Key takeaways:
- The customer experience now begins beyond brand-owned channels, as AI has fundamentally changed how people discover and evaluate brands.
- Content has a bigger role in AI search and brand discovery. Brands need a balanced mix of content that drives AI visibility, builds authority and creates memorable brand experiences.
- A content audit is the first step toward becoming an answer-ready brand. Assess existing content, identify gaps and organize it around the topics and questions your audience is already searching for.
Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jamie Jeffries, group director, Strategy & Analytics, at Pace, to discuss how AI has changed content’s role in the customer experience.
Around the office, it seems like AI visibility frames every conversation. In meetings, in post-meeting debriefs, in conversations across desks or cubicles. It’s an interesting time to be part of a content marketing agency as the industry braves the figurative “new frontier” that is AEO.
My days are spent creating the content itself, whether researching for blog posts or crafting LinkedIn posts, so getting to sit down with a strategist and ask a lot of questions is a real treat for me. As the customer experience evolves, so does content’s role in molding it, making collaborative conversations like these more helpful than ever.
How AI is reshaping the customer experience
LW: In your own words, how would you describe the customer experience?
JJ: I would describe it as the way a customer discovers, interacts and builds relationships with the brand in the hopes of driving ultimate advocacy. That to me is really the focus of what the customer experience should do.
LW: How have you seen AI change the customer experience?
JJ: A brand can no longer say that they can absolutely control the customer experience. They can control how it’s maneuvered through their own channels. But with AI, so much of that is happening outside of what a brand can control.
We’ve known for a while that the journey is very nonlinear. Now that you add in AI and everywhere that people are gaining information, it’s like a tangled web, especially when we talk about how someone may discover a brand. They may discover the brand because they’re on ChatGPT or Claude, and they’re asking questions. They may know of a brand and are trying to find out more information about its products and services. They’re doing that with AI and then maybe coming over to the brand platforms.
Essentially, a brand has the ability to control its ecosystem, but it can only influence what is being said out there by GenAI and AEO tools. That’s fundamentally a huge change in how we are talking about it with clients—why we’re raising the importance of it and thinking about it holistically, including all the different insertion points where someone could encounter a brand, both on and off platform.
LW: Can you pinpoint a time when it became obvious that AI was changing how customers discover brands?
JJ: Well, with AI specifically, our clients have really gotten more and more interested, I’d say, in the last 12 to 18 months. If you look at traffic numbers now, like traffic coming over from ChatGPT mentions, some clients still see it as a bit insignificant, but we know how quickly it’s growing. There are some programs where we’re seeing triple-digit month-over-month growth as far as citations and mentions within the AI systems. And so, it’s beginning to be enough to capture clients’ attention.
We have clients all across the board on how much they’re investing. Not even dollars, but thoughts around it. Some clients are just dipping their toe in and saying, “Oh, we’ll test.” Other clients are saying, “Nope, everything we do from a planning point of view really needs to make sure that we’re laddering up.” You have a wide breadth based on the client themselves and where they kind of think about it.
Why brand discovery starts before your website
LW: How is AI search affecting website traffic and customer discovery?
JJ: When you look at traditional search behaviors, we’re seeing that searches are increasing, but then the number of clicks coming to a website is decreasing. And that’s just because of AEO or people using GenAI platforms to discover that information. We’re seeing a transition and decline in overall traffic numbers, and that is gaining attention. That has probably become noticeable in the last 12 months.
LW: You mentioned earlier that the customer experience is starting before people enter brand channels. You framed it in a way that it’s kind of uncontrollable by a brand, but that you can try to influence it. What is in a brand’s arsenal to try to influence it?
JJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, a lot of the traditional SEO principles stand, right? Understanding what people are consuming around your brand, and what those keywords are. SEO is still influencing that visibility. Those strong principles must stay.
But some of the things that we are continuing to talk about with clients are like, how do they bring forth unique viewpoints from the people within a company and bring that visibility as subject matter experts? That positioning of what the company stands for is very critical.
The other place that we really talk to our clients about is how brands are using proprietary data to carve out a reason for AI to cite and mention them through content. That could be using unique indexes or studies that they’reconducting, or partnering with different associations and being able to own that information.
