For twenty years, “being found” meant ranking on a search results page. That is changing. A growing share of buyers now ask an AI assistant — ChatGPT and others — “what’s the best option for…” and act on the answer without ever seeing a list of ten blue links. If your brand is not in that answer, you were not considered.
How AI engines decide what to say
AI assistants do not have a ranking algorithm you can reverse-engineer the way you could with search. They synthesize an answer from what they have learned and, increasingly, from what they retrieve at the moment of the question. In practice, a few things consistently shape whether a brand appears:
- Presence across trusted sources. Are you described — consistently — on your own site, in directories, in press, and in the places AI systems draw from?
- Clarity of positioning. Can a machine state, in one sentence, what you do and for whom? If your own site cannot, an AI will not either.
- Consistency. Conflicting names, descriptions, addresses, or claims across the web reduce confidence, and reduced confidence means you get left out.
- Substantive content. Pages that genuinely answer the questions buyers ask are more likely to be retrieved and cited than brochure copy.
- Structure. Machine-readable signals — clean page structure, structured data, clear entity information — make you easier to understand.
Step one: measure before you change anything
Start by asking the AI engines the questions your buyers ask, in the ways they ask them, across the markets and languages you serve. Record who appears, how you are described, and what you are compared to. Do this repeatedly — answers vary — and you will have a baseline. Without one, every “improvement” is a guess.
Step two: fix the fundamentals
- Say what you are, plainly, on your homepage — in a form a machine can lift out verbatim.
- Make your information consistent everywhere it appears.
- Publish real answers to the questions your buyers ask, in each language they ask them in.
- Add structured data so your organization, products, and locations are unambiguous.
- Earn mentions in the sources AI systems trust in your category.
Step three: treat AI conversations as a channel
The conversations happening inside AI assistants are where buying decisions are increasingly made — which is why advertising is beginning to appear around them. Treat that as a channel to manage, not a curiosity: understand which conversations influence your buyers and be present in them.
Keep tracking
AI visibility is not a one-time fix. Models update, competitors move, and the questions buyers ask evolve. The brands that win will be the ones that measure continuously and adjust. Faro, topdoer’s AI-visibility product, is built to do exactly that — measure how you appear across AI engines, help you improve it, and manage advertising around the conversations that matter — in English and Spanish.