The rise of AI is less a search challenge than a communications challenge, says 1440’s Guy Corbet.
This isn’t science fiction. Well or badly, organisations always communicate with audiences: customers, journalists, investors, employees, policymakers and so on.
That’s how brands are built, and how reputations are ruined.
Each audience matters. In different ways each one influences an organisation’s success or failure.
Until now every group has been human. But no more.
Organisations no longer communicate only with people
Whether they like it or not, all organisations are now communicating with artificial intelligence (AI). And AI is telling the people that matter to them what each brand or organisation is doing.
Put simply, to understand what a brand stands for, ask AI, not the brand book.
Too often, the temptation is to treat this development as a new technical challenge, similar to search engine optimisation (SEO), traditionally the way to make brands easy to find online. Indeed, generative engine optimisation (GEO) has emerged as a “silver bullet” to show up on AI.
While technical approaches will always have a place, it’s a mistake to think that the rise of AI is solely a technical challenge. It is better to think of AI as another audience that needs to be engaged and won over. The artificial audience.
Like every audience, AI has its own characteristics. It is influenced by evidence it finds rather than slogans or assertion. By consistency rather than scatter gun or one-off campaigns. By substance rather than marketing fluff.
By what the wider world repeatedly says about an organisation. Not what it claims about itself.
AI is already telling the story that it finds
Increasingly, people don’t just search. They ask. More than half of UK adults now use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini.
AI is already describing organisations to customers, investors, journalists and prospective employees, often before they ever visit a website.
The question isn’t whether AI will tell an organisation’s story. It is. But is it telling the one the organisation intended?
Unlike a search engine, AI doesn’t simply retrieve information. It builds its understanding from a brand’s content, plus independent commentary, plus expert opinion, plus media coverage and more.
AI’s understanding is based on the ideas most consistently associated with the organisation, expressed by third parties rather than the brand itself.
In other words, AI isn’t just blindly replaying what it discovers about a business. It’s interpreting what it finds. A bit like a journalist or an influencer.
Visibility is only the beginning
Many discussions about AI focus on how a brand can best be discovered. How do we become easier to find? How do we “rank” more highly? (Though the idea of ranking is on the way out.) How do we optimise for AI?
Those questions all matter. But they only solve part of the problem. Being found is valuable. Being understood is more valuable.
Technical optimisation and GEO may help AI find an organisation. But it does very little to shape what AI says about it once it has. That depends on something else entirely.
AI has more in common with communications than it does with SEO. It reinforces the associations it encounters most often. Being easy to find is only valuable if what AI finds makes a business worth choosing.
The communication challenge hasn’t changed
The implications are significant. If AI increasingly shapes how organisations are understood, then brands have a new audience to communicate with.
The organisations that succeed won’t simply be the easiest to find. They’ll be the easiest to understand.