Your Business Invisible to AI? Here’s How to Fix It.

Here’s a number you need to pay attention to, and that’s that almost 60% of Google searches are now ending without a single click to your website. For years we have been focused on getting that number one spot in Google, one of the top 10 rankings in Google, those blue links. But that game is changing right in front of our eyes, because of course now we’ve got AI Overviews, and tools like ChatGPT, and AI Mode coming from the US. It’s just been launched in the UK. This is becoming the first point of contact for your customers. So if your business isn’t visible to those type of tools, then effectively you will become more and more invisible as the time goes on.

Hey, look, if we haven’t met before, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to For The Daring Growth Seekers podcast, brought to you by Done By Nine. And this podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing in the AI era. And today we are talking about this single biggest shift in how customers are finding businesses. And honestly, I feel as though that we talk about this often on the podcast. And no, it’s not just another social media trend you should be trialling out, or a new ad format that you need to be aware of. This is literally about search itself, and how search itself is actually being replaced.

And the way that consumers and people, clients, are discovering and using these tools is changing rapidly. And we need to keep up. And I literally just presented a new variation of our workshop that’s been really popular lately. We presented this last week to a room of professional service businesses, and even sitting down with those businesses last week, it’s really clear that businesses and business leaders, they’re starting to catch on. They’re starting to see this change in how businesses are being discovered, and why focusing on things like your brand, your trust, your authority, it is getting more and more important by the day for your marketing strategy.

AI Overviews, as an example, they’re now appearing in over a third of all search results. And when they do, the click-through rates from a Google search with an AI Overview can drop by as much as 27%. And that’s data from, like, today and from the past few months as well. So this really isn’t a podcast around the prediction of what we’re seeing in the future. This is things that are happening, like, right now. So your customers are asking different questions, and AI is essentially starting to provide them the answers. But the main concern that we’re seeing in that room at that workshop last week is, are they actually mentioning your business?

And that was a key thing that we did. And a key thing I’d recommend you to do is actually start to audit your business now, and audit: how does ChatGPT and Google Gemini and all those different tools talk about your business right now? And are they actually recommending you and your product and service for the category and the niche that you’re actually trying to get customers or clients for? So in this episode, we’re going to try and get really clear, a really clear practical plan, where you’re going to learn some of those key factors that are actually influencing whether an AI is going to recommend you, and the steps you actually need to take to move from being invisible to being the trusted answer as well.

But the first thing I want you to know is, how do we make sure that we are going to get our business found on a tool like ChatGPT or Google Gemini? Because for a long time, the answer to that question was technical SEO, or technical search engine optimisation, and focusing on keywords, for example. And those things I still believe have a place, but we just have a new gatekeeper. And that is the AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and all those type of tools. They are looking for just something slightly different.

So we’re going to start with the most important finding that I have seen most recently. And that is, some recent research examined the factors that most correlate with a brand appearing in an AI-generated answer. And it wasn’t about having the most pages on your website, or jamming in the most keywords on your landing pages. Those are all kind of old-school techniques.

The three key factors that keep getting mentioned, that I recommend that you focus on, is thinking about your branded web mentions. How often is your brand actually mentioned on other sites? And this is a core marketing function that we’ve been focusing on, not only just with SEO and what they used to call link building, but also just in marketing in general. It’s about how do you get your brand mentioned as many times as possible, and in many different places as possible.

The second key factor, the branded anchors. How often are other sites linking back to you, or using and talking about your brand name? And again, this is a massive thing that we’ve been trying to do in marketing for a long time, is getting people to talk about us. And that is a key thing that we need to be focusing on. And that third key factor that keeps coming up is thinking about the branded search volume. Trying to get as many people searching for your brand directly, just to show that you’ve got the search volume of people who are trying to find and work with you as a brand.

Then there was this other study that showed, and this is really interesting as well, that less than 25% of AI citations are actually coming from your brand’s own website. So as much as we think that AI is searching your entire site, and learning all about you and your site, and presenting your website’s information back into a ChatGPT-like model, less than 25% of AI citations are actually coming through from your brand’s website. And what this is telling us is that AI is actually learning about you and your brand from what other people are saying about you. This goes back to your reputation, your authority, your brand equity. They are becoming your most valuable marketing assets.

So we need to be thinking about how can we build up you and your brand. I think branding is becoming more and more important in this day and age. And trying to build up a reputable brand that doesn’t rely on you having to have a heap of blogs or content on your website that is keyword-stuffed to the hilt. It’s more around your brand, and how people are talking about and referencing you. So while the landscape is changing, the way forward is, honestly, I think, about strengthening some of the foundations. So I’m going to break this down into three key areas for us to focus on today. Three key kind of foundational pillars, let’s say.

The first foundation is essentially getting your house in order. So before we can actually build a brand authority, we have to make it easy for AI crawlers to even find or understand information about our businesses. And this is the background work that, again, in marketing has always been really important, especially with search engine optimisation. But now it is becoming absolutely critical.

