The for­est is the trees

If a tree falls in a for­est and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Life is a com­plex sys­tem. A Rube-Gold­berg machine of luck, love, chaos, needs, col­lat­er­als, and serendip­i­ty. And we need oth­ers to make it through.

When sort­ing pri­or­i­ties or plan­ning bud­gets, con­sid­er this ques­tion: What is the most impor­tant area of my busi­ness I need to focus on? If it isn’t ​“being seen”, check again. 

Of course the tree makes a sound. 

But nobody gives a shit.

More new stuff on the new stuff

Chat­G­PT released a pret­ty impres­sive­ly com­fort­able shop­ping research expe­ri­ence. Just ask it about a prod­uct you’re look­ing for. Set crys­tal clear expec­ta­tions: price-range, exper­tise, reviews, geo­graph­i­cal area, past expe­ri­ences, who is it for, when you’d like to get it. 

Your new per­son­al shop­per – who already knows a lot about and will fac­tor that into the research – will seek the best options to match the very spe­cif­ic use case of you. 

With that first list of results, you can keep chat­ting and improv­ing it. Ask fol­low up ques­tions to refine results until you’re hap­py. Click on prod­ucts to see retail­ers avail­able, com­pare rates and fea­tures, and go straight to the prod­uct page of your top choices.

And if Shopi­fy rumors are true, we’ll soon have embed­ded add to cart but­tons, so frac­tion from research to check­out goes near-zero. 

This is a big deal:

• B2B Research will be more thor­ough and accu­rate than ever. Any­one not pass­ing the first AI cut will have issues get­ting into the selec­tion process.
• B2C’s jour­ney becomes min­i­mal. No need to go through pages of con­tent, reviews, pric­ing com­par­i­son, or spot­ting the fine-print. 

Ama­zon mas­sive­ly sim­pli­fied con­sump­tion and holds at least 40% of all online pur­chas­es because it made it very easy to fil­ter, com­pare, find prices and reviews, return items, and trust that the prod­uct will get deliv­ered time­ly, safe and sound. 

AI-dri­ven shop­ping will pig­gy­back on our own con­fir­ma­tion bias­es and give us the kind of results we like, with the infor­ma­tion to con­vince our boss­es, spous­es, or our­selves. Sales cycles will get notice­ably shorter.

It’s a new and fresh take on the key ele­ment to be successful: 

A per­son­al­ized, pleas­ant, easy cus­tomer experience.

How does this work?

While we have lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion on the actu­al mechan­ics of how prod­ucts are picked and fea­tured, here are some edu­cat­ed guesses:

Chat­G­PT doesn’t have a search engine per se, but it does have a crawl­ing bot look­ing into your web­sites and feed­ing the model.

Since Microsoft owns a big chunk of Ope­nAI, we can expect Bing to become the search engine under the hood. That means results will be heav­i­ly influ­enced by your Bing posi­tion­ing and data. We know Per­plex­i­ty is using shop­ping feeds too. It won’t take long before all major plat­forms are syn­di­cat­ing prod­ucts to every rel­e­vant chatbot.

We also know Chat­G­PT does some­thing pret­ty cool: It looks for what’s said about your prod­ucts, and returns rec­om­men­da­tions influ­enced by pure, good old content:

• User gen­er­at­ed. Fre­quen­cy, viral­i­ty, pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment. Red­dit is extreme­ly author­i­ta­tive and you’ll see plen­ty of ref­er­ences from it. Broad­ly speak­ing, any social net­work will have an impact. Beloved prod­ucts with a loy­al fan­base will climb the lad­der fast.
• Lifestyle. Your very own con­tent is high­ly rel­e­vant to help the LLMs fig­ure out what it is, why it’s dif­fer­ent, who it is for. Up to a cer­tain degree you’re in con­trol of the story.
• Real peo­ple Q&As. From sim­ple FAQ sec­tions to tools like Answer­base, and of course, reviews. This for­mat is cat­nip to bots because it eas­i­ly match­es what the users are ask­ing, in form or sen­ti­ment, so it gives the research tool a thread to follow.
• Author­i­ty web­sites. Hav­ing anoth­er brand with enough clout and top­ic author­i­ty say­ing nice things about you helps the assis­tant ver­i­fy and trust your brand name over oth­ers. This ranges from indus­try mag­a­zines to marketplaces.

Hal­lu­ci­nat­ing or not, deliv­er­ing truth is the essen­tial goal of any advanced AI chat­bot. Truth under­stood as:

A claim that is ver­i­fi­able, ground­ed in wide­ly accept­ed evi­dence, log­ic, or expert con­sen­sus, and framed in a way that acknowl­edges uncer­tain­ty when needed.

So your con­tent strat­e­gy needs to be ground­ed in a com­pelling sto­ry, a rec­og­niz­able brand, backed by respect­ed voic­es, and with enough infor­ma­tion for the tool to ver­i­fy and vet you in a split of a second.

The ATTRACT framework

Acronym alert! Our frame­work sets guide­lines to improve your dig­i­tal pres­ence and appeal to Gen AI, with the web­site at its core. These quick wins can get you rolling with­in three months.

A — Amplify

Get oth­ers talk­ing about you. PR, reviews, UGC, influ­encers. The bots are listening.

T — Truth

Share ver­i­fi­able, trust­wor­thy, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed infor­ma­tion. Make it easy to vet you in milliseconds.

T — Teamwork

Dis­trib­u­tors, part­ners, resellers — make them part of your con­tent and vis­i­bil­i­ty machine. Feed them qual­i­ty mar­ket­ing assets so they can dis­trib­ute them.

R — Reorder

Struc­ture your data right. Prod­uct feeds, schemas, meta­da­ta. Not par­tic­u­lar­ly sexy, but essential. 

A — Answer

Cre­ate clar­i­ty. FAQs, forums, sup­port, Q&A con­tent. Match the form and lan­guage of real searches. 

C — Code 

Tech­ni­cal SEO, struc­tured data, fast load­ing, API feeds. Robots need to read you before humans can choose you.

T — Trust Signals

Author­i­ty con­tent, tes­ti­mo­ni­als, sen­ti­ment. You need to be good — and look ver­i­fi­ably good.

Small improve­ments on each of these areas show out­stand­ing results for Gen­er­a­tive Engine Opti­miza­tion, with the addi­tion­al obvi­ous ben­e­fit that these are all great for stan­dard SEO, lead cre­ation, engage­ment and conversion. 

💡We help our cus­tomers achieve this with sim­ple, afford­able, month­ly plans. Con­sis­ten­cy goes a long way. 

A word for those of you on B2B

The days of hid­den prices, gat­ed cat­a­logs and lengthy approval process­es are gone. It’s a brave new world that demands rad­i­cal transparency.

Here’s where you can start:

1. Set ​“start­ing from” prices for non-reg­is­tered users. Give data to bots so they know quotes and dis­counts are avail­able for bulk purchases.
2. Feed default base prices to search engines.
3. Make it super easy for com­pa­nies to cre­ate an account, get approval, and start buying.
4. And have an opti­mized, easy check­out with enough options.

Sawubona

That’s a Zulu word that means ​“I see you, you’re impor­tant to me, and I val­ue you”. The response to it is ​“Shi­bo­ka”, or ​“I exist for you”. That’s damn powerful. 

This is business:

Acknowl­edg­ing, proud­ly shout­ing from the rooftops that we exist for our clients, and giv­ing them – and all our beau­ti­ful, scary new robots and dig­i­tal toys – every­thing they need to see us. Real­ly, real­ly see us.