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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
What's our AI visibility like? This is one of those questions that more CEOs, CMOs, founders, and boards are going to start asking. Because for the last twenty years, when someone asked how visible are we, marketers had some kind of answer. We could talk about Google rankings, organic traffic, share of voice, social reach. But now, the question is starting to change because buyers aren't only searching anymore.
Amanda Natividad:They're asking. They're asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. They're asking AI tools for recommendations, comparisons, and explanations. And so now, the executive question becomes, are we showing up there? And if we are showing up there, are we being described correctly?
Amanda Natividad:That second question is the one I think marketers should pay more attention to. I get that it's tempting to treat AI visibility like a score. Give me the number, tell me if I'm winning or losing. Red, yellow, green. Great, decent, bad.
Amanda Natividad:Scores are easy to report upward because they give us the comfort of a number. But what if AI visibility isn't only a score? What if it's also a mirror that it reflects what AI systems may have absorbed about your brand? What category you seem to belong to? Who you seem to compete with?
Amanda Natividad:What strengths are associated with you? What gets misunderstood and what might already be confusing people in your broader market? That's what I wanna talk about today. I think the most productive question we can ask ourselves about our AI visibility is what is AI reflecting back about how the market understands us? I've talked about GEO on this show before, generative engine optimization.
Amanda Natividad:And in that episode, which you can go back and listen to and then come back to this, my argument was that GEO is what happens when search becomes zero click. Because if AI answers your buyer's question before they ever click to your website, then the game changes. Because now the questions become, can we be retrieved, understood, cited, and remembered? In that first GEO episode, I broke it down into four mechanics. Retrievability, extractability, credibility, and public evidence.
Amanda Natividad:Today, we're going a layer deeper. Because once you run some kind of AI visibility diagnostic, what do you actually do with what comes back? Do you obsess over the score? Do you panic because Gemini thinks your competitor is someone you don't consider a competitor? Do you immediately start rewriting your homepage?
Amanda Natividad:Maybe. But before you do any of that, you still need a human read. This episode is sponsored by HubSpot. And the reason this topic is coming up now is because I've been using HubSpot's AEO grader. It's a free tool that shows you how your brand appears across AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Amanda Natividad:The idea is that you can see how AI perceives your company, where competitors may be showing up instead, and where you might be missing from the conversation. And that's exactly the kind of thing I think marketers need right now because we need a starting point. So I ran my company, SparkToro, through the AEO grader. And the most interesting part wasn't just the score. I mean, the score was useful directionally, but the more interesting part was what the report reflected back.
Amanda Natividad:Some of it was affirming. The report correctly identified Spectoro as a niche audience research tool. It picked up on our credibility with marketing practitioners. It recognized that we help marketers understand where their audiences spend time, what they read, what they watch, and what they listen to. Oh, and also what they follow.
Amanda Natividad:So that was affirming, not because it gave me an ego boost. Although, sure, I am a human person with an ego and I enjoy compliments just as much as the next person. But more importantly, it confirmed what I already suspected about our positioning. It told me, okay, the broad idea is landing. The public signals around SparkToro are strong enough that AI systems can generally understand what we do and who we help.
Amanda Natividad:That's useful. But other parts needed a human read. For example, the competitive set was messy. SparkToro got compared to SEMRush, HREFs, SimilarWeb, BrandWatch, and a bunch of other tools. Now, some of those are fair nearby alternatives.
Amanda Natividad:If someone is trying to understand an audience, research a market, analyze competitors, or figure out where to place content, sure, I can see why those brands might show up in the same universe. But they are not all direct competitors. SparkToro is not trying to be Semrush or Ahrefs. We're not trying to be a broad SEO suite, a web analytics platform, or an enterprise social listening tool. So the defensive instinct would have been to look at that and say, oh, well, AI got it wrong.
Amanda Natividad:And maybe it did. But the more interesting useful question is, why did it get it wrong? Where did that comparison come from? Is it because the category is confusing? Is it because buyers actually do use those tools as mental alternatives?
Amanda Natividad:Is it because our public record overlaps with those brands in certain contexts? Is it because third party articles, partner pages, review sites, podcast transcripts are all sending mixed signals? This is where I think positioning becomes extremely relevant. And hey, if I'm gonna talk about positioning, I have to talk about April Dunford. So April talks about positioning as context setting.
