Does ChatGPT recommend your brand? If not, what are you doing about it?

Users increasingly rely on their favourite AI assistants for product recommendations, brand research, and even ideas for their next hobby. In many cases, they are using AI for tasks they previously relied on traditional search engines for.

Why Does This Matter?

If the answer provided by your phone or an AI assistant such as ChatGPT already contains sufficient information, users have little incentive to visit your brand’s website. In other words, your website may no longer directly influence the purchasing journey.

Fig: Example asking Copilot for a toy recommendation.

The Challenge

While it is positive if an AI assistant lists your product or service, several important questions may still arise:

• Why was my brand listed second instead of first?
• Where did the information about my products originate?
• What if the information is incorrect? How can I update it?
• How can I cross-sell or upsell if I do not control the user journey?

Another concern is that AI responses may rely on information that is not fully up to date. For example, your organisation may have issued a product recall, launched a clearance offer, or updated a donation phone number for a charity campaign.

Fig: Examples highlighting whether pricing and contact information are up to date.

With traditional search engines, brands can typically log in to their accounts to update information, manage search equity, and control how their content appears. However, when AI responses are built on information from multiple sources that you do not directly control, ensuring accuracy and consistency becomes far more challenging.

A Secondary Challenge: Analytics and Attribution

Digital marketers rely heavily on measurable metrics to understand performance and allocate budgets effectively. Common KPIs include website traffic, time on site, bounce rates, and conversion paths. These metrics form the backbone of SEO strategies and user journey design.

However, in a scenario where AI assistants successfully promote your brand, sales could increase while website traffic declines. While higher sales are certainly positive, traditional analytics may struggle to capture how the customer journey actually unfolded. As a result, existing reporting models may no longer tell the full story.

Of course, the situation becomes even more challenging if AI assistants are not recommending your brand at all when users request suggestions.

What Can Brands Do?

Our research suggests that while some principles remain similar to traditional SEO, ensuring visibility within AI-driven responses requires additional considerations.

First, your content must be structured in ways that allow AI models to easily interpret and consume it. Equally important is ensuring that information across your digital ecosystem is interconnected, consistent, and frequently updated.

A helpful way to think about this is by considering how AI systems interpret prompts. In many cases, the model breaks a prompt into smaller pieces, extracts possible queries, and searches for supporting information. It is somewhat like reverse-engineering a paragraph written in a language you do not fully understand. You may translate individual words or sentences first, and then infer the meaning of the entire paragraph.

AI models follow a similar process. Once potential queries are identified, they execute searches to retrieve relevant information. By analysing these query patterns using developer tools, organisations can gain insights into what the AI is actually searching for and optimise their content accordingly.

This effectively brings us back to foundational SEO practices. With a clearer understanding of the queries being executed, brands can optimise their websites to ensure they rank highly for those searches.

At the same time, organisations must recognise the shift in user behaviour. If a user views a carefully designed conversion journey as unnecessary noise on the path to getting an answer, that insight should inform how digital experiences are redesigned moving forward.

Another key finding from our research is the importance of influential external sources. These are not limited to social media influencers. Established forums, specialist communities, trusted news outlets, and authoritative organisations often carry significant weight in AI-generated responses.

Final Thoughts

Before abandoning your carefully designed digital journeys, it may be more useful to view this shift as the emergence of a new journey type that organisations need to support.

Just as mobile-first strategies became essential over the past decade, we are now entering an AI-first landscape. While users may still access content on mobile devices, their first interaction with a brand increasingly begins through an AI interface.

If you would like to learn more about our research on how brands can improve their visibility across leading AI engines such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini, please connect on LinkedIn or send an email.

At the time of writing, ChatGPT is temporarily down globally. That in itself raises an interesting question: what do users do when their preferred AI service becomes unavailable, and could that moment reflect on how they perceive your brand?