If your company has decades of expertise and authority, why doesn’t AI necessarily know it?
Because unfortunately being established isn’t the same thing as being understood.
A company can have decades of expertise, loyal customers, exceptional products, and genuine authority.
But search engines and AI systems don’t experience your reputation the way longtime customers do.
They work from information and signals they can access, interpret, retrieve, and connect.
If newer competitors clearly describe their products, define their differentiation, answer more customer questions, demonstrate their expertise, and earn visibility across the broader web, they can begin to occupy digital territory that an established company assumes it already owns.
That doesn’t mean established companies should throw out traditional SEO and start chasing every new GEO tactic.
Quite the opposite.
3 Ways to Grow Your AI Visibility Without Throwing the SEO Baby Out With the Bathwater
Defend the hard-earned search equity and visibility your company has while expanding your presence across the newer ways prospective customers discover, research, compare, and evaluate products. Here are 3 ways:
1. Double Down on Understanding How Your Audience Searches Now, Not Then
Your audience of a year ago is not your audience now. Not with how fast AI and technology continue to adapt and adoption increases. While technically your audience may be the same, how they research and evaluate companies is not. In the age of AI, you need a deep dive to understand when your audience turns to prompting an LLM, versus querying a traditional search engine, versus turning to social media for validation in their purchase research and decision-making. That is step numero uno.
2. Critically and objectively assess your services and product copy. If a competitor clearly explains why its product is durable, who it is designed for, what makes it different, and why someone should choose it, search engines and AI systems have clearer information to retrieve, interpret, and potentially use when responding to relevant searches and prompts to a search or recommendation. Yesterday’s SEO playbook alone won’t sufficiently cover today’s AI findability needs.
3. Unearth and project buried expertise. Established companies haven’t gotten to where they are without developing expertise; the problem is, most are serving humble pie (ok that phrase isn’t exactly what I’m trying to communicate but it gives you a visual). I recently worked with an expert-led ecommerce business that had developed deep product and industry expertise in its 30-year existence. The problem wasn’t a lack of expertise. It was that expertise and strong point of view that made the company so popular with its customers and fan base wasn’t being explicitly communicated in the places and formats today’s search and AI systems could readily surface. Newer competitors were simply better at articulating their own value propositions online.
What Established Brands Need to Do for Better AI Visibility
The opportunity isn’t simply to “rank in ChatGPT.”
It’s to make sure you truly understand and meet your audience where they are today, revisit and rework your most important product and service pages, and project the expertise and authority you’ve spent years building so they are actually visible wherever today’s customers are researching and making decisions.
You have a real opportunity to get in front of customers in this new channel, but you have to get there by first understanding the gap you need to close.
If you’re an established company watching newer competitors suddenly appear everywhere, don’t start randomly creating content for AI.
First, find out why they’re winning.
Ready to Get Off the Plateau?
That’s what my Lead Gen AI Visibility Audit is designed to uncover. I assess how your brand appears across search and AI discovery, identify who’s getting recommended instead and why, and determine the highest-priority opportunities to improve your visibility.
This type of work may be relevant if:
- You’ve been in business for years but newer competitors are becoming more visible
- Competitors appear in AI recommendations where your brand doesn’t
- Too much of your organic visibility depends on people already knowing your brand
- Your website doesn’t fully communicate your expertise
- You’re unsure how prospective customers are discovering companies like yours through AI search
- You want to improve AI visibility without abandoning any SEO equity you’ve already built
If you’re ready to tackle AI Search/AEO/GEO in a way that will meaningfully attract the right audience and contribute to growth, reach out today.
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