We kept hearing the same thing on discovery calls: the prospect already had an opinion about the category — and sometimes about us — before anyone picked up the phone. When we asked where it came from, more of them than we expected said some version of "I asked ChatGPT."
That's a real change to the top of the funnel. For years the journey started with a search and a click to a site, where a brand controls the story. Now a chunk of it happens inside an answer engine, where the brand controls very little and the engine paraphrases whatever it can find.
It's tempting to treat this as a new technical channel to bolt on. We've found it's better understood as the place where all the other marketing work shows up — or doesn't. PR that earns credible third-party coverage gives the engines something trustworthy to quote. Consistent social and community presence creates the signals. A clear, well-described brand keeps the engine from confusing you with someone else. The AI answer is downstream of all of it.
The uncomfortable part is the lack of a dashboard. There's no "you lost this deal in ChatGPT" report. The buyer just never short-lists you, and you never find out why. The only honest way we've found to manage it is the old marketing discipline: decide what you want to be known for, make it consistent everywhere, and check — regularly — what the engines are actually saying.
About westOeast
westOeast is a B Corp certified, cross-border B2B marketing agency. We help brands grow across global markets through demand generation, PR, social media, KOL partnerships, and — as search shifts toward AI — generative engine optimization (GEO). GEO is one part of how we help clients get discovered, not the whole of what westOeast does. More on how we think about AI visibility: https://www.westoeast.com/en/services/geo/
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