And these are the things that I’d be getting you to think about first and foremost. Firstly, your structured data, or what we’d call your schema markup. Now, I don’t want to go too heavy on the jargon on this, but this is essentially the code you add to your website to plainly tell search engines what your content’s about. Things like your business hours, your address, your product prices. And it’s removing a lot of the guesswork for the AI tools. So that’s that first one: schema markup, structured data. If you don’t know what it is, I’d get someone who does know how to be able to cut through that jargon for you, and be able to actually build out what you actually need in that place.

Secondly, readability, clarity as well. So thinking about, is your website content concise? Is it free from a ton of industry jargon? Because essentially, AI is prioritising clear, simple language that is directly answering a question. That third one, thinking about basic accessibility and speed, is the big one. Can AI crawlers search your website? Can they navigate your website properly? And is it loading fast? Because slow sites are getting pushed down the list, is what the data is telling us.

And finally, this all comes back to something that Google has been telling us as an answer for years and years and years, and that is Google’s E-E-A-T principles. The EAT principles: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And again, these are not just little buzzwords that Google have just come out with. These have been the baseline for getting visibility for a long time. But again, they’re getting more and more important. Going back to what I said before: brand, building your brand, building a website that really showcases that brand and who you are, and that trust and that authoritativeness, that is the key moving forward.

So, pillar number two, foundation number two: creating answer-ready content across your website as well. And this section is more about formatting your content so that AI can easily just grab little sections and use it as a snippet and an answer. Just going back to what we said before, remember, listen, 25% of the citations are actually coming from your website. But for those 25%, we’ve got to make sure that they’re actually grabbing the right information from your website.

So what I would be getting you to think about here is, think about how people are using ChatGPT. They’re asking a question, for example, and then ChatGPT or Gemini is giving them a direct answer. It doesn’t show the 10 blue links that we sort through, and then decide, oh, which website do we want to go have a look at and take a punt on whether it’s going to answer my question. So instead, your goal is to make your content the perfect source for that very direct answer.

And this means creating content in formats like the traditional FAQ pages that directly address real questions that your customers are asking you day in and day out. Thinking about how-to guides, step-by-step instructions, trying to actually really lay out that content step by step, so that it’s easy for AI tools to be able to pick up and use. And then using short, concise paragraphs that are easy for an AI to lift and to quote and to add to the answers as well.

But the key here is to maintain that factual precision. You can use AI as a tool to help draft all these different sections that we’re talking about here. But I’d always recommend that a human is always going to have to be the one to be able to review for your nuance, review for making sure it’s actually your brand and your brand voice that is owning this content, and also for accuracy as well. So it’s going to be, obviously, factual precision, but making sure that there is that human touch on top of it as well. Because your perspective is what makes the content worth reading in the first place.

And the third pillar and the third foundation is the trusted visibility. And this brings us to what I think is the most important part of what I want to get across in today’s podcast. And that’s the one that’s connecting us back to those top three factors, which is brand mentions. This is about actively building your brand’s authority outside of just your own website. Now, again, your website is massively important for building out your brand and having its home on the web. But we need to get people getting to that website, and we need to be able to drive a lot of brand mentions, and a lot of people talking about you and your brand, and what a fantastic product or service you have, or all that you do.

Because AI models, they build a perception of your brand from lots of different places: customer reviews, industry articles, forum discussions, different reports there as well. This is an interesting thing you can try: if you do use a paid version of ChatGPT or Gemini or any of those tools, try the reasoning search. So it’s usually, like, ChatGPT, it’s the o3 model, for example. So choose one that has like a pro or reasoning to it.

Now, the reason I say that is you can then put a question into that reasoning model, and it’s literally going to give you every single step that it went through, every single search it looked at, websites it looked at, review sites that it went to, and you’re actually going to get a really good idea about how it is actually getting the right information to be able to give you a proper answer. It may take you a little bit longer to get that answer using a reasoning model like ChatGPT o3, but it’s going to give you a lot of knowledge as well about what it’s actually looking for.

So how do we actually manage this trusted visibility pillar? The first thing is, I do think you need to go back to your basics. And it’s funny, again, we’ve been talking about a Google My Business profile for years and years, but now it’s actually becoming more and more critical from what we’re seeing, especially if you’re a business focusing on local queries. It’s about making sure you’re keeping it updated, you’re actively encouraging customer reviews more often, because those reviews are getting really powerful, and it’s a real powerful independent signal of trust. So it’s not just your website with your wonderful case studies and things like that; you’re actually getting an outside point of view as well, via the Google reviews.

Then, thinking about getting your brand mentioned on other websites that are reputable. This could be through things like guest articles. Yeah, we’ve been doing that for ages, but it’s now time to step up the mark: maybe getting a feature in an industry publication, maybe getting interviewed on a podcast, like on this. It’s about showing up where your expertise is actually valued.

