I placed my first paid search bid in 2003 on a platform called Overture. Pick a keyword. Set a price. If someone typed those words, your ad appeared.
For 25 years, every innovation in digital advertising was a more sophisticated version of that idea. Figure out what someone wants. Show up when they’re looking. Make the path to conversion frictionless.
I spent my career evolving this strategy. Keyword models, attribution systems, performance frameworks. Hundreds of millions in ad spend, optimized to the basis point.
It worked. It still works. But the ground has shifted beneath it.
AI Platforms Don’t Rank Websites. They Recommend Brands.
The customer journey you’ve been optimizing no longer always starts with a search result. Increasingly, it starts — and will soon often end — inside an AI conversation.
AI-powered platforms — ChatGPT, Google (AI Overviews & Gemini), Perplexity, Claude, Copilot — are rapidly replacing traditional search as the primary way people evaluate products, services, and companies. They build recommendations from structured data, entity knowledge graphs, authoritative citations, and verified information. Then they deliver a single answer.
You’re either in that answer or you’re not. There’s no page two.
From CX to AX
Up until now, brands competed on who delivered the best experience after the click. Now the competition is for who gets recommended before there is a click.
Customer Experience was the human’s perception of your brand. How your site loads. Does your landing page match the visitor’s intent? You measured it with conversion rates, ROAS, AOV or cost per sales qualified lead in the B2B space.
Agent Experience is the machine’s perception. Can AI find you? Will it recommend you?
This is the shift from CX to AX. And most brands are on the wrong side of it — not because they lack credibility, but because their visibility in AI is entirely accidental.
The AI Visibility Framework
The goal: be visible in the AI conversations that matter, at every stage of the buying funnel, across the platforms your customers are using.
That starts with your brand’s entity — what is your current presence across each foundational model and in the platforms most relevant to your industry.
From there, the work splits into two lanes. Each reinforces the other.
On-Site: Structure & Content
Technical structure makes your brand machine-readable. Schema markup and structured data allow AI to easily extract and comprehend your company details, services, locations, product specifications, and key differentiators. Without this machine-readable layer, AI models are left to interpret unstructured page content — often inaccurately or incompletely.
Content Creation. We identify the questions AI is already answering in your category and where competitors are getting cited. Then we provide the roadmap to close the gaps — FAQs, comparison pages, structured answers, insight articles. Content engineered for AI readability – removing the need for them to crawl and interpret your site.
Off-Site: Citation & Authority
PR and earned media give AI the third-party validation it requires to recommend you with confidence. Answer engines verify your claims against external sources — top tier media, niche trade journals, industry publications, podcasts, Wikipedia and verified reviews. Without corroboration, even accurate information gets deprioritized.
We identify the sources with the highest citation rates in your category and help you secure media where it moves the needle. Your PR and communications teams need to give priority to AI visibility. For most organizations, this is new territory — and we help execute through that transition.
The Reinforcement Loop
These aren’t independent workstreams. They compound. Technical structure makes content extractable. New content gives AI something to cite. Strategic earned media give AI the external validation to recommend you with confidence. Each new page, each new external placement, each new citation reinforces the others. AI models don’t check once — they continuously re-evaluate the web for authority signals. Consistent, deliberate activity creates a widening advantage between you and your competition.
Each Platform Is Different
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot — each has its own way of sourcing and weighing information. A brand visible in one may be absent from another. The on-site and off-site work provides coverage across all of them. More on this soon.
Your Dashboard Has a Blind Spot
Google Analytics tracks LLM source/medium — but it can’t tell you whether ChatGPT recommended your competitor. It can’t show you whether Gemini cited your brand in the conversations you care about. The most important interactions in this new era are happening where your current tools can’t see.
Share of Answer, citation frequency, and recommendation rate. The industry hasn’t standardized these yet. But they’re the best leading indicators we have and we use AthenaHQ to visualize and report on the data across all the foundational models.
CX still matters. Paid search still works. AI won’t replace every human interaction with your brand. But the sequence is evolving. LLMs are a new battle ground.
Where This Is Headed
We’re seeing the early infrastructure of agentic commerce — AI agents that don’t just recommend, but compare, negotiate, and purchase on behalf of the user.
A customer says, “Buy me the best cookware set under $200.” An AI agent queries product feeds, compares reviews, checks pricing, and completes the purchase. No browsing. No website. No human decision-making at all.
Your brand was either in that agent’s consideration set or it wasn’t. The pieces are being assembled now. Stripe checkout in ChatGPT. The full agentic ecommerce channel is coming.
Where to Start
Audit your AI visibility.
Query the LLMs your customers use. Are you in the answers? Are your competitors?
Establish your entity foundation.
Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia, brand consistency across platforms that matter.
Make your site machine-readable.
Schema markup, structured data, machine-parseable content.
Build content that earns citation.
Find where competitors get cited. Build what you’re missing.
Invest in your authority layer.
The publications and sources AI trusts to verify your claims are now the infrastructure of visibility. Your PR strategy is now a top priority.
Measure what matters.
I’ve helped brands navigate every major platform shift of the last two decades — and this is bigger than any of them. It’s not just the fastest growing new channel. It’s a new intermediary — one that makes autonomous decisions about whether your brand is worth recommending, or not.
Share of Answer. Citation frequency. Recommendation rate. Correlate actions to outcomes.
We don’t have all the answers and the landscape is constantly evolving — but we’re trying to separate signal from noise and better understand what moves the needle in each foundational model. The first brands to invest intentionally will separate from the field and we would be happy to help you on your journey.
This isn’t the end of advertising. It’s the end of advertising as you’ve known it.