The advertising industry has spent decades learning to optimize for search engines, those inscrutable algorithmic gatekeepers that determine whether a brand exists or merely thinks it does. Now, it seems, there is a new set of gatekeepers to court — and these ones actually talk back.
At the car-selling platform Motorway, executives have begun monitoring what large language models say about the company in real time, Cassie Hall, the company's marketing and brand director, said Tuesday at a Semrush conference in London. The practice suggests a new anxiety has settled over marketing departments: not just whether consumers can find you, but whether the machines will recommend you when asked.
The period-tracking app Flo Health has gone further still, Ms. Jones said, creating a position dedicated entirely to what might be called LLM discoverability — a phrase that did not exist in any job description five years ago and now apparently requires its own head count. The manager, Georgia Jones, Flo's head of brand marketing, explained, collaborates with channel owners as media plans take shape, ensuring the company's messaging is structured in ways that artificial intelligence systems might deign to cite.
(One imagines the performance review: "Exceeded expectations in being mentioned by robots.")
The development represents a logical, if slightly vertiginous, extension of the search-optimization industry that has employed thousands of consultants and consumed billions of dollars since the late 1990s. Where once brands hired specialists to divine the preferences of Google's algorithm, they now must consider the preferences of systems that synthesize information rather than merely index it.
Whether this new discipline will prove as durable as its predecessor remains unclear. The machines, after all, are still learning — and so, it appears, are the marketers who hope to be remembered by them.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Flo and Motorway’s Playbook for Getting Cited by AI"