How to Build Brand Authority for AI Search

What We Need to Grow, Episode 007: Brand Authority in the Age of AI. A Founder Talk conversation with . Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

I've been thinking about this idea of what we need to grow, and reflecting on a few conversations I've had recently with founders and people driving growth in their organizations. A few things have been standing out. The first is the irony of the blue ocean versus red ocean idea. Blue ocean means you look out and there are not a lot of boats, not a lot of competition - you're kind of first to the party. Red ocean means it's a bloodbath, lots of fighting, lots of tension, lots of competition. The funny thing with a blue ocean opportunity is that you have to have the insight to recognize what one looks like. I've had conversations with people talking specifically about showing up in AI, about how the tools have changed, about what's happening at the machine layer beneath the surface. And some of those people look out and go, I don't see a lot of competitors in our space doing this, so maybe it's not that time-sensitive. The problem is that by the time you see a lot of ships out there competing for that space, you're no longer in a blue ocean. You're in a red ocean. The window to gain territory at the machine layer is right now. Waiting for proof that it matters is the move that costs you the most. The second point is about reversing how we think about content creation. Coming out of the era of video, social media, and digital marketing, almost everything has been built human-first. And I'm not saying we stop thinking about people. The goal is still to solve meaningful problems for real human beings. But the communication layer is changing. As more of the digital world becomes automated, as agents move on our behalf and filter through larger amounts of information before a human ever sees it, we need to think machine-first in how we structure and communicate that information. Think about the restaurant example. In the not too distant future, asking an AI to suggest a couple of options for date night, based on what it knows about your preferences, current reviews, the menu, price point, and availability, and potentially even making the reservation, is not that far off. Now scale that to the tender level. Large procurement contracts, hundreds of pages of criteria, each section weighted and scored separately. That process is going to be increasingly handled at the agent level. An agent querying the market to identify who belongs in an RFP, or generating a shortlist for a procurement officer, is not a future scenario. It is a direction this is already moving. Which brings me to the third point: stepping outside of time and space. If you can look at the questions buyers will ask, or that an agent will be querying for, and answer those questions now, you are positioning yourself for decisions that haven't happened yet. Through your content strategy, your LLMs.txt file, your schema, your case studies, and your FAQ structure, you are essentially moving into a future state and planting a flag there. Your competition doesn't know you're doing it. But when an agent goes looking for who belongs on a shortlist, or when a procurement officer asks for the top three vendors for a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, you've already qualified yourself. Most people are still thinking in terms of the human-first layer. They haven't made the shift to understanding that there is a more technical and more powerful way to communicate now, one that requires you to reverse-engineer how agents and AI systems are going to be looking for what you offer, and make sure you're surfacing in those spaces. So those are the three things. Blue ocean, don't wait for it to turn red. Machine-first thinking, retool how you communicate so the systems doing the filtering can actually work with what you've built. And step outside of time and space, make the investment now that positions you to win decisions that are still ahead.