GM views car dealers as a primary source of customer insight, not just a sales channel. Dealers effectively run continuous A/B tests on messaging and can provide real-time feedback on what resonates with customers—what "makes their eye sparkle"—which is often more potent than formal research.

The rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude has created a new frontier for marketers beyond SEO: "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO). Brands are struggling to understand what consumers are prompting, how to ensure their products are included in AI-generated responses, and how to guarantee that information is presented accurately.

Distributors possess a long-standing "secret weapon"—a massive repository of clean, well-understood data on partner behavior and transactions. As AI becomes prevalent, distributors are uniquely positioned to leverage this data to provide superior business intelligence, solidifying their role in the channel ecosystem.

According to Expedia's Head of Organic Search, success in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) requires influencing four areas: the AI's training data, its real-time information retrieval process, the user queries themselves, and the AI's compounding user memory.

Instead of gating its valuable review data like traditional analyst firms, G2 strategically chose to syndicate it and make it available to LLMs. This ensures G2 remains a trusted, cited source within AI-generated answers, maintaining brand influence and relevance where buyers are now making decisions.

Criteo’s strategy with OpenAI is to create a hybrid system. LLMs provide general reasoning and conversational ability, but their knowledge quickly becomes stale for dynamic commerce data like pricing and stock. Criteo provides the real-time data layer to ensure accuracy and avoid bad user experiences.

To get included in AI answers, you must answer the specific questions your customers are actually asking. Audit your customer service platform and social forums to find these real-world queries. This surfaces high-intent, long-tail questions that brands often miss when focusing on their own narrative.

Don't just focus on ranking for broad, initial LLM queries like "best CRM platforms." The real conversion opportunity lies in the highly specific follow-up questions users ask, which reveal their true context and intent. Brands must ensure they appear in these refined, long-tail answers to get chosen.

By analyzing thousands of conversation transcripts, AI systems can identify sales patterns, common objections, and customer concerns specific to different geographic areas. This allows businesses to tailor their messaging and sales strategy down to a neighborhood level, a degree of personalization previously impossible to achieve.