AI Is Quietly Getting Your Brand Wrong. 84% Never Check.

Notes from building BrandGEO, an AI visibility tool for our agency’s clients. For almost 30 years, being discovered worked one way: someone typed words into a search box, an engine returned ten links, and an entire industry, mine included, fought over the order of those links. That era is ending faster than almost anyone’s marketing budget admits. Buyers now ask an AI assistant and take the recommendation. McKinsey pegs it at 44% of US consumers already using AI search as their primary source for purchase decisions, and the same research found that only 16% of brands systematically measure what those assistants say about them. Forrester found B2B buyers adopting AI search three times faster than consumers. ChatGPT alone serves hundreds of millions of people a week. For a decade, you optimized how you’re found. Now you need to optimize how you’re described. An AI doesn’t return ten links. It returns a verdict: a confident paragraph naming a few brands and characterizing each one.…