AI Visibility Is Not a Numbers Game

For years, we've been taught to think that organic growth comes down to execution: publish more, optimise more, find the trick everyone else is missing.

But for the first time in a long while, startups are now being forced back to fundamentals. Before you can think about visibility, you have to think about how you want to be understood.

And it's a much harder conversation than whether to add FAQs on the homepage.

Over the last few months, I've noticed founders approaching AI visibility with the same assumptions they brought to SEO.

The questions are usually different on the surface:

• How do we increase our AI visibility?

• How do we get mentioned more often?

• How do we show up in ChatGPT?

But underneath, they all share the same assumption: that AI-driven discovery works like SEO used to work.

Now I understand where they're coming from. For years, we've been taught to think about organic growth as a numbers game. More content led to higher rankings that lead to more traffic. And more traffic meant more opportunities.

So, the objective was simple: get the highest visibility possible, and some of that is bound to convert to cash.

But AI search does not operate that way. AIs provide information that content used to deliver. Customers no longer access, or even learn about, your website this way. AIs educate users about their problems the way your guides used to do. So, if you look at this from the numbers game point of view, there is no traffic to gain here.

The opportunity is elsewhere now: AI systems are helping people make choices.

A person asks AI for alternatives to a product they're considering. A buyer wants help shortlisting tools. Someone describes a problem they're trying to solve and, in the course of the conversation, an AI lists the products they should evaluate.

And so, if your company isn't part of that conversation, it may never make it onto the buyer's shortlist.

If it doesn't make into the shortlist, well, it's not being discovered. The rest you can imagine.

So, the outcome of AI visibility isn't a click but a recommendation. And that recommendation is not earned with more content, links, or a definition block or FAQ on every page.

It's earned by making your startup easy to understand.

• Who is it for.
• It's target category.
• What problem it solves.
• How it is different from competitors.
• And even, what is the most relevant competitive stack your product belongs to.
• How you want it to be presented and described to potential customers.
• What conversations your product is relevant to, and so on.

Interestingly, you never had to care about any of that with SEO. As long as you knew, roughly, what problems your product is relevant to, you could find thousands of keywords that could attract an equal number of potentially interested people.

The rest was the numbers game.

AI visibility isn't. It's 100% a relevance game.

The companies that benefit most from AI-driven discovery aren't the ones chasing numbers: mentions or some random visibility data.

They are the ones making it easiest to be chosen.