AI search begs for a clear story

what’s worse than AI getting your company wrong? it ignores you completely.

tamara scott | september 8, 2026

every day we hear another story (or six) about AI developments: data center controversies, AI replacing human jobs, how to use the dang thing in a way that actually boosts productivity, and how to show up in the results. marketers who spent the majority of their careers learning on-page SEO, content strategy, schema markup, Adwords, funnels, and personas now have to learn AI theory just to stay relevant.

why AEO requires a change

AEO (SEO for AI search/GEO/AIO/chat search, they all mean pretty much the same thing) requires a different approach than SEO because so much of what an LLM does is intended to be invisible to the user. That hidden “thinking” makes the tech feel faster and more authoritative than search engines for the end user, but like finding a mist in a fog for marketers who are looking to show their value.

AI doesn’t look for the most accurate information, it looks for the most consistent information about a query, and that consistency is misconstrued by the machine — and presented to the end user — as authority. while this presents a challenge for media literacy and critical thinking, for marketers looking to be seen and referred to by LLMs the most consistent story wins, and if you’re not consistent, you’re not going to win.

AI is a blunt object that works without the human context that you bring to any query. that’s why every prompt requires you to tell the AI the context around your thinking or program that into the GPT as a rule. without your context of intent, knowledge, or detailed use case, the LLM assembles the puzzle via the shapes without actually looking at the picture.

a return to original branding processes

the disruption we're feeling right now hits hard because it goes deeper than marketing tactics. It makes us return to the original process of deciding what the company does and why. a single campaign isn't going to get your team found in AI search. companies that look to marketing, sales, and product for fast fixes miss the bigger problem: the company doesn't know who it is.

the company that doesn't know who it is at its core will similarly have a fragmented, contradicting, or confusing presence across the web. LLMs will pick up all those messages from all the competing campaigns and try to make sense of them before ultimately deciding other, more cohesive narratives answer the user's query more completely.

our strategies have to change

used to be, we'd target a keyword, write really good copy, keep it updated, and the traffic would build. you didn't have to do much more than write a really good blog post that was more complete and had a better, more informative answer. that was difficult, but it democratized the SERPs to a point, because the best answer won.

it's only been about three years since this strategy won. but LLMs bring more complexity on the back-end by incorporating more information per query. that means your brand has to be in more places more consistently for the LLM to recognize your authority.

companies that used to dominate SERPs now fear losing ground to their competitors in LLM traffic. Tyler Hakes from The Optimist found that when companies come to him with a visibility project, it turns into an identity project. individual pages carried the brand for years. now those companies have to do the hard work of understanding their own story before they can teach the LLMs what that story is.

find the story to get found in search

most companies will skip understanding their story because they’re afraid that it means they have to redo everything. very few companies actually need to actually rebrand from scratch. the story has been in your materials all along. once it’s uncovered the changes needed to get you found become obvious.

the trick is that you have to start from the core story then fix the messaging on all the moving parts. Individual SEO-optimized pages address the story as it relates to the page topic. unchecked and without a unifying central story, messaging drifts and obscures brand authority.

SEO depends on individuality of pages (the best answer for the single query), and movement to AEO depends on the combined strength of the messaging behind your best pages. we help companies find and implement their story across internal culture and external customer touchpoints so they show up authentically and authoritatively.