And that’s, I guess, the other big key thing: focusing on that niche, focusing on that person, that persona that you are trying to reach. Become that go-to choice for that specific target audience. So you don’t just want to be plastered everywhere where your audience is not. Because remember, first-party data is getting more and more important, and personalisation is getting more and more important as these AI tools develop and grow. So we’ve got to make sure that your product and service is really clear on the type of person that you can help.

So when you’re seen as an expert in that defined area, you’re then more likely to be mentioned and cited as the authority in that area as well. And this, again, is not about going out and chasing heaps of hundreds of low-quality backlinks and stuff like that. It’s more about earning genuine mentions on sites that your potential customers are actually trusting, and that they’re actually reading in the first place as well. Not just going to some random website asking them to talk about you.

So at this point, those are the three foundations. But even then, you might be thinking, this is a lot. Do I actually need a different strategy for Google? Do I need one for ChatGPT? Do I need a whole other one for Bing, for example, as well? And the answer there is, from what we’re seeing, not really. There was a research paper I read from Semrush, and they showed that there actually is a big overlap.

So for Google’s AI Overviews, as an example, if you are already showing in the top 10 of organic results, you do have an 86% chance of being cited in that Google AI Overview. So it still heavily relies on Google’s existing index. ChatGPT, though, if we think about them, they have less of an overlap with Google. They’re aligning more with Bing search results. So there is that kind of little bit in there as well, about checking to see how you are actually ranking in search engines like Bing. But the point here is that a strong organic presence is still your ticket, still your ticket to the game, essentially.

So those fundamentals that we’ve gone over already, things like your good technical setup, your real clear content across your site and across your social media, things like that, and building that real strong brand authority, that is going to lift your performance across all different platforms. So the work that you do to appear in AI Overviews is also going to essentially help you get more likely found in tools like ChatGPT.

But remember, the other big key thing there is that if we all sit in a room and everyone Googles, using Google AI Mode or ChatGPT, this same query, everyone’s likely to get different responses based on their data, based on previous search history, all those different things as well. So again, we need to focus on that audience, we need to focus on who they are, and that real niche, and that problem, that product that you solve, or that desire that you fill.

So the actions you need to take, I think, are pretty clear. And it’s not just about suddenly frantically trying to optimise for a dozen different AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and all those type of things. It’s more about how do we focus on what’s always mattered in marketing, but just trying to flip the switch in terms of this new context.

So your next step is, don’t try to do everything at once that we’ve just discussed. I would suggest starting with that first pillar, that first foundation that we spoke about: get the house in order, get those foundations in order. Ask your marketing person, or get a marketing team like ourselves, to do that audit on your site’s structured data. Have a look at things like your page speed. Even if it’s crawlable: is Google search or ChatGPT even able to crawl your site? This is the first foundation you need to look at.

Then you can move on to pillar two, that second foundation: reviewing your content across your site. Again, this is a big job. It’s not something you’re just going to go through and wipe out your entire site. This is something you need to make small progressive changes to over time. Look at the most important service pages that you have on the page. Can you add different ways of answering simple FAQs, adding new FAQ sections in there at all, that are going to answer the most common queries that your customers are asking? And that is a straightforward way to add a bit of value on your website as well.

And then finally, go back to that third foundation, the third pillar there, which is your big long-term goal. And there’s no silver bullet with this, but it’s about building that brand authority. Maybe sit down and brainstorm even just one or two authoritative websites in your industry right now where a mention of your brand would actually be really valuable. Then start thinking about how you can actually make that happen, building those relationships with those people. But it really is about trying to be seen and talked about on some of those authoritative websites.

And like I say, this is a long-term goal. There is no quick answer to building brand authority. This is marketing. And this is what the end result that you need to be focusing on is: doing deals and meeting with people, and trying to actually be seen as the authoritative figure in your niche, for your personas, across the industry. Go back to those E-E-A-T principles that we had. And like I say, there is no silver bullet with anything that we’re talking about here. It’s how do you build this long-term playbook that you can just refer to, and build on and evolve over time as well.

And if you do need help working through this, building a strategy, that’s, of course, what we do here at Done By Nine. A couple of ways we can work with you. You can either join one of our workshops, or you can obviously get in touch with us and we can start with one of those brand audits that we spoke about. Or you can just use all the resources that we share online every week. We’re sharing new podcasts each week with different ideas about how you can navigate this AI era.

Because literally, the idea of just Googling it, that is just evolving. The way that people search and discover your product, your service, your business is changing. People are literally having conversations with AI to find solutions, whether that’s literally typing in their keyboard or just picking up their phone and talking to these tools. And this is where we’re starting to see where buying decisions are being made.

And as I’ve tried to explain in this podcast, there is no temporary hack for the algorithm in terms of this. You need to be thinking about the long game: building a trusted brand, create genuinely helpful content, both in your social media or your website, and make it easy for both people and AI to be able to see you and your business as the clear, authoritative choice. Because that new way of finding businesses, that is already here. But the only question we’ve got right now is whether you’re ready to be found.