A better question than ‘How do we rank in Ai Search?’

Most businesses are asking how they rank in Ai Search. But as we’ve covered several times recently, a more useful question asks if a potential customer using Ai Search subsequently tried to work out whether we are one of the best businesses in our market, what questions would they ask – and what evidence would they find?

That’s a much more interesting exercise, and a message which probably merits repeating. It’s one of those changes in marketing thinking which sounds obvious once it’s pointed out, but is easy to ignore.

A serious B2B buyer will not simply ask an Ai system “Who’s the best supplier?” and immediately place an order with the first company named. More likely, Ai Search will help them draw up a shortlist, understand the market, identify possible suppliers and work out what questions they ought to be asking.

Then the investigation begins. How long has this company been around? Who does it already work with? Does it genuinely work in my industry? Who are the people behind the business?

This is where the obsession with “ranking in Ai” can become a distraction. We might manage to engineer enough mentions to appear in an initial answer, but if the evidence behind us is thin, we’ve only tackled the first few seconds of the buying process.

In some ways, this is reassuring. The latest marketing challenge isn’t necessarily to discover some mysterious new optimisation technique – it’s to make sure that the web contains plenty of credible evidence that we’re as good as we say we are. And we should be able to provide that evidence.

So yes, pay attention to whether Ai Search knows who we are. But a more productive exercise is to pretend we’re a skeptical buyer, ask every awkward question we can think of, and see what the whole internet, including our website, has available to answer it.

Further reading: Google isn’t dying…. I don’t think! But the customer journey is fragmenting faster than most businesses realise by Ged Leigh on LinkedIn