Your SEO traffic is tanking. Google’s search results look less like search results and more like a shopping mall of ads, AI overviews, and Google’s own products. And your buyers? They’re asking ChatGPT and Claude for recommendations before they ever think about visiting your website.
According to Forrester, B2B buyers are adopting AI search at three times the rate of consumers.
If AI assistants are becoming the gatekeepers to the internet, how do you make sure they’re actually recommending your brand?
We recently sat down with Artem Kubatkin, Head Tuner at Attune, on our Best Story Wins podcast to figure that out. Attune is a data analytics platform that measures what AI assistants think about brands and how they recommend them. Kubatkin built the platform himself and now analyzes millions of data points on AI visibility, so he’s seeing exactly what works and what crashes and burns.
Here’s what he told us: there’s a clear framework for winning at AI visibility. But you need to understand the three fundamental pillars first.
3 Ways to Make AI Assistants Actually Recommend Your Brand
Most marketers are flying blind when it comes to AI visibility. They know it matters, but they don’t know where to focus. Kubatkin breaks it down into three pillars that give you somewhere to start.
1) Coverage: Have Enough Content for the Conversations That Matter
Here’s how AI assistants actually work. When someone asks ChatGPT a question, that question gets “fanned out” into dozens of sub-questions. For each one of those sub-questions, the AI performs a web search and reads the top results.
If you’re not in those results, you don’t exist.
“When you ask a question, it’s explicit into 20 different questions for each different question. It reads the first three, four, or five pages of Google search results, not just one page,” Kubatkin says.
This changes everything about traditional SEO. Being on page two used to mean you were invisible, as the overwhelming majority of clicks happened on page one. Now, AI assistants are reading far more deeply than any human would. The question isn’t whether you rank first. It’s whether you have content that covers all the topics where you need to show up.
Coverage isn’t about pumping out blog posts. It’s about being part of the conversation for every variation of questions your buyers might ask.
And if you’ve pivoted your business model or launched new features? AI might still be working with outdated information about what you do.
Audit your content against the actual questions your sales and customer support teams hear every day. Those questions are probably the same ones people are asking AI assistants.
2) Structure: Reverse Engineer How AI Wants to Answer
AI assistants follow patterns. They’re trained to answer questions in specific ways, looking for certain types of information in certain places.
Kubatkin worked with an e-commerce company selling cigars that discovered something crucial. Their product descriptions were written for humans browsing the website. But AI assistants were looking for completely different signals.
By understanding how AI wanted to structure answers about their products, they could reorganize content to be AI-friendly while also improving the experience for actual humans.
“It’s like a proxy to make better decisions,” Kubatkin says.
Structure isn’t just about adding schema markup (though that helps). It’s about understanding the mental model AI uses when synthesizing information and making sure your content aligns with it.
Want to better understand how AI search is looking for information? Try this out: Search for questions in your space using ChatGPT or Claude and look at how AI structures the answers.
- What information does it prioritize?
- What order does it present things in?
Review closely and you’ll find your blueprint for information hierarchy.
3) Authority: Kill the Mixed Signals About Your Brand
Authority works on two levels.
First, it’s about where you’re mentioned across the internet. Second, and more important, it’s about whether those mentions tell a consistent story about who you are and what you do.
“Make sure that there are no mixed signals about what you do,” Kubatkin says.
This is critical if you’ve pivoted or expanded what you offer. If you started as a project management tool but now you’re a full work management platform, does the internet know that? Or are there hundreds of articles, directory listings, and reviews still describing your old positioning?
AI assistants pull from all of those sources. If they’re getting conflicting information, they might not recommend you at all.
The easiest place to start? All those directories where you’re already listed. G2. Capterra. Industry-specific listings. Go clean them up. Make sure they tell the same story about what you do, who you serve, and what problems you solve.
Do a brand audit across the internet. Search for your company name and see what AI assistants are finding. If there’s misalignment, start fixing it systematically.
Easy Wins: The Channels Your Competitors Are Ignoring
Beyond the three pillars, there are some surprisingly underutilized channels that can dramatically improve your AI visibility. The best part? Your competitors probably aren’t using them yet.
YouTube Is a Goldmine
Google AI Overview results are increasingly featuring YouTube videos, especially for educational and how-to content.
“Guess who owns YouTube: Google,” Kubatkin says.
The key is creating videos with strong structure:
- good time codes
- clear topics
- breaking longer content into shorter, self-sustained clips
Tip: Each shorter clip should stand alone and answer a specific question.
This isn’t about going viral. It’s about creating content with high lifetime value that AI assistants can reference again and again.
Create Content That Gets Quoted
State of the industry reports, original research, thought leadership pieces—these have massive built-in network effects. When other sites quote your data or reference your insights, you’re building authority signals across the internet.
“Lifetime value of the long form content that you produce is gonna be there to stay,” Kubatkin says.
Compare that to the lifetime value of a spammy Reddit comment or a generic Medium article churned out by AI. There’s no contest.
The content that earns citations is content that’s genuinely new. Not AI-generated blog posts rehashing what everyone else has already said. Real insights from real data that your audience can’t get anywhere else.
Your First Step Into AI Visibility
If this all feels overwhelming, start simple.
You don’t need expensive tools or a massive content overhaul to begin.
Kubatkin’s advice? “Go into the field.” Pretend you’re a customer. Search for your brand in ChatGPT. See who you’re compared to. Figure out why competitors are mentioned more than you.
Then talk to your sales team. Ask them what questions prospects are asking. Ask if anyone has ever said something like, “Well, I read on ChatGPT that…”
“Did user learn something on ChatGPT that he wasn’t supposed to know and now we’re having issues in our sales funnel?” Kubatkin asks.
That’s a question every marketer should be investigating.
The opportunity window is still open, but it won’t last forever.
“The time to be tinkering and looking into it and learning is now,” Kubatkin says. “That sort of early entry bonus advantage might disappear real quickly.”
AI assistants are becoming the first stop for buyers researching solutions. Making sure they know about you—what you do, who you serve, what makes you different—isn’t optional anymore. It’s the foundation of being discoverable in the AI era.
Start with the three pillars. Clean up your coverage, fix your structure, and eliminate mixed signals. Then expand into the channels your competitors are ignoring.
The brands that move now will have a significant advantage over those who wait.
Want to hear the full conversation with Artem Kubatkin? Listen to his episode of Best Story Wins to get more insights on AI visibility, the future of search, and why authentic content beats AI slop every time. And if you’re looking for more ways to strengthen your content strategy in the AI era, check out our resources library for guides, templates, and expert insights to help you win.
Lastly, if you’re curious how this all might look in practice, do get in touch.
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