Amanda Natividad:It's not just we help x do y so they can do z. Although, yes, everyone has written that sentence and some of us have written it many, many times because it's useful and it is the first step in the right direction. But more than that, positioning gives people context. It tells them what market are we in? Who what are we replacing?
Amanda Natividad:Who are we for? What should you compare us against? What value should you expect? What kind of product is this? So if an AI system puts you in the wrong competitive set, that might be an AI problem, but it might also be a context problem.
Amanda Natividad:The public Internet may not have enough clear consistent evidence about where you belong. And this is where I think marketers need to resist two bad instincts. The first bad instinct is to treat the AI output as absolute truth. No. Gemini says we're in this category, so that must be the category.
Amanda Natividad:No. Please don't let a chatbot reorder positioning. But the second bad instinct is to dismiss the output entirely. Oh, that's wrong. The AI is stupid.
Amanda Natividad:Moving on. Also, no. Because even when the output is wrong, the wrongness can be useful. If AI systems believe something off about you, there's a decent chance some part of your market believes it too. Not definitely and not always, but it is a clue and clues are useful.
Amanda Natividad:This is also how I think about share of voice in these tools. In my SparkToro AEO greater report, SparkToro showed up at 24% in ChatGPT and Perplexity's market breakdowns, but only 12.5% in Gemini where SEMRush and SimilarWeb appeared higher. So that's interesting, but I would not treat that as a sort of market share number. I wouldn't put that in a slide and say SparkToro has exactly 24% share of voice in the AI universe because what would that even mean? These systems work differently.
Amanda Natividad:They use different sources, retrieval methods, models, different freshness, different assumptions. Even Google's own documentation around AI features is careful here. Google says the fundamentals of SEO still apply, but AI overviews and AI mode can use different techniques, models, which means the links and responses can vary. So if the AI visibility number so if the AI visibility number so if the AI visibility number changes from one engine to another, I wouldn't interpret that as this one's correct and this one's wrong. I would interpret that as visibility varies by system, and the variation itself is worth investigating.
Amanda Natividad:Why are we clearer in one system than another? Why do we show up alongside certain competitors in one place, but not in another? Why does one system understand our category better? Why does another system turn us into something more generic? Again, this is why I like the mirror metaphor.
Amanda Natividad:You're not asking the mirror to run your strategy. You're asking what is being reflected back to me. And then as the actual marketer with great judgment, you decide what to do with it. This is also why I like see your interactive's caution that AI visibility can become a vanity metric because it absolutely can. Just like rankings became a vanity metric when people obsessed over ranked number one for keywords that didn't even matter for their business.
Amanda Natividad:Just like impressions can become a vanity metric when no one asks who saw the thing or why they cared. Just like traffic can become a vanity metric when it brings the wrong people to the wrong page for the wrong reason. AI visibility is no different in that regard. If all we do is chase a score, we're going to recreate the worst parts of SEO reporting, but with newer acronyms and probably worse screenshots. The score is not the strategy.
Amanda Natividad:The score is a prompt. It's a prompt to us to ask better questions. What is accurate here? What is inaccurate? What is missing?
Amanda Natividad:What is overemphasized? What does AI seem to understand about us? What does it fail to understand? Where does that confusion come from? And what can we actually fix?
Amanda Natividad:This is where I think the work becomes really practical. After running a diagnostic like HubSpot's AEO grader, I would create three buckets. Bucket one, what AI gets right? For SparkToro, the report got several things right. Audience research, credibility among marketers, ease of use, affordability, credible data sources, privacy first, audience intelligence.
Amanda Natividad:These are things I would want to reinforce. If AI already associates us with these strengths, great. Let's keep building that public record. Bucket two, what AI gets wrong? This is where I would look at the weird competitor set.
Amanda Natividad:I'd look at vague descriptions. Maybe I look at places where the report describes us as if we are a broader marketing intelligence platform or an SEO suite. And then I would ask, is this wrong because the model is wrong? Or is this wrong because we haven't done enough category education? Do our comparison pages explain the difference clearly?
Amanda Natividad:Do third party mentions describe us accurately? Do podcast appearances, guest posts, and reviews reinforce the right context? Or are we relying too heavily on our own homepage to do all the explaining? The last question matters because of course, your website is important, but the conversation around your website is important too. That was one of the main points in my earlier GEO episode.
