How To Increase Brand Visibility In the AI Era
A strong brand foundation is the thing I ask clients to get clear on before anything else. The mission. The vision. The values. The brand story. Who you actually serve and why. This brand foundation serves as the backbone of everything that comes next: your marketing strategy, sales, business growth decisions, and more.
These days there’s an added variable that impacts branding strategy: artificial intelligence.
While AI has changed the game in terms of how small businesses and nonprofits connect with the world, the truth is that many brand leaders still don’t quite understand just how AI is impacting their brands.
Introducing Melanie Gorman, Founder and Chief Strategist of Crownsville Media
Recently on Episode 22 of Talk Branding To Me, we sat down with SEO and GEO expert Melanie Gorman, and asked her point blank: “What do small business owners need to understand about AI?”
Melanie is a trained mental health therapist turned website developer and digital marketer, which is a more useful background for this topic than it might initially sound. She spent years running SEO for a publishing company reaching 30 million unique visitors a month, and she’s been through every major disruption in this space—from the early Google era to the rise of Facebook to what’s happening with AI right now.
Her take: AI doesn’t have to be scary. It just has to be understood.
Here’s what I took away from our conversation.
You’re Not Discoverable In AI If You’re Not Indexed in Google
This is the foundational point Melanie made throughout our conversation. Whatever you want known about your brand has to be attached to your brand, and it has to live somewhere that Google can index it.
That means a thriving private Facebook group, a members-only community, or content sitting behind a password isn’t going to show up when someone asks an AI tool about you. If it’s not on your website, publicly accessible, it’s essentially invisible to the systems people are increasingly using to find businesses like yours.
Niching Is Your Opportunity, Not a Limitation
Traditional SEO (search engine optimization) is built around strangers searching with short phrases; the average Google inquiry is about four words long. AI search works very differently. The average AI exchange is closer to eight back-and-forth interactions, which means people are having something closer to a conversation before they land on who to hire.
That behavior shift rewards specificity. As Melanie put it, two people can do the exact same job and get completely different AI recommendations based on who they’ve clearly said they serve. A graphic designer who’s written extensively about working with local sports clubs will recommended for that, while a designer who’s written about serving moms will get recommended for that. Same skill set, different footprint, different referral.
What matters most is when the searcher’s brain shifts from “I’m looking for information” to “Who can I trust?” Niching is what connects your brand to the second question because your expertise and experience establishes your credibility in that space.
Practical Tips: Separate Your Pages, Then Blog
Melanie’s advice here is refreshingly simple.
Give every service its own webpage. If you lump four services together on one general page, you’re diluting the potential visibility for each service. Google treats every page on your site almost like its own mini-website, so a combined services page featuring four services means each offering gets a quarter of the visibility it could have had on its own page.
Then, blog consistently to deconstruct those services into smaller pieces. This is where the AI-search math comes into the strategy. Blogging isn’t dead—it’s just doing different, longer-term work than it used to.
Melanie’s own site has around 85 blog posts built up over five years, and she gets referrals from ChatGPT because of it. The catch is that your ideas have to be your own. AI tools can help you edit, but everything they’ve learned came from things other people already published. If you want a genuine footprint, the thinking has to originate with you.
This is a long game, not a weekend project. Ideally you’re publishing a couple of times a week, not blitzing out a hundred posts at once and then going quiet.
If you need leads right now, that’s what ads are for. If you want organic growth and visibility in both Google and AI tools, that’s what consistent publishing is for. Most businesses need some blend of both.
A Quick Primer on GEO and AEO
If you’ve seen these acronyms floating around and felt slightly behind, you’re not alone—even the industry hasn’t fully agreed upon these terms. GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are effectively describing the same practice: writing content designed to be the answer, rather than just contain it.
Think about “zero-click” search results—the kind of query where there’s genuinely one right answer, and Google just gives it to you without you having to click through and read a bunch of articles. AI tools operate on that same instinct on a larger scale. The organizations that get chosen as “the answer” are the ones that have already established themselves as a trustworthy, verified source on their topic, which again, loops back to consistent, original content and other trust-worthy factors like Google reviews, testimonials, and work samples.
Why You, Why Now?
One of the most useful pieces of advice Melanie shared was this: every piece of content on your website should answer two questions for a visitor: why you, and why now. What makes your approach different? Not just your services, but your point of view, your values, and your process. Does this sound familiar? It’s basically publishing the foundational elements of your brand, and using that information to connect with the right people who want to hire you.
This is comfortable territory for a lot of service-based business owners, especially those of us who didn’t get into this work to sell ourselves. In a world where someone can ask an AI tool for three recommendations and get an analysis of your differentiators in a matter of seconds, vague positioning simply doesn’t hold up. Saying it out loud and putting it in writing—on a values page, an about page, or a blog post—is what gives AI something specific to point to.
The Bottom Line
Increasing your brand’s visibility through AI tools doesn’t happen overnight. Melanie was clear that building a real footprint that shows up organically in both Google and AI tools, is a multi-year project, not a quarterly campaign. The businesses that stay proactive about it and keep publishing original, specific, well-organized content clearly tied to their brand are the ones that will keep showing up as the trusted answer, however people are searching for it.
As small business owners, we don’t get to sit this one out. Our clients are already using AI to find people like us. The work is now about making sure what AI knows about us is accurate, and that depends on us actually telling our brand story.
Want to hear the full conversation? Melanie shares even more thoughts, including how to think about your marketing “pie chart,” what GEO and AEO mean for different types of businesses, and her predictions for where AI search is headed next—in Episode 22 of Talk Branding To Me: Your Brand In the AI Era: How to Get Found By the Right Customers.
You can also connect with Melanie and her team at Crownsville Media.
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