The fastest way to lose at AI visibility

Louder Than Words
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The fastest way to lose at AI visibility is to start with AI visibility.

Seriously.

I'm seeing this more and more as AI becomes harder for leaders of all types (not just marketing) to ignore.

Most conversations I have with teams are about skipping straight to tactics before the foundation is even built. They feel like they need to catch up.

  • More frequent posting
  • More prompts to "get cited"
  • A Reddit strategy bolted on overnight
  • "We need to be doing LinkedIn articles now!"

That missing foundation? It'll actually make it easier (not easy, easier) to earn citations and gain visibility in LLMs.

But we're skipping that part.

I recorded a video about this last week and the more I sat with it, the more I knew the topic needed more attention here.

So here we are. This is where I think the real work starts. Three things. Not tactics (yet). The foundation.

1. Clarity

Who exactly are you? What problem do you solve? Who do you solve it for? How?

This isn't just a positioning exercise. It's the thing that determines:

  • Your homepage/website copy
  • The content topics/angles you'll cover
  • The premise of your newsletter, podcast, or video series

The more narrow the focus, the easier it is for tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity to know who you are and cite you in a specific context.

This matters. You might know internally who your company is, but that doesn't mean you're showing up that way externally. (Website copy, your content, LinkedIn bios, offsite bios, etc.)

Kevin Indig recently analyzed 283,000+ ChatGPT citations across a thousand-plus categories. Brands get cited almost anywhere, even topics with nothing to do with their expertise. But getting cited isn't the same as getting recommended by name. That only happens 44% of the time in categories a brand has repeatedly shown up in.

LLMs don't read your mission statement. They read patterns across everything you've published across all mediums. How confident are you that what you've been presenting publicly in the way of content is easily understood by ChatGPT?

You might be clear on who you are and still be invisible to a model that's only ever seen your content scattered across ten different angles because you're targeting every keyword/prompt your audience might be searching for.

Vague answers don't get cited. There's nothing to pull from.

2. Consistency

Two kinds. Messaging, and medium.

Messaging. If I ask your salesperson what the company does, or the person running your booth at the event, or your content marketer. I'm willing to bet I'll get related answers, but not the same answer.

That's a problem. If you can't present yourselves consistently, LLMs can't either.

Medium. I deliberately have this conversation in almost every discovery call:

Me: Do you have a newsletter?
Them: Yes.
Me: Nice. How often do you publish?
Them: Twice a month.
Me: Good start. When did the last one go out?
Them: Six weeks ago....

Same story with the LinkedIn initiative that never quite got off the ground. (The internal SMEs that posted 3x and have fallen silent in the 3 weeks since.)

Or the YouTube series that was abandoned after 4 episodes.

The less consistent you are, the less material there is for an LLM to actually pull from.

This matters, too.

In March of this year, Semrush and LinkedIn analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in AI search. About 75% of the cited authors had posted five or more times in the previous four weeks. Occasional posters barely showed up at all.

Follower count barely mattered. Frequency did.

*One important caveat: Back to the previous point in section one, consistency without clarity is just noise on a schedule. Random acts of content without any consistency in messaging/positioning will still leave LLMs confused as to who you are. You need both.

3. Credibility

LLMs cite people disproportionately more than they cite companies.

Most teams I talk to understand intuitively that human connection matters when it comes to making a buying decision.

But then their newsletter goes out from "The [Company Name] Team."

The podcast clip gets posted from the company page instead of the person who said the smart thing on camera.

All wasted effort.

That same Semrush/LinkedIn study I referenced earlier backs this up directly: ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode cite individual creators 59% of the time, favoring people over company pages.

Every time we default to the brand account over the human, we're working against the exact signal LLMs seem to prioritize.

Build up your people. Make your team famous.

Let the newsletter come from an actual name. Let internal SMEs publish from their individual LinkedIn pages.

Clarity, consistency, credibility

None of these are sexy tactics. They're what make the tactics work.

Skip it and you're just building on nothing. Publishing for the sake of volume.

The fastest way to lose is to skip ahead to the tactics and miss the foundational work that determines success.