How to Create an AI-Optimized Brand

Guest post by Ann Smarty.

AI platforms are changing organic findability channels, whether marketing pros want to believe it or not.

Yes, the fundamentals are there: You need to be relevant, earn authority (backlinks), and make sure your site is easily crawlable.

But the priorities are shifting.

Just a few years ago, becoming a brand (named entity) was also “a best practice,” but it was almost optional. You could create a niche site, find your long-tail queries with low “difficulty,” and quickly start getting search traffic.

This strategy is still pretty effective for organic search.

For LLM platforms, it’s completely different, especially if you want to be part of the answer, not just a URL they pull answers from. For LLM discoverability, you need to become a clear, relevant brand.

Everyone is talking about LLM traffic, but it shouldn’t be your business goal

First, let’s clear the most widespread misconception: Optimizing for AI (ChatGPT) traffic.

Decades of online marketing spoiled us: We got used to clicks.

Clicks are great: They are easy to attribute (and measure the effectiveness of any channel or tactic). But clicks have been going away for quite a few years now.

Ever since Google started introducing quick answers, featured snippets, “People Also Ask”, etc., the trend has been clear. Consumers are being used to getting answers to their questions right away, without necessarily clicking anywhere.

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and AI Mode are accelerating this habit: They give answers that eliminate the need for a click.

Optimizing for LLM traffic is understandable (this is an old habit that’s hard to crack) but it is no longer sufficient.

Your target customers won’t click! Multiple click-through studies of AI Mode have found the click-through to AI citations is between 0% and 5%.

Let me put this another way: Almost no one clicks AI citations for a simple reason: AI Answers are designed to give satisfying answers, so users simply move on or keep conversing with an AI agent.

Optimizing for being cited still makes sense (because citations may influence the answer), but simply being cited is a short-sighted strategy. Instead, your business or product needs to be an answer.

Creating an AI-friendly brand: Plan for the future

As consumers are trained to get good answers right away, without much research or clicking, the future is (unfortunately) about 0-click findability.

Let’s take a look at a quick example.

I prompted ChatGPT for “Best apps for productivity” and here’s the answer comparing all the known options:

Citations may have influenced the comparison and answer inclusion, but would you click any of these?

A more probable journey from here would be searching for those brand names to find some reviews and finally convert.

Start with a Unique Name and a Unique Product Positioning

If I had to start a new brand now, I’d focus on answering the two questions:

• Is my name unique for people and AI agents to be able to remember it?
• How is my brand unique?

Both of these are key to being recognized as a brand (although these are just first steps).

If you are just starting out, tools like Namify help you find a domain name that’s unique and creates topical associations right away. It also runs social media checks to find if you can lock your brand name across other channels.

This is one of the biggest changes in digital marketing strategies by the way.

For product positioning, ChatGPT can actually help. Ask it to compare your direct competitors and identify gaps.

Overall, you are the ultimate resource for defining your value proposition because you know your niche and your customers best.

Even existing businesses struggle with defining their unique differentiators, and yet, these should be the first step to auditing your AI visibility: What do you want to be known for?

This step is foundational to your entire marketing strategy. You must clearly define your unique brand value propisition by answering four key questions:

• Problem: What specific problem does your business solve?
• Audience: Who is your precise target audience?
• Differentiation: How do you solve that problem uniquely compared to competitors?
• Authority: Why are you the credible expert to solve it? (e.g., years of experience, specific credentials, proven track record).

Be specific. Avoid vague language. Your goal is to establish a clear, focused digital footprint that is easy for your audience to understand.

For instance, if your brand’s current reputation is too broad, you must refocus all your digital assets (website, social media, content) to emphasize your core specialty. This means highlighting your deep experience, specialized skills, and associations with other recognized entities in your specific field.

Make sure your digital footprint reflects your unique value proposition

Now that you know your unique brand differentiators, make sure you make them clear everywhere, in different forms and contexts:

• List them on your home page and possibly site footer
• Create an FAQ that highlights them (why your brand is a good fit for your specific audience and how you are solving specific problems)
• Emphasize them in your social media bios
• Align your content strategy around specific problems you are solving
• Talk about specific problems on your social media channels
• Audit your customer reviews and curate those that reflect your uniqueness constructively and in much detail. Create customer questionnaires to try and steer customer feedback in that direction. You need detailed user-generated feedback that emphasizes what is unique about your brand.
• Participate in online discussions that talk about the specifics you are looking for. Reddit is almost always a good choice because it has discussions about narrow problems in any niche. Just be very careful. Reddit marketing is tricky. You cannot be self-promotional there. The only way to win on Reddit is to be authentically useful.

No fluff. Clarity is key here. LLMs save resources. They skip what they cannot understand.

Ask AI platforms regularly what they know about your business and adjust your strategy accordingly. Keep an eye on AI citations across different LLMs. They may be influencing the answers and, more importantly, contributing to the training data.

LLMs rely on their training data to create answers and direct their searches. If your business is correctly positioned in the training data, it will be consistently included in answers to related prompts.

The fundamentals of organic findability – relevance, authority, and crawlability – are still key, but AI has re-prioritized them. Being a well-defined “brand” is no longer an option; it is the only way to get found.

As consumers get used to get quick answers, our marketing obsession with traffic becomes obsolete. Optimizing to be cited by LLMs is short-sighted. The only future-proof strategy is to build a brand so clear and well-defined that your business is the answer.

This begins with a precise definition of your unique value proposition (UVP). Once you have that, your task is to project it with clarity across your entire digital footprint. LLMs are built to skip ambiguity. To be found, you must be focused. To be the answer, you must be unmistakable.

Ann Smarty is the founder of Smarty Marketing, a boutique SEO agency based in New York, and Viral Content Bee, a social media promotion tool. Ann’s search engine optimization career began in 2010. She is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs, including Small Business Trends and Mashable.