Your brand suddenly has a second salesperson

A potential customer is looking for software for their problem. Instead of opening ten websites, they describe their requirements to an AI and ask: “Which three providers would you recommend?”

At that moment, a sales conversation is essentially taking place without your sales team being involved. The AI explains the category, recommends providers, lists pros and cons, and compares products with one another. If that works in your favor, then that’s amazing. But, well, you only have limited influence over it. Maybe your brand shows up. Maybe it doesn’t. The more interesting question is probably: Does the AI actually sell your product or service, whether in a negative or positive sense, the way you would sell it yourself?

This is exactly where AI Visibility becomes interesting. It is not just about whether a brand is mentioned in an AI answer. What matters is how it is described, what problems it is recommended for, and which competitors it appears alongside. A brand can be mentioned frequently because it is bad, for example when someone searches for the worst provider. You certainly don’t want to be mentioned there.

Visibility alone is not enough

Let’s take a hypothetical example: A software company appears in 80 out of 100 relevant prompts. Sounds excellent. Power on. Fire up the party grill? Wait…

On closer inspection, however, the AI regularly describes the product as a traditional SEO tool, even though the company has since positioned itself completely differently. For enterprise questions, it usually recommends a competitor. In comparisons, the company’s own product is primarily categorized by price, even though that is not the desired positioning.

Visibility would be high and yet the result would still be bad.

That is the difference between Mention and Positioning. A brand can be mentioned frequently and still be misunderstood. A pure Visibility Score only tells part of the story.

The sales conversation starts earlier

Of course, customers were already doing their own research before generative AI. What is new is how far they can take that research without visiting a provider’s website. Yes, quite a lot is possible there…. Now you can really let your imagination run wild and ask anything in any form.

They can describe their situation, add requirements, compare alternatives, and ask follow-up questions. This shifts part of the purchasing decision into an environment that the company itself does not control.

A perfectly worded homepage is then of little help if a potential customer only visits it after an AI has already explained which three providers it believes are relevant.

That is why I would not primarily consider AI Visibility a new SEO problem either. It is more of a positioning problem.

Do the AI Sales Rep Audit

Instead of simply measuring how often your brand is mentioned, I would start with 30 to 50 real questions that potential customers might ask during a purchasing decision. The number is not a benchmark, but simply a useful size for an initial manual test.

Then I would examine each answer based on five questions:

Are we mentioned?
How is our product described?
For which use cases are we recommended?
Which competitors are we compared with?
What arguments in the answer speak for or against us?

This creates a much more interesting picture than a single percentage.

Instead of “Our AI Visibility is 64 percent,” the insight could, for example, be: “We are frequently considered for general category questions, but disappear when it comes to enterprise questions, while two competitors are regularly recommended there.”

You can actually work with the second statement.

Maybe the AI isn’t the problem at all

The most uncomfortable part of such an audit, however, might sometimes be that the AI reveals a problem that already existed before.

Maybe your own positioning really is unclear. Maybe the website describes the product differently from external sources. Maybe sales, marketing, and product are telling three slightly different stories. Who knows. Or perhaps a competitor simply does a better job of explaining who their product is for and why someone should buy it.

Then you do not immediately need a new “GEO hack.” Man, that word has really become an awful buzzword. What you need first is clarity.

Because that is exactly where, for me, the interesting core of AI Visibility lies: We get a new way to observe what image of a brand is being created before anyone speaks to that brand.

Your brand suddenly has a second salesperson. You cannot give them a sales script or invite them to coaching.

But you should know what they are telling your potential customers.