What does AI believe, say, recommend about your brand and business?

What happens when agentic AI steps in as the authoritative source of information and credible recommendations about brands, products, claims, technology, formulations, ingredient sourcing and emerging health/wellness issues – bypassing any need to visit your website at the start of an exploratory journey? Think for a moment about the implications of a super well-informed digital advisor making trusted recommendations to consumers based on its own assessment of your brand and product strengths vs. competitive choices. We’re standing at the edge of nothing less than a transformative shift in how people and trade partners get information, find solutions and make decisions.

To succeed in the era of LLMs, brands must now optimize for AI agents—not just customers.

• More than 50% of Internet traffic is now populated by non-humans — AI crawlers operating out of sight on a subterranean highway of digital data collection, scouring every available channel to train and inform LLMs so they can be instantly summoned to dispense informed recommendations.
• Unlike any previous technology generation such as Google search, AI speaks to its users in an authoritative, empathetic voice while supplying answers and a point of view. Yes, this is a machine, but we say it again — with solutions and recommendations — from a source that isn’t your brand saying it. A smart source that over time will get more and more familiar with customer needs, aspirations and desires. It never forgets, never sleeps and remembers every detail about preferences, concerns and prior conversations.

Will consumers and trade partners make decisions, form impressions based on what they read or hear from an AI guide? Likely. Could this become reflexive and embedded behavior? Yes.

Managing agentic AI in the battle for trust and influence

What does AI know and believe about your brand and product line?

Your company?

Your technology expertise?

What will it say about your formulations and claims?

What will it recommend?

Is the narrative accurate?

Is your brand story presented in the best light possible?

What portion of your key messaging came through?

What’s missing?

Will your customers trust this on-tap source and rely on it?

This is not a phase, a passing fad or a novelty. It is business infrastructure, and it’s about to change everything including your strategy, marketing and comms game plan.

Over the past 30 years, the phrase “Google it” emerged with the revolutionary idea that any answer was just a web inquiry away. Over the past few years we’re also hearing, “Ask your AI.” Google search links still require effort and time to investigate, collect, digest and assess.

This week I requested AI help to find a hotel near the University campus where my daughter will attend this fall as we prepared to join her freshman orientation. In seconds I got a list of options, then a filter of those choices based on AI’s assessment of the best deal, location and quality plus an offer to assist with booking. Follow-up questions for clarity were answered in seconds with refinements. The process was easy, painless, quick, convenient and presented in an authoritative and helpful voice.

• I went with it. Done and done. For a travel and hospitality brand, or any other business really, you have to be concerned about the presence of a machine that doesn’t behave like a machine gaining a recurring trusted role as arbiter and sage of risk-free choice.

All of this potentially happens without anyone first visiting your web site or social channels. This begs the question of how to control and enable your brand narrative — when an unseen army of AI bots are hoovering everything available, good or bad, right or wrong to formulate its own assessment of your brand and business from what it collects.

An AI mandated moment of truth

The AI agent era flips the script—you don’t search for information – that information comes to you through an intelligent liaison that knows what stakeholders want.

We’ve reported previously on the pervasive levels of uncertainty and anxiety consumers are facing right now. What do they want above all? The return of certainty and a sense of control. Can agentic AI offer a resurgence of perceived control? It’s quite possible that this pipeline from mountains of aggregated data digested and served up in conversational recommendation form could become a trusted partner — when everything else often appears to be self-serving, biased and often requires burning mental calories to unearth and evaluate.

New platforms designed to monitor, gain intel and help inform LLM crawlers

If you want to know the details of what LLMs believe about your brand, new tools have emerged to help bring detailed understanding of what AI agents think they know about your business. From there you’re in a better position to design content that is AI crawler friendly. This will help assure your brand, claims and formulation story is coming across correctly, supplemented with monitoring to see how that plays out in real time.

Out of fear of losing control over brand IP, some businesses may be tempted to erect digital barriers to bot crawling access. However, that also risks ceding future control and diluting the ability to manage a conversation that’s gaining increasing traction among consumers who are going to get more and more comfortable with seeking out AI sponsored advice.

Better to manage this than leave it alone and hope your brand is properly presented, recommended and the story being told is accurate and complete.

With that in mind, LLM engines prioritize the following brand content characteristics:

• Language. LLMs like to navigate rich, conversational text such as blog posts and newsletters, more so than webinars or embedded images.
• Agentic-optimized structure. Prioritized lists, definitions, and guides make it easier for LLMs to synthesize and summarize information.
• Clean, scrapable web sites. Accurate, fully indexed web sites are better than keyword optimization or navigating older legacy pages designed to elevate site authority.
• Third-party earned authority. Outside publications, external media and expert commentary can help confirm, verify and validate your brand story and value proposition.
• Deep customer conversations away from your site. The presence of external reviews and forums generates authoritative mentions, backlinks, and credibility.

Elevating importance of earned (editorial) media to credibility and trust

Whatever your brand states and claims remains an assertion – of what you want people to believe about your brand, business standards, unique strengths and added value. Running alongside the advice of agentic AI, and also a part of its assessment structure, is the increasing importance of third-party credible endorsement.

Journalism and reporting are third party evaluation of what you claim from a respected source. Earned media will play an increasingly important role in the agentic eco-system, operating in two directions as an added authority in what LLMs process, and as an independent voice that validates and verifies what you want stakeholders to believe. PR has always been important resource for credible third-party evaluation. Now it has added gravitas in the system of informing LLMs and also providing a trusted resource consumers also look to for affirmation.

The one-two punch of LLM crawler optimization and earned media outreach forms a formidable strategic foundation for brand storytelling in the era of AI advisory.

