AI Discoverability: A New Way to Control What AIs Say About You

In the new era of conversational computing, your stakeholders’ first touchpoint is no longer a search engine, it’s an AI. When your investors, customers, policymakers, or future employees ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot a question about you, what do they hear?

The AI’s best guess… or your verifiable truth?

AI Discoverability Isn’t Just Marketing. It’s Enterprise-Wide Strategy.

Because our methodology is integrated across our entire agency, it delivers value far beyond the marketing department.

• For Crisis: You don’t want an AI “guessing” your side of the story. Our framework ensures your verified truth is the foundational data set.
• For Public Affairs: When a policymaker asks an AI to summarize a complex issue, your nuanced position is what it finds.
• For Management Consulting: The “Conversational Journey” audit reveals what your market truly thinks, providing invaluable data for your next business strategy.

This is why AI Discoverability matters now across your C-suite.

Don’t React to AI. Teach it.

Right now, your brand, reputation, and core value proposition are being defined for you by a black box. It’s time to take control.

The “Platform-First” Trap: Why GEO and AIO Aren’t Enough

Other agencies are now selling “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO) or “AI Optimization” (AIO). These are tactical, “platform-first” approaches.

They start by auditing what an AI gets wrong and then react to it, scrambling to fix errors with a flurry of PR hits or basic schema recommendations. This is a reactive game of ‘whack-a-mole’ you will never win, because you are always one step behind the algorithm.

Reacting to the bot is a losing strategy. Teaching the bot is the only way to win.

The Tunheim Solution: A Stakeholder-First Approach

We’ve built a different, more powerful methodology. We don’t start with the platform; we start with your stakeholders.

We believe you cannot influence a machine until you deeply understand the human who is using it.

Our AI Discoverability service is a strategic, C-suite process that architects your company’s foundational truth. We’ve mastered this approach by developing a unique, proprietary process: The “Stakeholder-to-Syntax” Pipeline.

1. Stakeholder Intelligence: We begin with the deep, human-centric research that defines our agency. We build robust personas and map the entire conversational journey of your key stakeholders, from buyers and investors to policymakers and potential hires.
2. Concept Optimization: We use that intelligence to build the foundational “Knowledge Graph” for your brand. This is your conceptual truth, your expertise, your executive voices, and your position in the market. It becomes the official “answer key” for the AI.
3. Technical Execution: We translate this strategic blueprint into the native, machine-readable language of AI (Schema.org / JSON-LD) and deploy it directly onto your owned properties. We don’t just “recommend” schema; we architect it.
4. Ecosystem Validation: Finally, we use our full-service media, digital, and public affairs expertise to validate this truth across the entire digital ecosystem—from the high-authority earned media that AIs trust to the critical databases like Wikidata that form their training data.

This Isn’t Our First Algorithm

For 30 years, Tunheim has guided the world’s leading organizations through the algorithms that control information flow.

• We mastered email spam filters to get your message delivered.
• We mastered Google’s search rankings to get your brand seen.
• We mastered social media feeds to get your story told.

Generative AI is just the next, most complex, evolution. We provide Algorithmic Resilience based on a pattern of adaptation we’ve proven for three decades.

Stop chasing the algorithm. It’s time to teach it.
Architect your AI Discoverability framework.

The digital landscape is shifting—fast. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how consumers find and interact with brands, and the strategies that once worked for search and social media are rapidly becoming obsolete.

For CMOs, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Will you proactively adapt to AI-driven discoverability, or will you wait until your competitors define the playing field?

In a recent episode of Tunheim’s Being Understood Podcast, David Erickson, Senior Director of AI & Emerging Technology, shared how AI is transforming digital discoverability—and what brands need to do to stay ahead. This blog breaks down key insights from the episode and outlines how CMOs can take control of their brand’s future before AI leaves them behind.

The AI Disruption in Search and Social

Traditional SEO and Social Strategies Are Losing Ground

For years, brands have relied on search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing to drive discoverability. But as David Erickson points out, AI-driven changes are making these strategies less effective. 

