AI is now the curator
I gave a talk at Digital Marketing World Forum in New York this month called "Finding your audience in the AI era." I run analytics products for publishers and online stores, so I spend my days looking at where traffic comes from and what people do once they arrive. These pages are the talk, written out.
Everything is changing and we're all trying to keep up. It's hard to predict what the world will look like in a few years. But one thing is very clear and relevant to all of us. AI will increasingly become the curator of information for your audience and customers. For the next few years, the percentage of people's attention getting filtered through AI colored glasses will continue to rise.
That means you have two jobs.
Get noticed by AI. Our new overlords won't promote you if they don't know about you or don't care about you. If AI doesn't know you, it won't send anyone.
Earn the relationship. When you are lucky enough to have AI send a customer your way, you need to earn a direct relationship with that customer. AI can send someone once. Bringing them back is your job.
The first job is where a whole industry is forming already. It's the new SEO, and it has new names: GEO, AEO. Some of that advice will turn out to be right. But it's early, nobody has a proven playbook yet, and most of it is guesswork until you can see what the AI is actually doing on your site. So the first job starts with measurement, and that's the next page: You can only optimize what you measure.
The second job is the one I care about most, because it's the part AI will never do for you. That's AI can send someone once.