Gaining Visibility In The AI Search Era

While the vast majority of online shoppers have used AI in some way to help with purchases, there’s still a large trust gap. More than two-thirds don’t trust AI agents to buy things on their behalf, according to a new study from Horizon Media shared exclusively with Forbes. These customers aren’t confident that AI agents will be acting in their best interests, and if there’s a negative reaction to an automated purchase—which the study found happens about 40% of the time—then it is a direct hit to long-term loyalty of more than 27% of your customer base.

While this is a large segment of loyal customers, it’s no reason for brands to completely stay away from agentic e-commerce. Horizon found most customers want AI agents to provide research assistance and recommendations, but only 12% currently want fully automated product selections and purchases. Customers also tend to be more open to AI-powered selection and purchases for lower-stakes items—groceries, household CPGs and over-the-counter medications—but they prefer research assistance for larger ones like vehicles, vacations and home renovations.

Brands should concentrate their AI efforts on research assistance, but also carefully pilot automation. After all, consumer trust and expectations change as time goes on—and the foundation of that trust can be built through a trustworthy recommendation engine.

Legal Matters

Outdoor retailer Patagonia is embroiled in a made-for-social-media trademark battle that it really doesn’t want to be a part of. In January, the company sued climate activist drag queen Pattie Gonia over a breach of a previous agreement not to sell merchandise under the Pattie Gonia name. This week, the brand posted on Instagram that it really wants to settle the case, and that Pattie Gonia just needs to withdraw trademark applications, stop using the Patagonia logo, and stop selling and promoting merchandise as Pattie Gonia. Patagonia said the company agrees with Pattie Gonia’s message and advocacy, and is just protecting its trademark.

Pattie Gonia has so far refused to settle, saying the company is trying to put a stop to brand partnerships that “pay for the education, activism and advocacy that me and my team do.” And the internet has come out in force for both sides: Pattie Gonia supporters accuse the brand of trying to “erase an activist,” while Patagonia’s supporters say the company needs to protect its brand, and some customers are already confused about whether Pattie Gonia is actually affiliated with the company.

On Message

How To Evolve Your SEO Strategy For AI

For nearly two decades, HubSpot has been a CRM platform known for managing online marketing, sales and customer service. The internet has changed a lot in that time—and AI search has shaken up many search optimization practices. I talked to HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar about some of the bigger changes marketers are working through. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

How is AI fundamentally changing search?

Bodnar: It’s essentially a Venn diagram. There’s parts that overlap and there’s parts that don’t. You have to have a clean, easy-to-crawl website that loads fast, that both people and agents can access. You need a good amount of content, but the way that content is organized and presented needs to change. How the AI search engines determine if you should be included in their answer is different than traditional Google search.

You have to be much more plain spoken and question oriented. If you go to our CRM product page, you’ll see a section: What is a CRM? It’ll be its own section, just a paragraph. If an LLM is doing research, it’s going to look at our definition of what a CRM is. Instead of long-scroll prose-based articles, you’re going to have chunked, plain problem-solution framed articles that the large language models can easily take bits and pieces of for an answer. Instead of a human reading the whole thing, you’re having a robot taking the parts of it that are relevant to a more diverse set of questions.

In the old Google search world of the 10 blue links, there was PageRank, largely focused on this notion of authority: Does this site seem [to have] higher credibility on this topic? The LLMs are looking more at consensus because they’re trained on the whole internet. What they’re looking for is: Are you showing up across a wide range of places? Are you essentially one of the most popular answers?

AI search is more immature than traditional Google search, and it’s much more of a consensus-driven approach. What consensus looks like is different [by the] channel. Reddit is a key source that ChatGPT pulls from. So if you’re not being proactive with your Reddit strategy, you’re not going to be that part of the consensus. Affiliate marketing and ratings and review sites are becoming cited a lot in these LLMs. YouTube or LinkedIn [are] very big reference source[s] for AI search as well. So search has become more multi-channel. The most simple way to think about this [is] instead of just content on your website and trying to get some backlinks, it is now: I have content on my website, different social platforms and advertising partners, and that cumulative set of content is going to affect how I’m going to show up.