The content strategy behind AI visibility
LW: From a storytelling standpoint, are there certain types of content that perform best in this AI era?
JJ: Well, certainly there are different roles for different pieces of content. I’ve talked about it in a few different buckets so far with clients.
There is definitely that more structured content that is really set for SEO and AEO visibility, where there’s that structure or keyword penetration. We’re doing more listicles and Q&A formats, surfacing the answer much higher up in the content piece. We’re trying to make sure that we have a foundational presence around a set or a cluster of keywords.
There is then what helps to build our authority, and that’s where you bring forth those different viewpoints from internal and also leverage proprietary data to package that.
And then the third bucket I’ve really been looking at is brand experience, where we don’t have to be as focused on those SEO and GEO principles. It’s about connecting with someone regardless of the platform, whether it’s a YouTube channel, LinkedIn, the website or a newsletter.
It’s effective when all those work together once someone is in that ecosystem of the brand. It’s the blend of those three different types of content that creates differentiation of what that customer experience is like, at least from a content point of view.
LW: How should brands balance content for AI visibility with content that builds brand experience?
JJ: That’s where brands have to audit what they have. What’s out there? How would they categorize their content? This is something that we’re doing for a financial client on a small testing scale right now. How does the content that we already have fit into those three buckets? Where do we see the opportunity of that net new content or content that we need to refresh? Looking at that cluster, what is the primary set of keywords that we want to make sure we’reresonating for? How do those come together as far as ensuring that we have depth and breadth across a single topic?
If brands begin to audit from that point of view, they can ask, “Do we have balance where we want it? Is this how we want people to perceive the brand and the topics that we want people to resonate with?”
Building a knowledge-led customer experience
LW: Do you feel like because of AI, the customer experience is becoming more knowledge-led? And that’s the content that AEO is citing?
JJ: It definitely is for us and the clients that I work on. I would have to give thought to whether that is industrywide. Certainly when you think about something like [technology client], there’s basic product information that they need to have.
They can elevate their content—looking at case studies, looking at product use, how-to’s and things like that. It’s kind of making me think about something I’m actually working on for a global packaging client right now that’s talking about the journey itself.
For them, we’re looking at ways they can take content and turn that into journey activation. The hub of the content and the information architecture is that foundational piece. It’s basically all about repackaging their content into immersive experiences, like how-to’s, product information, client stories. And then expanding formats and platforms.
This is how companies are building that authority and making sure that they’re having presence where people are discovering information, from podcasts to YouTube channels to different webinars.
Brands should ask, how are we giving customers the power of choosing how they want to interact with us? Everyone’s a little bit different. Someone who may be engaging with a webinar may not be quite ready for sales conversion yet, but they’re making an awfully big leap to say, “I want to spend time with this brand and learn more from the brand.”
Then, enabling that sales and retention loop where they’re having how-to guides when it comes to the different products, doing podcasts with their thought leaders, doing more articles to build upon and showing case studies of how clients are leveraging. And it’s all stemmed from that proprietary resource that has spread out into ecosystems that a brand doesn’t even control to create this experience.
How brands can prepare for the next era of customer experience
LW: Do you feel like there are certain mistakes brands are making as AI changes the customer experience?
JJ: I think there are still some clients just not very concerned with how they’re being perceived or how they are being mentioned in GenAI. Maybe the client doesn’t use it a ton themselves. Some clients never want to be the first adopters or be the innovators. And I think this is a hard thing to sit back and watch because you could be really behind the eight ball.
I think it very much equates to the dot-com era, where companies were sitting and waiting and saying, “Oh, we have this business card website.” Whereas you had these other companies really integrating it into how it supports their business. And those were the clients that were able to emerge out of the dot-com bust with their assets still intact. Fundamentally, people are reluctant to change, right? And those are the clients, I think, that are going to have a harder time with it. Especially because when AI is mentioned on an executive level, it can mean so many different things, from productivity to other uses. It affects you, the brand, your future goals. It is our job as strategists to make sure that we’re drawing attention to what’s important.