• Zero-Click Search: “Google has, over time, created Instant Answers… so there’s no need to click,” Erickson explains. Search engines are now serving up direct answers, reducing the number of people clicking through to brand websites. 
• Social Media’s “Link Penalty”: Platforms like Facebook prioritize native content (videos, images) over links. “Facebook… all the other social channels, really, are doing the same thing… they’re trying to keep you on their platform.” 

This means that simply ranking high in Google search or posting links on social media is no longer enough. Brands must rethink how they appear across these digital ecosystems. 

AI-Powered Search Assistants Are Changing Discoverability

Beyond traditional search, AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are becoming key sources of consumer information. “OpenAI… released what’s called a multi-modal model, where you can talk to it and it’ll talk back naturally,” Erickson explains. 

This shift means that AI isn’t just indexing content—it’s actively choosing what information to surface. Brands that fail to align their content with AI’s needs risk being left out of these new discovery channels entirely. 

How CMOs Can Take Back Control

1. Position Your Brand as an AI-Ready Authority

AI models prioritize reliable, high-quality sources of information. Erickson highlights Google’s E.E.A.T. framework—Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—as key to AI-driven search. 

“Google has an acronym… for good content… Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” Erickson explains. Brands need to demonstrate credibility through well-structured, fact-based content if they want to be surfaced by AI-driven platforms. 

2. Shift Your Content Strategy from Clicks to Engagement 

Since search and social platforms now discourage external links, brands must focus on engagement-first content that thrives within each ecosystem.

• Use native content—videos, carousels, and interactive posts—to boost organic reach.
• Build thought leadership through long-form articles, reports, and podcasts that establish your brand as a trusted industry resource.
• Leverage conversational AI strategies to ensure your brand’s voice is represented in AI-driven search results. 

3. Conduct an AI Brand Audit

One of the most actionable steps CMOs can take today is an AI brand audit—a systematic review of how AI perceives and presents their brand across search, social, and conversational platforms. 

Key questions to consider: 

• How does AI summarize your brand? 
• What sources is AI pulling information from? 
• Are your competitors better positioned in AI-driven search results? 

Understanding these insights allows CMOs to proactively shape their brand’s AI presence rather than leaving it up to chance. 

4. Adapt SEO for AI Discoverability

Traditional SEO must evolve. Instead of focusing purely on keywords and backlinks, brands should:

• Structure content for AI-friendly indexing (clear headings, concise summaries, authoritative citations). 
• Use structured data markup to help AI interpret and prioritize content. 
• Ensure factual accuracy—AI models prioritize well-sourced, verifiable information. 

Act Now—Before Your Brand Gets Left Behind

AI is already changing how consumers find and interact with brands. Don’t let yours get left behind.

As Erickson warns, “The challenge of discoverability is not going away. It’s only going to get tougher… the best way to build a true competitive edge is to really jump on this now.”

AI is reshaping discoverability. Will you lead or follow?

Take Action Today

Schedule a call with Tunheim’s AI and digital strategy experts to assess your brand’s AI discoverability and ensure you remain a top source for both search engines and AI-driven platforms.

Don’t wait—position your brand for the AI-driven future now.

You may have heard the recent “controversy” about Meta reducing the prominence of news and political content on Facebook, Instagram but more specifically its new competitor to Twitter, Threads.

Given Tunheim’s role as a public relations and a public affairs practitioner, those are two industry sectors I pay close attention to.

And boy are they loud on this subject. Cries of throttling free speech and censorship have been thrown about with abandon.

Yes, Meta has been reducing the prominence of news and political content on its platforms but this is not a new phenomenon. It’s been happening for years. The only difference is the claim Adam Mosseri, who leads both Instagram and now Threads, made that Meta’s new Twitter competitor would not be amplifying that type of content.

