Is your brand AI-legible?
As AI assistants begin to organise our calendars, purchases, and decisions, brands won’t just market to people anymore. They’ll need to speak to the AI that speaks to them. So how do brands need to adapt to stay in the game?
We humans use cognitive shortcuts to make decisions, mostly relying on emotions to guide us. AI assistants are much more considered, and suffer from neither bias nor bandwidth limits. When choosing on your behalf, they’ll weigh far more inputs than any person could:
• Utility – fitness to task and user (accuracy, relevance, performance)
• Confidence – verified data, reviews, provenance, compliance
• Experience – satisfaction signals such as returns, complaints, reorder rates
• Ethics & economics – safety, sustainability, and the platform’s own incentives
Search visibility is quietly becoming a data-integrity contest and to be chosen and recommended, a brand must be legible to this logic.
For marketers, the good news is that your old SEO work is not wasted. Strong organic ranking still signals authority to AI. But it’s no longer enough.
To be machine-legible, brands must now also demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – what Google calls EEAT for short.
To do this, you should consider and ‘manage’ two things:
• What you say
• What others say about you.
What you say means providing the systems with clean structured data on all aspect of your product and customer experience: from sourcing, ingredients, sustainability, certifications, publishing live service metrics (eg. stock, delivery reliability, returns), to encoding ‘values’ as metadata, not just cute slogans.
What others say about you means nurturing your online reputation. When AI assistants recommend, they don’t count links; they weigh brand citations: who’s mentioning you? How credible are they? How are you framed (leader or afterthought)? That means your legibility now extends beyond your own data to your semantic footprint: ie the quality, recency, and authority of everything that’s being said about you. A viral Reddit thread might still ‘amuse’ the algorithm, but a positive quote in the Financial Times will train it to trust you and thus carry a lot more weight.
In this new context, authority is no longer what you claim; it’s what the machine can confirm.