Marketers are getting AI search all wrong—and it’s hurting their bottom line

FastCompany: I’m sure Christopher Nolan didn’t have marketing metaphors on his mind when he directed The Odyssey , but after I watched Odysseus face the wrath of Poseidon in Nolan’s three-hour epic, I thought the movie summed up neatly the trauma that marketers endure when they try to navigate the world of AI assistants. AI apps play by their own rules, and they’re constantly changing the map to upend the journey. If you’re allowing yourself to be led around by the nose, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

The Great Reddit Reckoning Marketers who adapted their media and content strategies to favor Reddit this year simply because of its popularity as a ChatGPT citation got stung, and badly. As we all know, for a spell, Reddit was the darling of the artificial intelligence digerati because its content accounted for a disproportionate share of citations in ChatGPT search. You couldn’t attend a trade show or read a LinkedIn post without someone urging you to adopt a Reddit strategy lest you become invisible in the eyes of the AI gods. Never mind whether Reddit was a good fit for your brand.

But in August, Reddit’s fortunes got dashed against the rocks. Between mid-July and mid-August, Promptwatch reported that Reddit’s share of ChatGPT search citations dropped by 86%. And that, folks, says everything about our AI obsession: We are contorting entire channel strategies around software that is still figuring out how it wants to browse the web. You Can’t Please the AI Search Overlords I run a company that uses AI in our work. And yes, AI search is real. Clients need to understand AI search and its impact on their brands.

Even though AI search still commands a small share of overall search volume, you don’t survive as a brand unless you have your eyes on where customer behavior is headed. But optimizing your visibility for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, or Claude—or whatever else emerges—means that you’re navigating a fragmented landscape at odds with itself. The Reddit/ChatGPT implosion only made that reality a news headline. Trying to please ChatGPT means that you’re going to alienate the algorithms that feed Google Gemini’s models, and adapting your strategy for Perplexity may put your brand in conflict with Google AI Overview.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when Google was your single overlord. Those platforms update their algorithms as they please, and their policies are opaque, at best. The content that you created to satisfy AI search can be rendered useless overnight with an algorithm update. What’s the way out, then? Look to Your Audience First The answer is so obvious that many of us don’t see it: Let your audience be your guide. It’s the same principle that has helped marketers navigate waves of change like the advent of the internet and the explosion of mobile.

When a brand manufactures content specifically to get cited by an LLM, it produces generic crap that sounds exactly like everything else. When a brand creates work that humans care about, the models will surface it anyway. Also, don’t lose sight of how sites like Reddit can help you beyond “a place where you need to be found,” an example being what Reddit can tell you about consumer behavior. I like what Duolingo is doing. They set up a dedicated Reddit presence this year , but they ignored whether ChatGPT was scraping their subreddits.

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The article addresses a significant issue in the marketing industry regarding AI search, emphasizing the importance of audience understanding, which is highly relevant and actionable for brand strategy professionals.