Next gen strategies to manage an LLM informed future

LLMs can circumvent brands, cutting them out of directing the consideration process before they even know a consumer is investigating. Thus, why adapting current strategies to engage LLM crawlers can build a virtuous, holistic solution. Optimized web content, earned, and social media leads to better AI references, greater trust and engagement, and prioritization in LLM assessments.

Considerations on the AI crawler journey

It’s time to systematically evaluate how LLMs will impact customer consideration, and how that will change go-to-market strategies. Engaging with new AI crawler intel, analysis and impact tools can help build a fluid map of the customer buying journey alongside an AI-engaged buyer journey, and how brands will show up in AI-powered search engines. While LLMs and AI-powered search are constructed on similar inputs, they can produce radically different results and outcomes. An LLM scorecard can help your brand identify the areas of greatest need and inform the tools designed to secure the optimal brand story and recommendation.

Adapting your strategy to engage LLMs will create a virtuous eco-system: Strong internal, earned, and social content will lead to more AI references, greater trust and engagement, and further prioritization in LLM queries.

If you’re wondering how these developments will impact your business and what’s the best path to navigate an agentic AI informed future, use the link below to ask questions and start an informal conversation.

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Social responds to a world on fire…

When social media first arrived nearly 20 years ago (time flies doesn’t it!) following the birth of Facebook, it didn’t take that long for the vital channel to commercially evolve, monetize itself and become an extension of brand broadcast strategy via paid distribution. However, the world has changed and with it the ‘best practices’ approach to social channel strategy is recalibrating. Are you ready?

Here we will examine the evolution and provide guidance on how to embrace the reset of what social is intended to be and how your brand should plan within it.

Culture influences consumer behavior

Culture change is coming more rapidly than ever before and it’s having a profound impact on how brands behave in the marketplace. Because, as always, consumers hold sway while they mirror and appropriate cultural trends. For example, witness the rapid ascension of —

• Values-driven consumer behavior.
• Escalating conscious consumption.
• Alignment between people and brands on mission and beliefs.
• Growing role of brand higher purpose, empathy and deeper meaning.

Integrating culture with social strategy

It’s time to integrate culture trends within your social plans and strategies. That means your brand must work hard to understand, then embrace, and also consider how to lead cultural change.

Think for a moment about what’s going in around us right now. Did any of you observe the incredible Instagram reels of raging floods and devastating mudslides in southern California? Don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anything remotely horrific like that before in the SoCal area. It was truly alarming. Also symptomatic of what’s influencing culture shifts around us now, and it is having a profound impact on social media.

Here’s the culture influence impact gallery –

• Chaotic climate developments, news of same and extreme weather events.
• Elections that might appear to challenge the foundations of democracy.
• Looming concern of AI disruption on the horizon.
• Wars, more wars, attacks and terrorism on the rise.
• Pervasive feeling of lost control over our lives and the world around us.

The only thing that’s certain is growing uncertainty

• The key insight: Social communities are an anchor in the storm to help users navigate a world on fire around them. The shared interests, passions, attitudes of like-minded people all coalesce with those who seek common ground and to make sense of their lives.

Up to this point, social strategy was defined mainly by branded content and paid distribution of product-centric stories and promotions. It represented a co-mingling of branded content, community and media spend/traction imperatives.

Now with the influence of culture trends, brands need to build a more meaningful, relevant value exchange in return for consumer time and attention.

Move from brand first to audience first content and narratives

Social strategy is shifting to embrace authentic, lo-fi, real and more intimate content designed to both inform and entertain – and created intentionally for organic traction. It’s a de-emphasis on measuring reach and eyeballs in favor of qualitative assessments, shares and meaningful interaction. People want, maybe even need, to participate in communities of shared passions and fandom. It presages a rise in the importance of user generated content that will be unscripted, unpolished and also unpredictable.

Here are some tactical considerations to fold into your thinking:

Nano-moments and empathetic moves: A North Face outerwear user on a mountain expedition expressed a complaint on social media about their jacket underperforming in a critical setting. North Face leapt into action and managed to deliver a new replacement coat to the customer on a mountain top. Great social moment and expression of zealous customer care.

Rise of the creator economy: micro-influence from creators is redefining the social channel engagement plan. #booktok, #healthtok and #cleantok are all symptomatic of niche creator communities where innovation and brand collabs will become increasingly important. Coke recently invited creators to use AI inspired tools to share unique holiday themed images.

Video, video and more video: Did you know that 58.5% of time spent on social is spent consuming videos? We’re moving from ad cutdowns for social consumption to video intentionally designed to instruct, guide and coach in an “edutainment” format. As a natural extension of this development, longer form videos will gain favor like this lively, fun effort on behalf of Hilton Hotels.

The role of AI in social: AI is being deployed to automate and elevate community monitoring and in doing so to support social teams with intel on social behaviors, sentiment and social listening. AI will also be used to facilitate more customized content delivery and enable advanced content creation like Coke’s Real Magic image effort cited above.

LinkedIn and B-to-B outreach: LinkedIn has a grip on B-to-B social interaction. It is a great environment to showcase company culture and staff expertise. Nearly 75% of B-to-B companies already leverage CEOs, academics and doctors for content creation there. We expect employee engagement on the platform to grow, working to position staff as opinion leaders with insider knowledge.

Uncertainty in the world around us is changing the value proposition for social channels, with a call to level-up on community building. It offers a safe harbor at a time when people want to engage with others who share their specific passions. The essential strategic shift is from brand first, audience second thinking to the reverse of that point of view. Goes without saying that properly curated and fed, social channel value in the brand marketing playbook is growing while the content game plan targets relevance.

If this post gets you thinking about social strategy and you’d like to ask questions about your brand’s approach to optimizing your social community plans, use this link to share your thoughts and start an informal conversation.

Looking for more food for thought? Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report.