Your Brand Has An AI Problem
What happens when AI starts telling your brand story for you?
Last week I went incognito into ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. I typed: “Who is Kara Redman?”
The results were wild. And, ahem, specific. (Apparently, I’m “not universally liked.”) When I clicked the sources, some of them were articles and podcasts I’ve been on, my own website..but most of them were my own LinkedIn. Turns out people arguing with me had become part of my AI-generated brand summary.
That’s when I called Jenna Hannon.
Jenna is the former CMO of Uber turned founder of Hatter, an answer engine optimization agency that helps brands show up (and show up well) in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Her background is in marketing (she was the first marketing hire on Uber Eats), and she went on to work as a fractional CMO before building Hatter.
I brought Jenna on for a LinkedIn Live because I wanted to understand something that’s been nagging me: if AI is now narrating brands to potential customers, what does that mean for the people who’ve been doing the positioning work all along?
(Turns out it means a whole heck of a lot).
Kara: SEO vs. AEO, let’s do it. When someone searches in an AI tool instead of Google, what’s different about what they see?
Jenna: The biggest difference is that you don’t get a list of links anymore. You get a summary. The AI reads everything it can find about you—your website, your LinkedIn, your press, reviews, even conversations happening about you online—and then it assembles a narrative. It tells the person a story about your brand.
So instead of a user clicking through ten results and forming their own opinion, the AI is forming that opinion for them and presenting it as a neat little package.
Kara: That’s what scared me about my own results. I didn’t write that narrative. It assembled itself.
Jenna: Exactly. And the good news is you actually have more influence over that narrative than you might think. The AI pulls heavily from your owned content—your website, your social media, the things you create and publish. But it’s also looking at what other people are saying about you: reviews, conversations, press mentions…it’s stitching all of that together.
So the question really becomes:
Have you been intentional enough about your story that AI has something coherent to summarize about you?
Kara: This is where I think brand positioning stops being a “nice to have” and starts being infrastructure. If the positioning is clear—here’s what we do, here’s who it’s for, here’s why it matters—the AI has a clean story to tell. If it’s scattered, the summary will be too.
Jenna: That’s exactly right. And I’d go even further: the brands we see showing up strongest in AI search aren’t the ones gaming the system., they’re the ones that were already doing good marketing. Clear position. Specific audience. Consistent message.
If you’re doing marketing right, it’s going to work in traditional search and it’s going to work in AI search. You’ll see the benefits. But if you’re just chasing tactics without a strategy underneath—that’s where things fall apart.
Kara: I say this to my clients constantly. Tactics without strategy is just expensive experimentation.
Jenna: Classic marketing problem, right? Except now there’s a new twist. The tactics people are chasing in this space are often wrong. I saw a LinkedIn post the other day where someone was trying to sell two different AEO-related services for what is literally the same thing under two different acronyms. There’s a lot of snake oil right now because this space is hot and most people don’t know enough yet to tell the difference.
Kara: So if I’m a brand or a founder and I want to show up well when someone asks an AI tool about my industry—what should I actually be doing?
Jenna: First, the AI needs to know you exist. So your content foundation matters. Your website needs to clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and why you’re relevant. Think of it as training the AI on your brand. You’re educating it.
Then it’s looking at authority. Not authority the way traditional search measured it—where a mention in USA Today was worth more than anything else because of the publication’s domain score. AI search has actually flipped that. It’s surprisingly good at understanding what industry you’re in, and it weights industry-specific sources more heavily than broad press.
So a mention in a niche publication or a guest spot on a podcast that serves your exact audience? That can actually matter more than a feature in a general outlet.
Kara: That tracks with my own experience. Two or three years ago, I started saying yes to basically every podcast invitation I got. Some of them were big, some were a dudes in their basements. But when I searched myself in AI tools, a lot of my results came from those episodes and told a consistent story because, hey—all I talk about is brand strategy.
Jenna: That makes total sense. The AI is good at understanding that you’re a credible voice within a specific domain. What it hasn’t fully figured out yet is credibility scoring the way Google has after twenty years. So right now there’s a window where showing up consistently in your niche carries a lot of weight.
My hypothesis is that window will eventually close and the algorithms will get more sophisticated. But for now, the opportunity is to be deeply visible in your specific space.
Kara: My take is that none of this—AI search, LinkedIn, paid media, press—none of it works if you don’t have something worth saying. We have incredible tools at our disposal, but if you don’t have a point of view, you’re just using those tools to scale a bunch of noise.
Jenna: This is what I tell clients all the time. It’s actually what’s underhyped in this whole conversation. Everyone’s talking about technical hacks and platform tricks. What’s underhyped is content—specifically, what you choose to create. It’s not about volume, it’s about having a core point of view and knowing that it matters to the person you’re communicating with. That content is going to perform so much better than just producing more stuff.
Kara: I think what makes this different from previous platform shifts is that AI search is essentially a brand channel. It’s not like buying ads where you can throw money at it and get instant leads.
Jenna: Exactly. Think of it like out-of-home advertising. You’re using this distribution method to communicate your story, your brand, your point of view. It’s shaping how people perceive you. And it’s not going to be quick.
A lot of folks are treating this like a performance channel—invest money, get leads tomorrow. That’s not how it works. It’s the distribution of your brand. And the foundation of that has to be a story worth telling.
Kara: There’s one more angle that I think makes this really interesting from a positioning standpoint. In traditional search, we controlled our narrative pretty tightly—we wrote the page titles, the descriptions, the meta tags. In AI search, the tool is writing a description of you based on everything it found…including the stuff you didn’t put out there.
Jenna: Right. So you still control a lot—your website, your content, your social presence. Those are heavily weighted. But there’s also a component of what others are saying about you. Reviews, social conversations, press coverage. The AI is pulling all of that in.
What I like about this is that it rewards substance. You can’t fake your way through it. If your product is great and your customers are talking about it positively, that becomes part of your AI brand story. If your Glassdoor reviews are terrible, that shows up too. You can’t just hire someone to optimize that away. You have to actually be the thing you say you are.
Kara: That’s the part that excites me. It applies real pressure to be authentic—not the overused LinkedIn version of “authentic,” but genuinely substantive. Your brand’s digital fingerprint is everything you put out there and everything others say about you. And AI is reading all of it.
Jenna: Be thoughtful about what you’re putting out there. Be a good actor. Because it’s all becoming part of your permanent record.
Kara: Last question. Where does this sit inside a marketing team? Who owns it?
Jenna: Honestly, this hasn’t been fully worked out yet. A strong AI search strategy touches content, PR, social—and those are often different teams. My personal opinion is that it should sit with content marketing, ideally in close collaboration with whoever is handling traditional search. The strategy is cross-functional, but the foundation is content.
Kara: Which brings us right back to the beginning. The content has to say something. The positioning has to be clear. And the story has to be worth telling.
Jenna: Every time.
✌️ Kara
Jenna Hannon is the founder of Hatter (gethatter.ai), an agency specializing in AI search visibility. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length from a LinkedIn Live on Brands Under Pressure.
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