George Orwell gave us one of the most unsettling equations in literature in 1984: 2 + 2 = 5.
Radiohead borrowed it decades later for the title of 2 + 2 = 5 on the album Hail To The Thief (still apt!), turning the same idea into something darker, noisier and more modern: what happens when something obviously untrue is repeated, normalised and eventually accepted. It’s the same principle for something that is true but we all know the web has had quite a lot of difficulties when presenting true vs. false.
I’m gettin’ a little dystopian on this one!
The point was that if you control what people are told, repeat it often enough and remove the alternatives, you can begin to control what they accept as truth. Which brings me to your website…I tell my clients that “with the rise of AI, your website is becoming a classroom for you to teach it whatever you want it to say about your brand”.
Your website is the teacher and those lovely noisy machines with crazy attention spans are sitting at the desks waiting for their lesson….
Welcome to www.your.classroom, folks.
Think about how children learn. We send them into classrooms where teachers try and explain the world to them. This is a country. This is a planet. This is how multiplication works. This happened in 1939. This is how you spell necessary and this is how to write the figure 8.
Hopefully, what they’re being taught is accurate, useful and balanced. Because what you teach kids matters. Teach something incorrectly and, until somebody or something corrects it, that information becomes part of their understanding of the world. Have them repeat 2+2=4 and it is truth. Or, have a competitor teacher / bad actor teach them 2+2=5 and it becomes their truth.
AI isn’t a child, of course. But there is a useful parallel in how AI systems encounter, process and retrieve information. They need information to work with and they like when the theme remains repetitive.
And when somebody asks in AI search about your company, your products, your expertise, your people or your industry, you want your own digital presence to provide the clearest possible ‘lesson’.
So the question for brands becomes: What are you teaching? What do you want / need them to know?
For years, we talked about websites as shop windows. I’d use the analogy of Google being Grafton Street and your shop’s location on it and its displays as being your SEO search results: People walked past on Google, saw something they liked and in they came.
Then we started talking about websites as destinations, platforms and digital experiences.
Still true, but things are changing and AI search introduces another role.
A role that sees your website becoming increasingly part of the information environment machines use to understand you. That’s an important change. Because your website isn’t only communicating with prospective customers anymore. It is communicating with machines that may subsequently communicate with prospective customers. 🤓🤖🤓🤖🤓🤖🤓🤖
Someone might never visit your homepage. They may simply ask:
- “Who is the best company for X?”
- “What does this organisation do?”
- “Is this company experienced in my sector?”
- “What’s the difference between this product and that one?”
- “Who has experience doing this in Ireland?”
- “WHO IS THE CHEAPEST?”
The answer they receive may be ⚙️ ‘assembled’ ⚙️ before they ever reach your website. And it may be assembled from all sorts of parts from all sorts of places. Places that we can’t necessarily control.
So your job isn’t simply to rank. Your job is to teach. And bad teachers create confused students. And confused students become disruptive (I was one of these). And disruptive students run wild (I was one of these).
Imagine walking into a classroom where the teacher changes the lesson every ten minutes. The blackboard says one thing. The textbook says another. Yesterday’s notes contradict today’s. The teacher is half asleep and disinterested. Half the course material hasn’t been updated since those wonderful halcyon website days of 2020. Important subjects get one paragraph while irrelevant ones get six pages. And nobody can quite explain what the school actually is, what it’s particularly good at or why anyone should trust it.
All they want to do is get the **** out, and go home to watch Netflix.
Plenty of brands kind of do this online. The homepage says one thing. The About page says another. Services are described vaguely. Old content contradicts new positioning. Expertise that everyone inside the company knows about barely appears online. Case studies don’t explain the problem, thinking or results. Important claims aren’t supported by evidence. The team page isn’t the team.
And then everyone wonders why AI doesn’t understand the brand properly.
Look at the curriculum. What you teach is incredibly important. This is where AI search, GEO, AEO, SEO and whatever acronym we invent next Tuesday, gets much more interesting.
It ain’t simply about sprinkling a few keywords and phrases around your website in the hope that ChatGPT notices you (this still has a role tho). It’s about creating a clear body of knowledge around your brand. It’s about standing for something. It’s about meaning. It’s about personality.
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Who do you do it for?
- What are you particularly good at?
- What have you actually done?
- What evidence supports that?
- Who are the people behind the organisation?
- What do they know?
- What questions can you answer better than anyone else?
- What language do you consistently use to describe yourself?
- And perhaps most importantly:
- What do you want the machines to learn about you?
Remember:
- Your service pages are lessons.
- Your case studies are evidence.
- Your FAQs answer questions.
- Your thought leadership demonstrates expertise.
- Your About page establishes identity.
- Your people establish experience and authority.
- Your structured data provides additional context.
- Your internal linking connects the subjects together.
- And YOUR brand language reinforces the ideas you want associated with you.
Together, they form the curriculum. You can’t just write 2 + 2 = 5, and remember there is an important difference between Orwell’s world and ours: You don’t control the classroom.
AI systems can encounter information from many sources: your website, publishers, competitors, disgruntled ex-customers, employees, former employees, directories, reviews, databases, social platforms, other websites and countless other parts of the public web and their underlying information sources.
So this isn’t an invitation to fill your website with whatever you would like AI to believe. Quite the opposite. If you want to teach machines that you’re an expert, then demonstrate expertise. If you want to teach them that you’ve worked in a sector, show the work. If you want to be associated with a particular service, build genuinely useful information around it. Similar, in many respects, to good SEO.
If you say 2 + 2 = 5 while the rest of the internet says 4, you shouldn’t expect the machine to obediently agree.
Brand building in the AI era isn’t about manufacturing truth. It’s about making the truth about your brand clear, consistent, evidenced and machine-understandable (what a mouthful).
Brand has entered the classroom and this is why I think separating “AI search” from brand is a mistake. The two are becoming increasingly connected.
Brands have always fought to occupy a particular place in people’s minds. Volvo wanted safety. Nike wanted performance. Apple wanted creativity and simplicity. Every brand, consciously or otherwise, teaches us something about itself.
Hearts, minds and machines
At Ebow Digital, we’ve always talked about the Battle for Hearts and Minds.
The heart is emotional: Do I like you? Do I connect with you? Do I want what you’re offering?
The mind is rational: Do I believe you? Can you do the job? Is there evidence? Does this make sense?
AI adds something interesting to that battle.
Before you can win the heart or convince the mind, we first have to make sure the machine understands who you are! That doesn’t mean creating websites for robots and forgetting about people – we all need to work hard and avoid another internet full of slop!
It means building digital experiences where brand, content, technology and search work together to create content that people want to read.
So, what’s on your blackboard? The AI classroom is open. The machines have noisily taken their seats. They have their pea-shooters ready, and whether you’ve planned the lesson or not, they’re gonna learn something…maybe it’s exactly what you want them to learn or maybe it’s 2+2=5…
If you need AI Search services, Web Design or Web Development let us know…
Or another fun article on the subject Google’s Guidance For Optimising For AI Search.
❤️ 🧠
Dave.
A little about me:
I founded Ebow in 1999. Since then, technology has changed beyond belief. But people haven’t changed nearly as much. That’s ultimately where our Battle for Hearts and Minds comes from: understand people first, then use strategy, design, technology and marketing to give them something worth thinking and feeling.
Read more about our history in The Story of Ebow.
Go ahead and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Or just check out our showreel: