When Ai compiles supplier tables, thin profiles get skipped. We all need to publish more comprehensive data than our competitors.
Here’s an interesting scenario resulting from Ai tools being used for product sourcing. What if they just ignore suppliers who don’t provide them with enough information? Remember, Ai systems are designed to be helpful, clear and confident. If they’re uncertain about something, we laugh that they might make things up, but in reality, I think they’re more likely to ignore it.
So here’s how it might pan out. A potential buyer asks an Ai system for a list of suppliers of a particular product or service, and to compare what they’re offering. Like it or not, people are already doing this, and to be fair, the Ai systems provide some pretty good answers. Try it, if you’re not frequently doing so already.
Now, supposing the Ai system decides to tabulate the suppliers it can find with details on product performance, price, warranties, reputation, company size, location, etc. What happens if it can’t find or deduce much of that information for a particular supplier? Is it likely to include the supplier in its table of results? I suspect that it might not.
We need to find out why (not)
It’s impossible to generalise on advice here, other than to say that we all need to spend time putting ourselves in the position of buyers and interrogating the Ai search tools with a series of possible queries. In a way, this is no different from trying to second-guess keywords for traditional SEO.
When we’re not in the list of suppliers provided, we need to ask the Ai tool why not. Have we simply not been ‘found’? Or can they just not find enough information about us? Don’t forget, the Ai tools will be as ‘confident’ as they are in any other circumstances, returning an apologetic answer for not providing what think we wanted to read. It’d be a mistake to think ‘sorry’ means it’s just learned something.
Perhaps most importantly, we need to look at the information the Ai tools found on our competitors. If that’s more comprehensive than the data it could find on us, we need to determine why that was the case. Knowing this could mean the difference between being included on lists or not.
Oh, and ChatGPT is nearing 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March and four times higher than a year ago.