Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Michael here, creator of AEO by GoEpps. I’m a student of history, and history keeps teaching the same lesson: we underestimate emerging technologies, yet those technologies end up reshaping the world.
The newest world-changing technology is LLMs (large language models) and agentic AI. These tools have now connected with the internet and with an often-overlooked technology, broadband. The result is simple to state and hard to absorb. Basically, computers will do the work of search for you and let you just ask your phone questions.
Brands are living through a massive shift, and many companies are overwhelmed. That reaction is understandable, but it is not a plan. The right response depends on where you sit.
So here is how you should be thinking about AI search, including ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and the rest, based on your job title.
Role | How this tech changes your work forever | What you should do to adapt | Where to start |
CEO, large company | Your brand's reputation is now assembled by machines that read the entire internet and answer for you before a buyer ever reaches your site. Market perception is being set in rooms you are not in. | Treat AI visibility as a board-level metric, not a marketing tactic. Make someone accountable for how your company shows up in AI answers and fund it. | Ask your team one question: how does our brand appear when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Gemini about our category? If no one can answer, that is your starting point. |
Founder, founder-led and private companies | You built the story of this company, and AI is now retelling it from scraps it found across the web. Your voice can be replaced by a summary you never approved. | Get your expertise and point of view onto the internet in your own words, consistently. Founders who publish shape what the machines repeat. | Write down the three things you want your company to be known for, then check whether AI tools already say them. |
Investors | Diligence and market research now run through AI, so a portfolio company's AI visibility is becoming a signal of demand and durability. Weak AI presence is a hidden risk on the balance sheet. | Add AI search visibility to diligence and to quarterly reviews. Ask founders how they are measured in AI answers, not just in Google rankings. | Pick one portfolio company and benchmark its AI visibility against its top competitor. The gap will tell you a lot. |
VP of Marketing | The channels you own are fragmenting, and a growing share of buying research happens in AI tools you cannot see or report on. Your dashboards are missing a lane. | Build measurement for AI search into your reporting, and rebalance budget toward content that AI engines cite. Defend the strategy to leadership with data. | Add one AI visibility metric to your next board deck. You cannot manage what you do not measure. |
Growth and sales exec | Buyers arrive with opinions formed by AI before your team ever speaks to them. The top of your funnel is being pre-shaped without your input. | Feed sales insight back into content so AI tools cite accurate, current answers about your product. Align marketing and sales around the questions buyers actually ask AI. | List the ten questions prospects ask most, then see how AI tools answer them today. |
Marketing director | The playbook you were trained on assumes ranking on Google pages. AI answers now intercept demand before the click, changing what a win looks like. | Widen your program beyond traditional SEO to include answer-focused content, third-party presence, and structured data AI engines can read. | Audit your top pages for direct, question-based answers and FAQ structure. Rework the weakest one first. |
Marketing manager | The daily work of publishing and optimizing now has a second audience: the AI engines that summarize rather than link. Content that reads well but answers poorly loses. | Rewrite key content around clear questions and concise answers, add schema markup, and make sure crawlers are not blocked. | Check your robots.txt for AI crawlers and confirm your sitemap is submitted to Bing, which ChatGPT relies on. |
Performance channel manager | Attribution gets harder as influence moves into AI conversations you cannot tag or track. Some of your best-performing demand will look like it came from nowhere. | Track AI visibility as its own channel and watch how it correlates with branded search and direct traffic. Stop judging every dollar by last-click alone. | Start a simple baseline of your brand's AI presence this month so you have a trendline to manage against. |
Marketing creatives | AI tools reward clarity, structure, and genuine expertise over volume and polish for its own sake. The machines quote substance, not decoration. | Create content built to be cited: clear headings, direct answers, original insight, and formats AI can parse. Substance is the new distribution. | Take one recent piece and restructure it around the exact questions your audience asks. |
Getting Help Getting Started
Every role above is looking at the same shift from a different seat. The common thread is that search is no longer something your customers do on a page you can rank on. It is something a computer does for them, and your brand either shows up in that answer or it does not.
The brands that win will be the ones that measure this the way they already measure everything else. That is exactly why we built AEO by GoEpps. We are setting the standard for how brands measure their digital marketing and drive growth in this new era, bringing traditional search and AI visibility under one program, measured together.
See where your brand stands and start setting the standard for your category at GoEpps.com/AEO.
