Be the answer, not a link
1st September
Brand Positioning
Something has changed in how a brand gets found, and most businesses have not yet priced it in.
When a buyer, whether a consumer or a board, meets a category through an AI engine, they are handed two or three named options rather than a page of ten. The machine synthesises one answer, and the brand is either inside the recommendation or absent from the decision, with nothing in between. This is the gap in its newest form, and it is widening quietly while budgets still point at the old map.
The evidence is now concrete.
Semrush's expanded 2026 AI Visibility Index, built on 126 million US AI search prompts from January to April across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, found that of more than 1,200 brands tracked across 22 verticals, only 36 appeared in the top 100 most mentioned on every platform in every month. More telling still, 45% of marketing leaders admit they cannot accurately measure how they show up in AI answers, and only 9% hold the tools to track it (Semrush). A brand cannot manage what it cannot see, and right now most cannot see this at all. The reflex is to treat this as a technical problem, a matter of feeds and schema. It is not, or not only. An AI engine repeats what is clear, structured and credible, which means visibility now rests on brand and proof working together rather than either alone. The appetite for that clarity shows up in the negative too, with Optimizely finding that 75% of UK consumers regularly receive marketing they consider irrelevant, which is a positioning failure long before it is a production one (IT Brief). You are giving the machine, and the person behind it, something worth repeating.
For investors.
Presence in AI answers is becoming a diligence question about future demand. A portfolio company that is legible to these engines holds a defensible line into the buyer that a competitor cannot see, and one that is invisible to them is carrying a demand risk that will not appear in this year's numbers but will surface in next year's. It is controllable, it is measurable once you build the measurement, and it is accretive to the multiple because it protects the top of the funnel that everything else depends on.
For founders.
This is the difference between being found and being overlooked at the exact moment someone is choosing. You have built something real, but if the engine that now mediates discovery cannot understand it clearly, it will name someone else. The work is to sharpen what you stand for until it is quotable, then give the machines the structured proof that lets them repeat it with confidence. Do that and you are present in the decision rather than hoping to be found after it.
