As artificial intelligence chatbots take over from search engines as the go-to platform for answers, brands that once had a solid online presence may suddenly find themselves invisible. If so, then Brandi AI LLC, the creator of a specialized “generative engine optimization” platform that has just launched today, wants to help.

The company says it’s pioneering an entirely new discipline for maximizing digital visibility. In the old days, companies could either pay to see their websites rank prominently in search engine results, or else they could perform “search engine optimization” or SEO to increase their site’s ranking in an organic way. But that no longer works, for more and more people are shunning traditional search engines in favor of chatbots.

Brandi AI co-founder and Chief Executive Leah Nurik said the shift to generative AI is a trend that spans both consumers and business-to-business buyers, and – for better or for worse – the fact is that most users trust the AI’s first response.

There’s a lot of research to back this up. According to a recent survey by Adobe Inc., more than half of U.S. consumers now use AI chatbots to research new products. For B2B buyers, generative AI is even more prevalent. A study by Forrester Inc. shows that 89% of B2B buyers rely on chatbots as a primary source of information at every stage of their buying process.

Buyers are doing this because generative AI is much more streamlined, eliminating the burdensome task of performing research themselves. It consolidates the decision-making process into a single, definitive answer. And while that might not suit everybody, many people are lazy and will just go with the AI’s suggestion.

“Buyers ask a single question… if your brand isn’t in the answer, it doesn’t exist,” Nurik said. “Yet most CMOs are flying blind, unaware of whether or not their brands appear in AI results.”

This is why Brandi AI believes that the time is right for an entirely new approach to online marketing. That’s generative engine optimization, or GEO.

Unlike SEO, which is all about optimizing web pages to rank highly on search engines, GEO is focused on the signals used by AI systems to find their answers. According to Nurik, these signals include things like the user intent, the site’s authority, clarity and trustworthiness. She said GEO focuses on how AI models evaluate and rank information, and by helping brands to align with these methods, they can increase their visibility in an AI chatbot’s response.

Understanding AI chatbots

Getting into the specifics, Nurik said Brandi AI’s GEO platform has three main strengths. The first is its competitive intelligence engine, which can reveal to marketers exactly how visible their website is, or isn’t, to generative AI chatbots. They can also use it to assess the visibility of their competitors, and find out exactly where they need to improve, she said.

The second component is an “actionable GEO framework,” which provides a structured and repeatable system for analyzing the kinds of prompts that surface brand content. It also provides recommendations on how to make content visible to different kinds of prompts, such as tips on how to formulate their article headlines, improve machine readability and so on. Nurik said it provides “clear next steps” for marketers to increase their citation rates and become more visible to chatbots.

Lastly, Nurik said the platform is designed to align existing webpages, blog posts and marketing assets with the things buyers want to find when they query AI chatbots. In this way, brands don’t necessarily have to overhaul their existing content, but simply adapt it to increase their chances of being cited by AI.

According to Nurik, companies that use Brandi AI won’t need to adjust or abandon their existing SEO and public relations workflows, because the platform is designed to integrate with them, expanding their content strategies to accommodate AI as well as traditional search engines.

“The hard truth is that visibility isn’t about rankings anymore, and if AI doesn’t surface your brand, your buyers won’t either,” Nurik said. “Brandi reveals what AI highlights, what it ignores and how to close that gap, before your competitors do.”

Images: Brandi AI