If I asked ChatGPT about you today, what would it say?

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If I asked ChatGPT about you today, what would it say?

Last update: May 4, 2026

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4 Minutes

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Good morning. Here is a question worth sitting with for a minute. When someone in your category, a buyer, a hiring manager, a CFO comparing vendors, asks Claude or ChatGPT or Google’s AI Search about the best company to solve their problem, what does it say?

If you do not know, you are not alone. Almost no one does. And that is the actual story of 2026 so far, not the one in the headlines.

Real buying decisions in your category are starting inside an AI conversation.

The headlines are pointing at the wrong thing

You may have seen the AI cost stories this week. Uber’s CTO reportedly burned through his entire 2026 AI budget ahead of schedule. An Nvidia VP said his team’s compute costs now exceed what he spends on people. The framing in most of the coverage is the obvious one: AI was supposed to be cheaper than humans, and the bill arrived early.

That framing is a distraction. For most companies, certainly the ones we work with, the AI cost question is not the right question at all. The infrastructure side of AI is something agencies and platforms absorb on your behalf. You are not the one staring at a token invoice.

The question you should be asking is much simpler, and much more uncomfortable.

Your customers already moved. Did your strategy?

Every meaningful marketing shift of the last twenty years has been a version of the same anxiety. Search. Social. Mobile. Programmatic. The brands that moved early did not move because the math was better on day one. They moved because their customers were already there, and the cost of absence was higher than the cost of presence.

We are in that exact moment again.

Right now, real buying decisions in your category are starting inside an AI conversation. People are asking ChatGPT which agency to hire. Asking Claude which CRM fits a 40-person team. Asking Google’s AI Search who handles complex tax situations in their city. Many of them are not clicking a single search result. They are getting an answer, taking the recommendation, and shortlisting from there.

If your brand is not showing up in those answers, you are not losing a ranking. You are not in the conversation at all.

Many buyers never click a single search result anymore.

Why this is harder to see than old-school SEO

Traditional search left a paper trail. You could check your rank, watch your traffic, see the click. AI search does not work that way. The buyer gets a synthesized answer, the answer mentions three companies, and the other dozen never existed as far as that buyer is concerned. There is no impression report. No click data in your analytics. The loss is invisible.

This is what makes it dangerous. By the time you feel the revenue impact, you are twelve months behind the brands who started optimizing for it.

A few practical moves, none of which require a token budget.

What we are telling clients to do before Q3

Run the test yourself, this weekend.

Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Google. Ask the questions a real buyer in your category would ask. “Best [your category] for [your ideal customer].” “Top alternatives to [your biggest competitor].” Write down what comes back. If you are not in the answer, or you are misrepresented in the answer, that is your starting point.

Treat AI visibility as a channel, not a side project.

It deserves a line in your marketing plan, an owner, and a measurement approach. Most companies have neither. The ones that build this muscle in 2026 will compound a lead that is very hard to close once buyer behavior settles.

Audit your content for how AI actually reads it.

These models do not weight your homepage hero copy. They weight clarity, structure, third-party validation, and the kind of specific, factual content that answers a real question. Most brand sites are written for humans skimming. They need to also work for models summarizing.

The channel mix is shifting fast. The need to show up has not changed at all. The brands that internalize that early are going to look very different eighteen months from now than the ones still treating this as a tooling conversation.

Have a good Saturday.

Jon

What are you doing about it?

This is the work we are doing with clients right now. Mapping AI visibility, rebuilding content strategy for how these models actually surface brands, and making sure the answer to that opening question is one you would be proud of.