Your website used to have human visitors. Now it feeds AI harvesters that feed machines that talk about you. Your web traffic has disappeared and so has your control over your brand's messaging.
"What's the best restaurant?" Ask AI. "Should I hire this company?" Ask AI. "Are they still in business?" Ask AI. AI has become the trusted friend everyone consults before decisions.
People trust AI. Not because AI is trustworthy but because it feels neutral. No cool graphics, no popups, no cookies banners, no "one weird trick." Just answers. Right answers, wrong answers, hallucinated answers, outdated answers - confident answers without agenda.
Where a human friend might hedge, admit uncertainty, maybe even call you to check, the AI answers every question with confidence. Based on information from scraping your site last Tuesday. Or was it last year? Based on it reading a page you forgot about. Or it reads only part of the page and misses your real offerings. Or it hallucinates an answer.
Your business could be failing because AI tells customers you are closed, or are no longer serving their market, or it talks about that irrelevant lawsuit that was long settled. Your revolutionary product could be described as "adequate." Your prices from 2019 could be quoted as current.
From Advertising to Public Relations for AI
No longer destinations, websites have become source material for machines that are the real destinations. You are not building for visitors - your brand is auditioning for AI's attention, hoping it remembers you accurately when someone asks.
It is all AI public relations now. Forget advertising. Forget impressions. Telling AI what not to mention can be as important as stating your product's benefits.
You cannot not play. Blocking AI bots removes you from the world of AI entirely. Competitors poisoning data is a real issue that monitoring addresses.
Your best salesperson
If you could tell AI what to say, it would be your best sales person. Sending you customers who would never have found you. Ignore it and it might become your worst enemy, losing you customers who would have loved you. AI can describe you perfectly and completely wrong in the same paragraph. You'll never know which.
AI word-of-mouth. The customer thinks they know you. You think you have a reputation. The AI is predicting the next tokens.
You are flying blind. No dashboard for machine recommendations. No analytics for AI mentions. No feedback loops.
You now need TWO strategies: human-facing and machine-readable. Monitoring of your AI reputation. Guiding AI in what to say. WakaiCorp portfolio company >helloMachine, addresses these issues.