Brands Now Court Chatbots, Not Just Customers

Chatbots Are the New Influencers Brands Must Woo

Marketers used to fight for position on search and social. Now there's a new gatekeeper: the chatbots customers ask before they ever visit your site.

In late 2024, Stacy Simpson, CMO of Athenahealth, asked popular A.I. chatbots about her company. The answers were incomplete, outdated, and pulled from dusty software blogs. That moment made the shift clear: we have to market to A.I., not just people.

As one founder put it, "There is a new influencer you need to reach, and it's this A.I. model," said Brian Stempeck of Evertune.

Why this matters right now

• More buying journeys start with a question to a chatbot. If you're not named, you're invisible.
• Models favor clear, consistent, and well-cited information. Messy brand signals get ignored.
• Digital spend keeps shifting with each format change. According to eMarketer, U.S. digital ad spend hit hundreds of billions last year-budget pressure is real, and waste stands out.

How A.I. decides what to say about your brand

• High-authority sources: Reputable media, standards bodies, and knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia/Wikidata) tend to carry more weight.
• Structured data: Clear product and organization markup (e.g., schema.org) helps models extract facts without guesswork.
• Third-party profiles: Directories, reviews (G2, Capterra), analyst reports, and docs often become the "source of truth."
• Freshness + consistency: Conflicting claims and stale pages lead to omissions or safe, generic recommendations.

The marketer's playbook to win the bots

• Run an LLM visibility audit: Ask top chatbots how they'd solve key use cases in your category. Track if you're mentioned, what claims appear, and which sources they cite.
• Define your entity clearly: Publish a definitive "About" page with who you serve, core products, categories, and comparisons. Add Organization and Product markup and consistent "sameAs" links to major profiles.
• Create factual, skimmable content: Use precise headlines, short paragraphs, bullet lists, and clear answers to "who/what/why/how much." Avoid hype; include evidence.
• Publish canonical product facts: Pricing ranges, integrations, SLAs, security standards, certifications, and implementation timelines. Keep it current.
• Own your category language: Define terms, acronyms, and use cases. Add FAQs that mirror the questions buyers ask chatbots.
• Strengthen third-party signals: Keep G2/Capterra/Gartner Peer Insights up to date. Align categories, competitors, and product names.
• Upgrade developer and help docs: Clear docs and release notes are catnip for models. Add changelogs and last-updated dates.
• Contribute to trusted knowledge bases: If your company is notable, ensure accurate entries (and citations) on Wikipedia/Wikidata. Follow their rules.
• Use structured data everywhere it helps: Product, FAQ, HowTo, Event, and Organization markup. Keep it valid and consistent with on-page text.
• Back claims with citations: Customer stats, benchmarks, and case studies with named sources. Models prefer verifiable facts.
• Refresh cadence: Quarterly content and profile reviews. Update dates, docs, and key pages so "freshness" signals are obvious.
• Ethics first: Don't stuff the web with spun content or fake listings. Accuracy wins over time-and bad signals can stick.

Measurement: prove you're earning mention

• LLM share of voice: Percentage of prompts where your brand is mentioned across key use cases.
• Accuracy score: Rate correctness of product facts (features, pricing, integrations) across models.
• Source quality: Track citations used by models. Improve the mix toward authoritative, up-to-date pages you influence.
• Time-to-update: Days between a site change and when models reflect it in answers.
• Downstream lift: Growth in matched "brand + use case" queries, demo requests referencing comparisons, and review-site profile impressions.

Team and process

• Owner: Assign an "AI Knowledge" lead across SEO, content, PR, and product marketing.
• Monthly LLM audit: Standardize prompts, log results, and prioritize fixes. Treat it like technical SEO-ongoing, not one-and-done.
• PR alignment: Land concise, fact-rich coverage in reputable outlets. Keep messaging consistent with your site and profiles.
• Release hygiene: For every launch: update docs, schema, FAQs, pricing, and third-party listings the same week.

Your first 30 days

• List your top 10 buyer questions. Ask 3-5 leading chatbots each question. Record mentions, facts, and sources.
• Fix the "source of truth": About, product pages, FAQs, pricing, security-tighten language, add citations, and validate schema.
• Update third-party profiles and ensure categories and competitors match what buyers actually compare.
• Publish or refresh one definitive comparison and one implementation guide-neutral tone, verifiable claims.
• Set a quarterly refresh calendar. Assign page owners and a single change log.

The big idea

You're no longer selling only to people. You're briefing the systems that brief your buyers. Make your story easy to find, easy to trust, and easy to repeat.

Want deeper, hands-on tactics? Explore AI for Marketing and practical Prompt Engineering approaches to influence chatbot outputs with clarity and proof.