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Marketers have been trying to game LLM responses to suit their brands since users began turning to AI for search.
In recent months, they’ve become aware that AI search responses aren’t just a user touchpoint that needs attention, but a competitive arena in which they might influence the way their rivals are perceived — and have to guard against their rivals doing the same to them.
Despite the well-publicized issues with AI hallucinations and bias, web users tend to perceive AI results as neutral. When a response supplies positive information about a brand, that works in marketers’ favor. When an AI Overview or ChatGPT response goes in the other direction, it can become a serious problem for a brand.
It’s compounded by the fact that, according to one study, just 8% of people double-check facts in AI-generated search answers. And a survey of 1,000 consumers published by content marketing agency Skyword found that, when the information given in an AI response differs from that provided by a brand, web users distrust brands.
Just 29% said they’d take an advertiser’s word for something in the event of a disagreement between the sources, the survey found. “Trust is no longer owned by a company, it’s earned across a broader information ecosystem,” said Skyword CEO Andrew Wheeler.
Marketers across the industry are concerned about the potential of AI-dealt reputation damage. “The accuracy of content online about our clients is a core challenge with AI,” said one holding company media executive, who exchanged anonymity for candor.
Brands have spent the last couple of years investing in their organic activity on platforms like Reddit and YouTube, increasing the output of their content marketing and PR operations, and redesigning websites to influence AI scrapers. Reddit is a favorite battleground for marketers vying to influence LLM results, though YouTube, Facebook, Instagram are also potential vectors.
Their rivals can use the same techniques, however, as part of a black-hat SEO approach designed to “poison” an LLM’s responses regarding a rival brand, potentially ruining its profile among AI search users.
“[Competitors] could fund or coordinate content across forums, review sites, comparison pages, sponsored articles, influencer posts or other third-party sources in a way that makes a competitor look worse or their own brand look better,” explained Charlie Marchant, CEO at SEO agency ExposureNinja. “If those sources are later crawled, indexed or retrieved by AI search systems, they could potentially influence how brands are represented.”
AI poisoning might involve posting bad-faith product reviews or outright misinformation about a competitor in the hope it’s ingested by an LLM and later regurgitated as honest opinion or fact.
“[Competitors] can’t really de-rank you in ChatGPT, but they can definitely trash your reputation,” warned Jordan Parkes, CEO of specialist research company ZeroClick Labs.
Remedies range from proactive measures to counter-attacking response, guided by AI search visibility tools like Profound or Peec.
On the defensive side, practitioners recommend marketers simply dial up the same work they’re doing to improve their AI search visibility. That stretches from ensuring social and website content uses consistent accurate language, to producing larger amounts of content like product specifications or user guides. Product and service guides account for up to 28% of AI search citations, per a ZeroClick Labs estimate.
In some cases, clients are “fighting fire with fire”, according to Parkes; wading into subreddit discussions or social media threads in order to correct the factual record in the hope that a swift rejoinder will be ingested alongside any potential misinformation.
While Parkes highlights the risks for brands, other practitioners are skeptical that brands can coordinate enough content across enough platforms to effectively influence or alter the ways an LLM presents a rival.
“It’s far harder than many people assume, particularly for established brands. AI models don’t rely on a single Reddit thread or isolated source … They aggregate signals from websites, reviews, news coverage, social platforms and other trusted sources,” noted Charlie Terry, founder and CEO of performance marketing agency CEEK.
It’s also difficult to distinguish between a bad-faith PR operation funded by rivals and genuine errors (or honest, negative reviews) that happen to be published online.
Terry suggested that, rather than attempting to salt the earth for competitors (or worry about SEO conspiracies), CMOs should focus on improving the AI discoverability of their brand content. “The brands that perform best in AI-generated recommendations are usually those with the strongest digital reputation,” he concluded, “not those trying to game the system.”
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