How have the metrics changed for success in search?

Back in the day when I started doing marketing, [Google] passed all the data. It was very trackable. You knew who clicked in. Over time, that started to become more opaque, but it was still directional and you could approximate. Then Google would tell you, ‘You need to buy branded keywords; you’re getting this brand halo and awareness in addition to that traffic that you should care about, too.’

The volume of those two things have essentially flipped in the new AI search era, where you get way less clicks. When we talk about AI search, we use mentions and citations. You see a much higher percentage of mentions than citations.

You have to make sure you are leveraging that citation traffic as much as possible, because that is very high quality. The referral traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude will become a customer at 3x the rate of traditional Google search. Intuitively, it makes sense: If I’m having a 20-minute conversation about a company or about a product and coming to visit you, I’m very aware.

Tactically, we set up very specific conversion paths. We triage those leads differently for our sales team: Those are higher priority, faster time-to-work leads, because we know the close and the conversion is so much higher, and the deal cycle is much faster—about half as long.

The challenge is you’re getting less clicks than traditional Google search, so you have to look at your overall visibility. That’s a leading indicator of future citations you’re going to get, but more importantly, who’s being exposed to you? We search [transcripts of] our [customer service] call recordings and see as visibility goes up mentions of, ‘I was talking to ChatGPT and it told me HubSpot was the best CRM for my business.’

The reporting is not perfect from a revenue attribution [standpoint] yet, but it is correlative. It’s also the game of the future. I don’t think you have any choice but to play it. AI search metrics are much closer to classic brand visibility, awareness, sentiment metrics than traditional direct response metrics.

What advice would you give to a CMO trying to succeed in AI search?

• Understand where [you’re] at. There’s companies who’ve done a lot of historical SEO that actually gets them a nice step forward in AI search. Use a tool to get a sense of what your visibility is; [it] should give you some basic recommendations around where there is a deficit in terms of platforms, content you are missing, or technical things—like how bots can access your site.
• AI search means everything. It’s searching PDFs [and] videos. Companies have so much internal information, they [can] do a new audit: Is there a whole other path of information that I already have [and] might just need a little bit of polishing to be available for the AI search engine?

Comings + Goings

• Robotic-assisted surgery leader Intuitive promoted Taylor Patton to chief commercial and marketing officer, effective July 1. Patton will step into the role after working as the company’s global senior vice president of its endoluminal business, and he will succeed Henry Charlton.
• Cloud communications provider Sinch promoted Sophie Cheng to chief marketing officer. Cheng internally transitions to the role after leading the company’s global product marketing and revenue enablement organization, and she succeeds Jonathan Bean.
• Customer service software provider Zendesk appointed Tifenn Dano Kwan as chief marketing officer. Dano Kwan joins the company from Amplitude, where she worked in the same role, as well as Collibra and Dropbox prior to that.

Facts + Comments

Forbes published its inaugural Iconoclast 50 list this week, honoring some of the most influential people in business, finance, entertainment, media and technology. Honorees appear on at least one other Forbes list, and have made a meaningful impact on their industry in the last two years.

$2.5 trillion: Combined net worth of all 50 list members

10: Number of list members that are women

30: Age of the youngest honorees: Kalshi cofounders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour. The oldest is 95-year-old legendary former Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett

Strategies + Advice

Creators are important figures in marketing today—so much so that some companies are adding a chief creator officer to their C-suite. Find out more about this new role and what it means to brands.

AI has many uses in the workplace, but here’s an important one: demonstrating your leadership. Here are six things you can undertake with AI to underscore your leadership at your company.

Quiz

Last week, social media was filled with reactions and memes about all of the bands and artists dropping out of the “Great American State Fair” concert series in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Which of these acts has remained enthusiastic about the opportunity and did not drop out?

A. Vanilla Ice

B. The Commodores

C. Young MC

D. Martina McBride

See if you got it right here.