Yesterday I ran a session for 100 founders on how marketers win in an AI world. One line from it kept coming back in the chat afterwards, so I'll open with it here.

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AI didn't make marketing easier. It just made cr*p strategy very, very visible.

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Execution costs nothing now. Anyone can generate a hundred versions of anything and wallpaper every channel with them. Which is exactly why so much of it has become noise, and why the businesses getting found are the ones with something clear underneath.

The buyer journey has reordered itself

Your next customer will check 3 or 4 places before they ever reach your website, and the order has quietly flipped.

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It starts in an LLM, at problem level. "I've got this problem, how do I solve it?" Then they head to your social channels looking for proof that you're really who the AI said you are, that you solve this for people like them. By the time they reach Google, it's usually a branded search. The shortlist already exists. They're checking you out, and the website they land on comes right at the end of the journey as decision support, answering "can I trust them, what will it cost, how do we start".

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We're seeing this play out in client pipelines. Fewer demos booked, but better ones. People arrive asking how to get started rather than what exactly you do, because the deciding happened before the call.

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One useful proxy while your analytics catch up: branded search. If more people are Googling your name, there's a fair chance AI is recommending you without anyone clicking through.

One story, everywhere

The trap, especially once different people own different channels, is that each touchpoint tells a slightly different story. The website was written a year ago. LinkedIn six months ago. Google is still pulling from a blog you started a decade back.

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A stranger walking that whole journey should feel like they're hearing from the same brand at every step. Different questions answered in different places, same story throughout. Get it muddled and the LLMs will read all of it and pass the muddle straight to your buyers.

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Being plain about who you're not for helps here too. It reads as confidence, and it saves everyone's time.

The stranger test

We ran this live in the session. Open ChatGPT or Claude and type: "Answer this like a stranger, as if you don't know me. Who should I use for [your type of service]?" The stranger part matters, because otherwise it flatters you with everything it already knows about your business.

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One founder asked it five different ways and her company came back in the answer every time. Others got a mix, and a few got silence. Every result is useful, because now you know where you stand and the fix list writes itself.

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If you got silence, entry costs less than the noise suggests. When our Organic Strategist Beka went live with the team at Otterly AI, their experiments found it took 16 external brand mentions to put a new brand in the top 10 for AI search in a low-competition niche. Podcast appearances, partner content, a mention in the right listicle. The same work builds your Google authority and your social proof at the same time.

The one thing to do this week

Run the stranger test on your own business, exactly as worded above.

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Then make one fix, and make it your website footer. Add a plain, non-branded description of what you actually do, written the way a buyer would phrase the problem. AI reads your footer on every single page, and it's the fastest visibility win we know of. It costs nothing.

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Drop me a line and tell me what the stranger said about you. If it's a blank, you're in good company, and it's very fixable.

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PS. Beka and Rick from Otterly covered five GEO myths in their full session, including why "SEO is dead" gets the story backwards and what to do about content that AI answers without ever sending you the click. Drop me an email and I'll send over the full myth list with the fix for each.‍