Maybe Being Found by AI Is a Customer Service Problem

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you’ll know that getting found by AI isn’t necessarily as simple as good SEO and a few Google reviews.

Or a GEO problem.

Or an AEO problem.

We’ve already created plenty of new acronyms for getting businesses found:

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation
GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation
AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation

And I’m sure there will be a few more.

AI assistants can search and bring together information from multiple sources incredibly quickly. That means what they know about your business may not just come from your website. It can come from what is being said about you elsewhere.

And that changes things.

We know that places like Reddit can be valuable sources of real people’s experiences and opinions. Reddit even has an agreement that gives Google access to its public posts and comments.

But you can’t simply turn up on Reddit and start telling everyone how wonderful your business is. Communities like Reddit tend to be pretty good at spotting businesses that are there purely to promote themselves.

That’s actually part of what makes these sources valuable.

They’re full of people talking about what they genuinely like, dislike, recommend and wouldn’t use again.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

How do I get my business mentioned on Reddit?

It’s:

How do I make my customers want to talk about my business?

This is where I think customer service becomes much more interesting.

If AI systems are looking across multiple sources to answer questions and make recommendations, then having a perfectly optimised website isn’t necessarily enough.

What are people saying about you elsewhere?

Are customers recommending you?

Are people discussing your products?

Do they mention you in forums, reviews, social media, articles and communities?

Does the same positive picture of your business appear in more than one place?

You can’t completely control those conversations. But you can influence the thing that causes them in the first place: the experience people have with your business.

For all the talk about AI changing marketing, the answer may turn out to be something remarkably old fashioned.

Make a good product.

Treat customers well.

Solve problems properly.

Be useful.

Give people an experience worth talking about.

Google itself has been talking for some time about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than content designed primarily to manipulate search rankings.

Its advice for appearing in generative AI search follows much the same principle. Create something genuinely useful for people rather than chasing the latest trick for getting into an AI answer.

Maybe we should start thinking about the rest of the business in the same way.

I’m sure marketing and PR agencies will sell plenty of solutions promising to improve “AI visibility”.

Some of them will probably be useful.

But there is a limit to what marketing can manufacture.

Ultimately, you need customers and fans who are happy enough with what you do that they talk about you without being asked. Those conversations then become part of the wider collection of information available about your business.

And that goes much deeper than marketing strategy or ad spend.

It comes down to the foundations of the business, how you treat people and whether you deliver what you promise.

Good customer service isn’t going to damage your SEO.

Creating a better product isn’t going to make your advertising less effective.

Having customers who genuinely recommend you isn’t going to hurt your brand.

You can carry on with the marketing you’re already doing. Good SEO still matters. Your website still matters. Reviews still matter.

But perhaps it’s also time to look underneath all of that.

If AI is increasingly piecing together its understanding of businesses from information spread across the web, then one of the best ways to influence what it finds may simply be to give people something positive to talk about.

Maybe being found by AI isn’t just a marketing problem after all. Maybe it’s a customer service problem too.

• Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Google Search Central: Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search
• Reddit: Reddit and Google expand partnership