When you ask ChatGPT which toaster to buy, it gives you three options and a recommendation, and most people buy the one it recommends. Rich M. Smith, who has been chief marketing officer of seven companies over 25 years, told me on Unscripted Small Business that’s exactly how he shops now. When I brought up the idea of treating AI visibility as outsourced customer service, he went further: “I love the phrase outsourced customer service. In many ways, it’s outsourced sales as well.”
Rich runs Rich M. Smith Growth Studio and hosts The Revenue Science Podcast. He is writing up our conversation on his own blog. You can watch the full episode here.
The AI answer is the sales conversation now
If AI is outsourced sales, then the answer an engine gives about your category is the pitch, and you didn’t write it. Rich described the experience from the buyer’s side:
“It almost sounds like a trusted friend giving you advice. So it’s kind of like word-of-mouth marketing on steroids, right?”
He didn’t sugarcoat what that does to shopping. You get the recommendation from Perplexity, you go to Amazon and you buy that one. “You don’t go shopping,” he said. The comparison step that your category pages were built for happens inside the answer.
Your website isn’t what your customers see anymore
This is the line from the episode I’d put in front of every client.
“What is being said about you, what you put on your website and what you put in your advertising is not necessarily what your customers are actually seeing anymore.”
His first piece of advice is that “you have to be cognizant of how you’re showing up in AI, and there are some tools now to help you do that.” I’d add one caution from my own testing: don’t take a visibility tool’s number on faith. The SOP for checking AI visibility data against your own first-party data is the step I run before I report anything from one of those tools.
Third-party mentions carry more weight, but your own site still counts
Rich’s second piece of advice is to generate third-party media. You can put your stats, social proof and testimonials on your own site, and you should keep doing it. But they “don’t carry as much weight as a news article written about me, as a review article written about me.”
“If somebody else says that about me to you, it carries a lot more weight. And that’s the same thing, that’s exactly the way you know AI engines work.”
I agree with the direction, and here’s the boundary I’d put on it. When I ran the Naperville test on local law firm recommendations, 22 of the 39 citations ChatGPT gave, 56%, pointed at the firms’ own websites. Third-party sources matter. Your own site still makes up more than half of what gets cited in that test. Rich’s own advice covers both halves: keep doing the on-site work, and go get coverage. For the coverage side, Bradley Benner made the case that press releases are back for AI search.
The study I brought up points off-page too
On the show I mentioned a new study on what correlates with AI search visibility across models. Going from memory, the strongest signal was a backlink profile that matched the industry of the page, then linked and unlinked mentions, with homepage relevance fourth. Rich’s read was quick: “it sounds like his results showed that the top three drivers were all third party.” More on the study and the rest of our conversation is in the Unscripted Small Business recap.
That lines up with what I found in my own data. In the anchor text study, exact-phrase anchors showed nothing, while anchors that shared the query’s words, in any order, showed a real effect. Relevance, not the exact phrase, is the thread running through both.
The best way to look like an authority is to have answered first
Rich’s last point was the one that made me stop. People don’t only ask AI engines what to buy. They ask how to fix what they already own. He’s a HubSpot user, and when he has a HubSpot question, “I don’t go to HubSpot and ask that question.” He asks an AI engine, and it answers.
So if you install pools, he said, think “about what are the common problems that people have with their pools.” Then publish the answers.
“So making that information available, then the engines will find it and present it to your customers and maybe your prospects when they’re having a problem.”
I told Rich how I put it: “the best way to come off as an authority is to have already spoken about something before you’re asked about it.” If you haven’t, you’re gambling that a customer stumbles onto you, instead of the engine pointing them to the answer you already gave. Here’s where I’d start:
- Pull the last 30 days of support emails, calls and reviews, and list the problems customers mention after they’ve bought.
- Write one page or one short video per problem. Rich’s example was checking the chlorine concentration in your water.
- Get one third-party mention per quarter that isn’t on your own domain: a local news story, a podcast, a review roundup.
Mike Martin’s Google Business Profile plays cover the review side of that list for local businesses.
So which questions about your product are AI engines answering right now without you? And when they recommend someone in your category, what did that someone publish that you didn’t? You can reach Rich at richmsmith.com or on LinkedIn.