You’ve spent years learning how to market to people. But what happens when the gatekeepers to your prospects aren’t people at all?
That’s the reality now. More often than not, AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are the first place people go for research, vendor selection, and buying recommendations. And AI doesn't care how pretty your website looks. It cares how structured, scannable, and machine-readable your content is.
If your digital content isn't structured for AI, it might as well not exist.
When we talk about optimizing for AI, it’s not just about tweaking your website. AI tools don’t draw a line between your homepage and everything else you’ve published. If it’s online, public, and has your name on it, it’s part of the picture AI builds about your brand.
Your “owned” content is now so much more than just your website. It’s also your:
If it’s publicly accessible and has your name on it, AI can—and will—crawl it. That’s a good thing if you’re being intentional. It’s a liability if you’re not.
To get a clear picture about what AI understands about your brand, start by reviewing what’s online about you. Then make sure it reflects what you want AI to learn and repeat about your business.
If you’ve got outdated, off-brand, or low-quality content sitting around, retire it. AI doesn’t forget. Don’t let it associate your brand with things you wouldn’t say today.
Then start expanding your footprint:
The goal? Show up wherever your buyers (and their bots) are looking.
Want to dive deeper into what AI says about your company—or your competitors? Run a deep research prompt on Gemini, Perplexity, or ChatGPT as if you’re your own ideal customer.
Skip the auto-generated summaries. Dive into the sources. That’s where the real opportunities (and red flags) live. Here is where you can help identify what content needs retiring, and what messages are sorely missing.
AI reads structure like humans read tone. If your content is just styled to “look” like a heading instead of using proper H1s and H2s, AI may not register it correctly.
Use semantic HTML wherever possible:
Also: add “knowledge blocks” to every page—snippets that clearly state who you are, what you do, and why it matters. These should live in the main body, not just the footer or sidebar. You’re feeding the AI the good stuff, so don’t hide it.
On platforms like YouTube and Substack, you must manually enable third-party AI scraping.
If you don’t, models from Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, and others can’t ingest your content—which means you won’t appear in their answers or recommendations.
This one setting can determine whether you’re findable or forgotten.
You’ve optimized for humans—now it’s time to optimize for the AI tools they use every single day. This isn’t about gaming the system—it’s about creating clear, structured, and consistently discoverable content that AI can understand and surface.
Build a presence AI can’t ignore. Download the ebook and get started.