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Suddenly, everyone is talking about AI as an audience—a topic we begged folks to pay attention to over a year ago.
The good news: it’s not too late. In fact, now is the time to go beyond treating AI as an audience—and instead market to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs as your most important influencers.
LLMs Open to Persuasion
More and more people are turning to LLMs for everything from basic information to rich syntheses. By some measures, people have adopted LLMs faster than any technology ever. Everything you’ve done to make sure customers, consumers and the public at large can find you through search matters a lot less. Now those precious links are mere footnotes.
Like influencers, LLMs are open to persuasion, which is not something you can say about Google search. That’s because search engines weigh the relevance of discoverable material differently than LLMs. Generally, Google has ranked media content first for its supposedly great relevance, integrity, and authority. LLMs need to produce detailed answers and cannot rely on news coverage to do so alone. They need more!
LLMs actually have predictable interests and needs: clear, specific, well-structured content, the more the better. That means as a brand, business, philanthropy, trade organization or an individual, you have a tremendous opportunity. Your content, for the first time, can truly shape how LLMs and your ultimate audience understands you.
The Time to Optimize for AI is Now
At least for now, you don’t need to pay Big AI to promote your content or have a million followers on social media. If you have a properly structured website with strong domain authority, you just need to make sure your content is up to snuff. Press releases help too. Even if they don’t get picked up on the front page of the WSJ, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others will read them and digest relevant information.
It will have an impact. In our experience, it’s often a pretty simple process. Redesign your corporate websites, then refresh and restructure written and video material. It improved the accuracy of ChatGPT query responses almost immediately.
Like in the early days of search optimization, when there was far less content published daily than today, there’s a window to make sure the right information about your company or brand is discoverable, well made and organized to be read by LLMs. It’s time to celebrate LLMs for the cheap, predictable influencers they are today—before they become the inscrutable oracles of tomorrow.
