The forest is the trees

If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Life is a complex system. A Rube-Goldberg machine of luck, love, chaos, needs, collaterals, and serendipity. And we need others to make it through.

When sorting priorities or planning budgets, consider this question: What is the most important area of my business I need to focus on? If it isn’t “being seen”, check again. 

Of course the tree makes a sound. 

But nobody gives a shit.

More new stuff on the new stuff

ChatGPT released a pretty impressively comfortable shopping research experience. Just ask it about a product you’re looking for. Set crystal clear expectations: price-range, expertise, reviews, geographical area, past experiences, who is it for, when you’d like to get it. 

Your new personal shopper – who already knows a lot about and will factor that into the research – will seek the best options to match the very specific use case of you. 

This* is what an ecommerce tailored for an audience of one looks like. 

With that first list of results, you can keep chatting and improving it. Ask follow up questions to refine results until you’re happy. Click on products to see retailers available, compare rates and features, and go straight to the product page of your top choices.

And if Shopify rumors are true, we’ll soon have embedded add to cart buttons, so fraction from research to checkout goes near-zero. 

This is a big deal:

• B2B Research will be more thorough and accurate than ever. Anyone not passing the first AI cut will have issues getting into the selection process.
• B2C’s journey becomes minimal. No need to go through pages of content, reviews, pricing comparison, or spotting the fine-print. 

Amazon massively simplified consumption and holds at least 40% of all online purchases because it made it very easy to filter, compare, find prices and reviews, return items, and trust that the product will get delivered timely, safe and sound. 

AI-driven shopping will piggyback on our own confirmation biases and give us the kind of results we like, with the information to convince our bosses, spouses, or ourselves. Sales cycles will get noticeably shorter.

It’s a new and fresh take on the key element to be successful: 

A personalized, pleasant, easy customer experience.

How does this work?

While we have limited information on the actual mechanics of how products are picked and featured, here are some educated guesses:

ChatGPT doesn’t have a search engine per se, but it does have a crawling bot looking into your websites and feeding the model.

Since Microsoft owns a big chunk of OpenAI, we can expect Bing to become the search engine under the hood. That means results will be heavily influenced by your Bing positioning and data. We know Perplexity is using shopping feeds too. It won’t take long before all major platforms are syndicating products to every relevant chatbot.

We also know ChatGPT does something pretty cool: It looks for what’s said about your products, and returns recommendations influenced by pure, good old content:

• User generated. Frequency, virality, positive or negative sentiment. Reddit is extremely authoritative and you’ll see plenty of references from it. Broadly speaking, any social network will have an impact. Beloved products with a loyal fanbase will climb the ladder fast.
• Lifestyle. Your very own content is highly relevant to help the LLMs figure out what it is, why it’s different, who it is for. Up to a certain degree you’re in control of the story.
• Real people Q&As. From simple FAQ sections to tools like Answerbase, and of course, reviews. This format is catnip to bots because it easily matches what the users are asking, in form or sentiment, so it gives the research tool a thread to follow.
• Authority websites. Having another brand with enough clout and topic authority saying nice things about you helps the assistant verify and trust your brand name over others. This ranges from industry magazines to marketplaces.

Hallucinating or not, delivering truth is the essential goal of any advanced AI chatbot. Truth understood as:

A claim that is verifiable, grounded in widely accepted evidence, logic, or expert consensus, and framed in a way that acknowledges uncertainty when needed.

So your content strategy needs to be grounded in a compelling story, a recognizable brand, backed by respected voices, and with enough information for the tool to verify and vet you in a split of a second.

The ATTRACT framework

Acronym alert! Our framework sets guidelines to improve your digital presence and appeal to Gen AI, with the website at its core. These quick wins can get you rolling within three months.

A — Amplify

Get others talking about you. PR, reviews, UGC, influencers. The bots are listening.

T — Truth

Share verifiable, trustworthy, differentiated information. Make it easy to vet you in milliseconds.

T — Teamwork

Distributors, partners, resellers — make them part of your content and visibility machine. Feed them quality marketing assets so they can distribute them.

R — Reorder

Structure your data right. Product feeds, schemas, metadata. Not particularly sexy, but essential. 

A — Answer

Create clarity. FAQs, forums, support, Q&A content. Match the form and language of real searches. 

C — Code 

Technical SEO, structured data, fast loading, API feeds. Robots need to read you before humans can choose you.

T — Trust Signals

Authority content, testimonials, sentiment. You need to be good — and look verifiably good.

Small improvements on each of these areas show outstanding results for Generative Engine Optimization, with the additional obvious benefit that these are all great for standard SEO, lead creation, engagement and conversion. 

💡We help our customers achieve this with simple, affordable, monthly plans. Consistency goes a long way. 

A word for those of you on B2B

The days of hidden prices, gated catalogs and lengthy approval processes are gone. It’s a brave new world that demands radical transparency.

Here’s where you can start:

1. Set “starting from” prices for non-registered users. Give data to bots so they know quotes and discounts are available for bulk purchases.
2. Feed default base prices to search engines.
3. Make it super easy for companies to create an account, get approval, and start buying.
4. And have an optimized, easy checkout with enough options.

Sawubona

That’s a Zulu word that means “I see you, you’re important to me, and I value you”. The response to it is “Shiboka”, or “I exist for you”. That’s damn powerful. 

This is business:

Acknowledging, proudly shouting from the rooftops that we exist for our clients, and giving them – and all our beautiful, scary new robots and digital toys – everything they need to see us. Really, really see us. 

Until next time,

Santiago.-