing it consistently.

“The fact is that it’s not the person doing the search who is forming an opinion about your company, it’s the AI platform before your prospect even gets a chance to see the search results.”

Most companies will say they have a strong digital presence because they have a website, active social channels and a PR program. However, until they run a structured AI search audit across all four major LLMs, they really don’t know where the gaps are, how to close them, or through which channels.

This applies to everything digital, i.e., websites, case studies, third-party profiles, images and any content your company has ever published. A Forrester survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers found that generative AI and conversational search are becoming the go-to source of vendor research, often bypassing visiting the vendor’s website, conversations with product experts and calls with sales representatives. Buyers are starting with AI rather than your company or product website. The fact is that it’s not the person doing the search who is forming an opinion about your company, it’s the AI platform before your prospect even gets a chance to see the search results.

Some people may think that this is an SEO problem, but it’s not. While still important, SEO has always been about a website being indexed, whereas AI search is about being understood. And if AI understands you, it cites you.

AI Search Has Changed the Entire Digital Footprint

SEO and AEO overlap and round out each other’s purpose. Technically, SEO’s primary job is to make sure your websites, pages, blog posts and press releases are searchable and properly placed on the search results page.

AEO is about the entire digital footprint that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity pull from when forming an answer to a search. That includes everything SEO touches plus the content categories SEO never prioritized because they weren’t about ranking, such as third-party profiles, review sites, industry directories, earned media, Reddit threads, case studies published as PDFs, press releases and social posts, or even images and video that are properly structured so AI can actually read and cite them. This is something I documented firsthand when I ran an AI search audit on ScheinerInc. last year.

AI isn’t just discovering content like SEO; rather, it’s interpreting that content from anywhere your company has a digital presence, owned or not, and forming an opinion about it before you ever get to see the search results.

When it comes to the video content that you’ve invested in, if the right searchable data isn’t accompanying it, neither you nor the LLM will ever see it.

Every company’s website has images. Does AI know what any of them mean?

A Real Convergence of Media

Since the rise of social media, the marketing conversation has centered on the convergence of three media types:

1) owned channels, your website and social posts;
2) paid, search ads, display and affiliates; and
3) earned, PR, customer reviews and forums, like Reddit.

What AI has done is collapse that distinction entirely. Every channel, whether owned, paid or earned, now has the potential to be cited as a form of validation by an LLM, which is why the media planning conversation needs to start with an AI visibility strategy.

AI citations have become an incredible asset for brand visibility across all LLMs. The companies that structure their content across all three channels for AI readability will be visible everywhere AI looks. For anyone reading this, the scope of what I’m describing is understandably overwhelming. The reality is that almost none of the digital channels mentioned has been structured to be read by AI.

Closing the Citation Gap

Every day a competitor structures content for the first reader is a day their AI profile gets stronger and more accurate. LLMs don’t forget what they learn about a company. Think of it as a new form of digital brand equity that compounds with every new piece of structured content you publish. The companies building it now are creating an asset that widens the “You found me” citation gap between them and their competitors.

Try Doing This…

If you asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other LLM what your company does, or what product or service they look for in your category, would the answer match what your best salesperson would say?

If the answer is no, or if you’re not sure, that’s where you start, and I’d welcome the chance to have that conversation with you. Email me at mike@scheinerinc.com.

As always, thank you for reading and/or listening.