The brand story ​​that AI tells when you’re not in the room

If you believe the statistics (​​you should), the first version of your business a potential customer is likely to encounter is no longer your website or your sales team. It’s an AI generated summary that a large language model (LLM) has synthesised, based on information it can corroborate about your business.  

When AI search generates recommendations, it surfaces insight from real customer feedback, rather than your own brand claims. So, the version of your company that appears over time is shaped less by what you say and more by what customers consistently experience. That means customer feedback is influencing perception earlier in the decision journey than ever before. 

For leaders responsible for growth, marketing or customer experience, this phenomenon is greater than a channel evolution. It changes where choice begins and who shapes it.  

Preference now starts to form before a buyer has had any direct engagement with your business. There may be no click, no visit and no obvious signal that a decision is moving forward. And yet a summary has been read, a comparison has been made, and a decision about your business has started to take shape. 

I speak to a lot of leaders who are anxious about not being visible to AI search, who feel they can no longer influence how and when their business gets recommended. And while there’s no doubt the goalposts have moved, I see it differently.  

Influence hasn’t disappeared. The way you influence has changed. It now happens in places you can only reach indirectly. 

Once we embrace this, the question becomes: “How can we have influence when we’re not there to speak for ourselves?”  

And that’s where trust comes in. 

​​​Trust and the bottom line 

Customer experience used to sit downstream, something you measured after acquisition. Now it influences how your business is described before you describe it yourself. And the consistency, credibility and accessibility of that experience increasingly determines how you show up in AI-generated summaries and responses. 

That’s why Trustpilot feedback matters more now than ever.  

When large language models generate recommendations, buyers look for reassurance that those recommendations are grounded in authentic experience. ​Your customers’ ​voices provide that grounding in a way self-promoted messaging alone cannot.  

I see many organisations responding to AI with more AI. More content, more automation, more surface area. Some of that is necessary. But the businesses that will stand out won’t be those who simply generate the most output. They’ll be the ones whose underlying customer experience is strong enough to withstand being summarised into a few decisive lines. 

This isn’t confined to large enterprise organisations. Startups, mid-market scale-ups and giant multinationals are all navigating the same compressed discovery environment.  

The question we all need to answer 

I put the same question to almost every leader I meet: are you prioritising the experience that will represent you when you’re not in the room to speak for yourself? 

Generative AI doesn’t create customer trust. It reflects it. 

Strong customer reviews boost relevance, ranking and recency, which are the highest currencies when it comes to being chosen by AI to recommend your business.  

Not prioritising their consistency and readability at scale is effectively allowing AI to ignore your business.  

That’s the environment we’re all now operating in. And it’s one every business, regardless of size, needs to take seriously. 

We talk about this in more detail in our guide ”3 ways to win trust in the age of AI”, where we offer practical advice on the steps you can take to win in the age of AI search. It’s an excellent resource to ensure your business keeps showing up when you’re not in the room to speak up for it yourself.