Amanda Natividad:In a Zero Click World, your brand is often being evaluated in places you don't control. Reddit threads, YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, reviews, comparison pages. And in an AI search world, those places can become inputs into someone else's answer. So when an AI tool gets your brand wrong, it could be that you need better comparison content, clearer sales enablement, customer stories that show strongest use cases. Maybe you need founder and executive interviews that explain the category as a whole.
Amanda Natividad:Maybe overall, what you need is more public evidence in the places where buyers are already learning. So that's bucket three, turn the gaps into marketing priorities. And this is the part that I think is easy to miss. AEO or GEO is not an optimization checklist. That original GEO research paper that defined generative engines as systems that gather, synthesize, and summarize information from multiple sources to answer queries.
Amanda Natividad:And that matters because the answer is not necessarily coming from one page. It's probably assembled from a bunch of signals. Your site, other people sites, third party coverage, and probably other things that we don't even fully know or control. That means the work of showing up in AI Answers overlaps with SEO, but it's not only SEO. It overlaps with content, but it's not only content.
Amanda Natividad:And of course, it overlaps with PR, but it's not only PR. It's a visibility problem. And visibility problems are rarely solved by one single landing page. So now our SEO still matters. So things like helpful content, tech technical accessibility, clear structure, all that matters.
Amanda Natividad:But AI search adds another layer, like whether we can be understood, summarized, compared accurately. And this isn't theoretical anymore. Adobe's digital insights report showed that AI driven traffic is growing across industries, including tech and software. And it was also found that AI referred traffic was way more engaged across industries than non AI traffic. So this supports the broader notion that people are using AI as part of discovery and evaluation.
Amanda Natividad:And Forrester has written about B2B buyers using generative AI and conversational search in the buying journey, which matters because B2B discovery already happens before people even talk to the sales team. So when buyers are forming opinions before they ever reach your site and before they talk to you, then the public record around your brand matters much more. Buyers have ways to form opinions without you. And AI can compress, summarize, and even amplify whatever public signals already exist about you. So when I look at an AEO report, I'm not only asking, are we visible?
Amanda Natividad:I'm asking, are we understood? So here's the practical play. If your CEO or CMO asks, what's your AI visibility like? I would respond with, let's get a diagnostic starting point. Run a tool like HubSpot's AEO grader.
Amanda Natividad:Look at how your brand shows up across AI answer engines, then don't stop at the score. Ask three questions. First, what is accurate? As in what is AI already getting right about us? Those are the signals we probably want to strengthen.
Amanda Natividad:Second, what is inaccurate or incomplete? This could be where you're getting miscategorized or nuances lost. Third, what does this tell us about our public record? Maybe we'll realize we need more direct, more specific website copy, better comparison content, a wider variety of case studies, or more third party proof. And then make a short list of priorities.
Amanda Natividad:Pick the handle of things that matter most. Maybe it's one product page, one comparison page, one sales deck, then improve it. Repurpose the idea off-site. Talk about it in a podcast. Put it in a newsletter.
Amanda Natividad:Share it on LinkedIn. Give your audience and the public internet more accurate evidence to work with. Then run the analysis again in a month or two and see what moved. This diagnostic gives you a way to start. And for a lot of teams, starting is the hardest part.
Amanda Natividad:Because AI visibility sounds huge. It sounds like one more thing marketing now has to own because apparently, we didn't have enough. But I think the right framing makes it less overwhelming. This helps you clarify your public market signal and build a stronger public record. It helps you it helps you ask whether the market and the systems that learn from you understand who you are.
Amanda Natividad:And if they don't, you now have something to work on. So here's how I'm looking at AI visibility. It's a mirror. A mirror that might show you some things you already knew, some things you didn't want to admit, and some things that are just plain wrong. But even the wrong parts can teach you something.
Amanda Natividad:This episode is sponsored by HubSpot. If you want to see how your brand is showing up in AI tools, you can run your own report with HubSpot's AEO grader. It's free, and it gives you a diagnostic starting point across answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Run the report, look at what's accurate, look at what's off, look at what's missing, and then decide what needs to be clarified next. Next week, my friend Kevin Indig is joining us to talk in even more detail on all the research he has done on AEO and GEO, fan out queries, and lots more.
Amanda Natividad:Plus, we're actual real life friends, so I promise it's a fun one. See you then.