From “How AI Changes Your Customers: The Marketing Guide to Humanity’s Next Chapter” by Mark Schaefer
So how does a brand make it onto an AI’s shortlist? Andy Crestodina, the founder of Orbit Studios, is on the cutting edge of strategies to influence the AI algorithms. He contends that traditional content marketing works, but with a twist. Andy put it succinctly: “Our job now is to train AI to become a sales rep for our brands by feeding it all of the important sales and marketing messages.” He articulated two core strategies:
1. On- Site Content
Your website is still your strongest platform. AI language models are heavily trained on owned media – your blog, product pages, case studies, and FAQs. It’s never been more critical to be ridiculously explicit about:
- What you do, and who you do it for
- Services, features, and benefits
- Unique selling points and use cases
- The locations you serve
- The challenges you solve
Every detail you add is another data point informing AI’s responses.
2. Off-site presence
The influence doesn’t stop at your own domain. AI also hoovers up data from:
- Online directories
- Review sites
- Trade publications
- Podcasts
- YouTube transcripts
Where SEOs once obsessed over backlinks, Andy notes that the real signal for AI seems to be the “co-occurrence” of your brand name with industry terms, regardless of a website’s authority. It’s about brand mentions and context more than backlinks.
Marketing is still about storytelling, differentiation, and connection…with the bots in mind. This demands:
- Extreme clarity: Content must be unambiguous and concise. AI doesn’t reward cleverness or implication. It “reads” explicit statements.
- Wide digital footprint: Place your brand, with industry-related context, everywhere you can legitimately do so.
- Collaboration: Guest posts, podcast appearances, and industry partnerships all feed AI.
Andy’s biggest tip: “Just do good marketing and look for chances to include your elevator pitch or value proposition in every piece of distributed content.” Over time, this builds an AI-friendly footprint.