Why Brand Messaging Matters for AEO

As a 40-something mom, it’s hard to keep up with the new slang these days, but I haven’t fully given up. I recently heard my 12-year-old son scoffing, “that’s AI,” while playing video games online with his friends.

When we sat down at the dinner table later on, I asked him what he meant by that. He told me that saying something is AI is the new version of “that’s cap,” meaning “this thing is fake or not to be trusted.”

Middle school boys aren’t the only audience tinged with a bit of skepticism when it comes to AI. I’ve seen what’s happened to my beloved em-dash on LinkedIn over the past two years. People are quick to write off content they deem to be generic and AI-produced, which they often lump into the same category.

AI has made producing content close to effortless. When you can publish anything, publishing in the first place stops setting you apart, so what you say becomes the only thing that can. Couple this with the fact that buyers are searching differently today, and you have a recipe for brand messaging resurging in importance.

In this article, I’m going to offer my thoughts on why investing in brand messaging is more important than ever in the age of AI search. Let’s talk about what’s changed and what you can do about it.

Producing content used to be the hard part

Creating content for your business used to take a lot of time and require a skill set most companies lacked in-house. Publishing consistently used to put you ahead of every company that wanted to and could never find the hours.

Now, you can build a website in twenty minutes and produce an unlimited amount of content for your business, and so can every competitor in your market.

Let’s be clear—I’m an AI advocate. It’s heavily integrated into my daily workflows. AI gives companies access to time and expertise they never had and helps my team produce more and better work on budgets that would have been impossible three years ago. This is a good thing.

But now that the barrier to content marketing is lower, if you have nothing specific to say, publishing adds to a sea of content that gets deeper every quarter, and buyers are growing more cautious about what they read because they are unsure whether a human perspective is behind it. This is where the middle school slang reflects an emerging modern buying instinct.

Buyers are handing over context they never used to give

Google trained all of us to search in shorthand. You might type “machine shops near me” and hope for the best, which was four words standing in for a decision worth six figures. Long and specific queries used to return worse results than short ones, so we learned to search in keywords.

Here is what that same buyer might type into an LLM today:

I run a small manufacturer making stainless fittings for medical device assemblies. My current supplier has missed lead times three quarters in a row and their tolerances slipped twice this year. Who should I be looking at?

Nobody was typing that into Google because it was too specific to work there. That kind of context used to reach us only through a discovery call or a customer interview, and even then, it surfaced late, after somebody had already read all the way to the bottom of a blog post. Buyers hand it over freely now, before they have talked to a single human being.

The number of results changed, too. A Google search often returns millions of results, and most searchers never make it past page two, so we’ve come to accept that ranking past position 11 is similar to not ranking at all. But an answer from an LLM comes back with a handful of options and a short reason for each one, so the list feels shorter and is built for the person who asked. Appearing in that list carries more weight than ranking fourth ever did.

How brand messaging for AI search works

Brand messaging for AI search works by matching the specific problems you solve to the specific context buyers describe when they prompt. An answer gets assembled from content that corresponds to the situation someone laid out, so generic claims about quality and partnership have almost nothing to correspond to. Those words describe most of the companies in any category, which is why they feel so safe to write.

So it’s time to plant a flag in the sand of specificity. Here’s what it can look like:

Generic	Specific
We are a precision machine shop committed to quality and on-time delivery.	We machine tight-tolerance stainless components for medical device manufacturers who have been burned by suppliers that slip out of spec at high volumes.

The second version shares language with the prompt above, down to the material and the failure the buyer has already lived through. I have read the first version on probably forty websites, and I could tell you almost nothing about the company behind any of them.

So to bring all this back to video games, the one I grew up playing was Super Mario Brothers on NES. AI is like a power-up mushroom, and we are like Mario. We’re still us, up against the same obstacles, not invincible, but with the ability to jump higher and run faster. But ultimately, there’s no game without Mario, and there’s no content worth writing without a human perspective.

Gen Alpha is already building a defense against soulless slop, and so are today’s buyers. Companies that succeed in the AI era will be the ones who can consistently articulate how they solve a specific problem in a way that matches how buyers search.

If you want to amplify your AEO, your messaging is a great place to start. Connect with us to learn more about how GBG helps you uncover your winning zone.