Making your brand discoverable by AI is becoming table stakes. Creating something worth discovering is a different problem.
This week in 50-somethinghood, I’ve been seeing creators talk about optimizing for AI, offering “Step-by-Step ChatGPT Optimization Plans” for brands.
Absolutely. Get it done sooner rather than later. This type of systematic distribution and discovery infrastructure is important to implement.
But it assumes that brands already have content worth discovering.
Make the brand technically legible to ChatGPT.
Structure the information correctly.
Put it in places AI can find.
Match the language people use.
All well and good. But my question is: have brands created the right kind of content to make an impact when found?
These systems can potentially help make existing brand content discoverable. But what should brands have created in the first place so that, weeks or months before someone is actually shopping, the brand becomes part of what a person knows, remembers, trusts, references, or associates with the category the brand is in/trying to sell to?
That’s a completely different problem, with a whole different set of questions I’ve been thinking about, such as the content inventory that this kind of system requires to be successful.
Imagine telling a company:
“Let’s optimize your digital footprint around the questions people naturally ask.”
Okay.
What are those questions?
Not simply:
Best bra for women over 50. Or best roll neck sweater, or best under-eye cream.
Those are all search queries.
What about everything sitting underneath those searches? What has this particular audience accumulated that affects how it interprets [insert category here]?
What conversations are already happening in and around these categories?
What annoys them?
What language do they actually use when discussing them?
Whose opinions do they trust?
What cultural references make something immediately recognizable?
What makes something interesting enough to send to somebody else?
What would make a particular brand recognizable BEFORE someone needs a bra, or a sweater, or a particular type of skin care product?
Now somebody has to research all of that.
Think about it. A point of view has to be developed, and then someone needs to create genuinely interesting material from it.
That’s a fucking job. And I’m learning firsthand how hard it really is. Stable Chaos has inadvertently become a little experiment in exactly this kind of content creation.
The amount of time and energy I’ve spent consuming and thinking about different articles, research reports, podcasts—the list goes on—just to create a relatively small number of written articles has been much greater than I anticipated.
Experiencing a category, digesting what you’ve learned, and turning it into a point of view is slow going. I love the process, but man, it takes time.
THE SMALL/MID-SIZE COMPANY PROBLEM: RESOURCES
Imagine telling a smaller company:
“You’ll need to have someone who can spend lots of time on this. Ideally, you’ve got someone you can put on it full time for a few months, and then keep up with it—understanding how your target audience experiences the category and creating content that will be useful to those ‘living’ the category. So that when they eventually want or need what you sell, they recognize your brand as one that understands them.”
Fantastic, but who can do that when they’re already handling multiple email campaigns or paid social, website updates, and are likely on the hook for quarterly pipeline metrics?
For a smaller company, creating this kind of content could very well be a massive resource problem.
THE BIG COMPANY PROBLEM: PERMISSION
At a larger company, the talk track is different. A larger brand likely has the resources; the question is whether or not they are willing to allocate them.
It’s a hard sell when part of the pitch is, “This is an extremely valuable, ongoing project, but we won’t be able to tell you exactly which piece of it drove revenue.”
Good fucking luck getting that through the average quarterly marketing review.
Because companies want attribution.
They want pipeline.
They want dashboards.
They want results within a timeframe that fits a quarter or fiscal year.
Category experience doesn’t necessarily operate on that timetable.
GO HIGHER, MY FRIENDS
Funnels are important, and they serve a purpose. The funnel gives the organization somewhere to put the activity and something to measure.
But category experience largely exists before the person has entered anything the company can identify as its funnel.
Think of a category as a world, with different audiences experiencing—or living in—it differently, often for extended periods of time. If I dip into my own personal experience, there are plenty of categories, like bras or loungewear, that I’m reading about, reacting to, and generally interested in long before I get the itch—or need—to buy a new bra or pair of sweatpants.
And this is happening across all sorts of categories. We experience many different categories as we live our lives—some we interact with daily, others monthly, or even just once or twice a year. We’re participating in them whether we’re actively looking to buy something or just “browsing.”
Most of that happens before a brand has any reason to recognize her as a potential customer. By the time she enters a funnel, she doesn’t arrive empty-handed.
She’s been living her life, accumulating context across all sorts of categories long before any individual brand can see her.
Watching things.
Reading things.
Talking to people.
Noticing brands.
Ignoring brands.
Developing opinions.
Accumulating experiences.
Living the category.
Changing how she thinks about herself and the problem.
Brands need to contribute something of value to these categories—useful perspectives, opinions, ideas, and solutions to the problems people are already discussing—long before there is any measurable indication of a potential buyer.
And that may be precisely why this kind of work is so difficult for companies to justify.
THE AI DISCOVERABILITY PARADOX — THE NEW CLUSTER
The question isn’t just: Can AI find my brand?
It’s also: What has the internet, and ideally our target audience, learned about our brand that gives AI a reason to include it in its answer? To serve it up on a silver platter?
AI optimization and ultimately discoverability may make this situation more critical. Imagine every brand doubling down on optimization.
It makes AI optimization table stakes, and we are back to the same problem:
WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO SAY?
No matter how wonderful your AI optimization is, slop is still slop.
The underlying and much harder challenge is to gain enough insight into your audience’s category experience to create anything ChatGPT-or anyone else- would find compelling and worth finding.
You can optimize the hell out of your content for discovery.
But first you have to have something worth discovering.