 

With a lot of journalists and politicos fleeing Twitter–where news and politics have long been the dominant topics–to Threads, the statement caused an uproar.

Personally, I’ve been using Threads from launch, and, as a news and politics junkie, my Threads feed reflects just that: It is almost entirely news and politics. The uproar appears to me to be a handful of loud voices gaming the refs.

Even so, social media writ large has been reducing the reach of some types of content. I first noticed it in 2014, so, not new.

In that year, social media management company Buffer shared research documenting the phenomenon.

Jay Baer of Convince and Convert mashed up reach data with Facebook’s stock price, illustrating a correlation between diminished reach with financial reward for the company:

So, what gives? What’s the financial incentive for Facebook to reduce the reach of its users’ content?

Well, if you can’t get exposure for your content by just posting to your Facebook page, what options do you have? Facebook advertising, of course!

Content analytics company BuzzSumo documented a decline in Facebook engagements across all post types from 2016 to 2017.

The Link Penalty

BuzzSumo supplemented that general engagement data with insight into which types of posts got the most and the least engagement.

While Parse.ly published findings that documented a decline in referral traffic Facebook was sending other websites from 2017 to 2018.

SparkToro published a study on Google searches that documented a decline in mobile click-through rates from 2016 to 2018.

So, yes, this decline in reach has been happening for years and Facebook isn’t the only culprit. Google’s in on the game, too.

So what’s the common denominator? Links, it would appear. Links get the least engagement on Facebook. Facebook is sending less referral traffic to other websites through–you guessed it!–links. And Google is reducing the click-through rate on…links!

In 2021, social media management company Hootsuite conducted its own research that reinforces this observation, showing that posts on LinkedIn that include a link to a website enjoy fewer impressions and much less engagement across the board.

They also looked at posts that included a link to a YouTube video on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook:

But why penalize links?

Because the various platforms want you to stay on their platform. The more people who spend more time on their platform do more things that create more signals and data that can be monetized in the form of advertising.

It’s An Algorithmic World

I’ve been doing search engine optimization my entire career and social media most of my career. If there’s one constant, it’s that algorithms change. All the time.

Success depends upon understanding that, stay on top of those changes, and adjusting to the new realities.

Rethinking Social Media

Organizations and brands that have been relying on link posts need to rethink their approach to social media. This is where we excel. If you need help thinking that through, let’s talk!

What Is A Digital Marketing Audit?

A digital marketing audit is an in-depth examination of an organization’s online communications in order to identify strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and obstacles, establish benchmarks, and provide insights and direction for future marketing efforts. 

The finished product is typically delivered in the form of a written report, a presentation, or both and summarizes the findings, including the good, the bad, the ugly and recommendations for improvement.

Depending upon need, the audit may also include sets of data compiled while conducting the audit.  

What Is The Purpose Of A Digital Marketing Audit?

The short answer is: To know what you don’t know. 

The long answer is: It depends. 

It depends on what you want to know. Let’s break this down into the typical scenarios in which you would need to do an audit.

Why Conduct A Digital Marketing Audit & Why Is It Important?

There are several reasons why you might want to conduct a digital marketing audit.

Technology Innovations

Digital platforms and channels are always changing and evolving. Google continually updates its search algorithms, for example. Social media channels, too, change their algorithms to emphasize or de-emphasize various factors. For example, with the rise of TikTok, competing channels are now emphasizing short-form video content. These are evolutionary changes. 

But sometimes we are faced with revolutionary changes. That is what we are facing at this present moment with Generative AI. When such a massively disruptive technological innovation appears on the scene, it’s a good idea to conduct an audit to understand how that disruption is affecting you and to begin to plan how you’ll deal with it.   

Accessibility Evaluation

Conducting an accessibility evaluation as part of a digital marketing audit is crucial. Ensuring your digital presence is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, is not only a matter of compliance but also an essential element of ethical and responsible digital marketing.

Time-Based Audits

A digital audit is a fantastic tool to use as preparation heading into an annual planning session for the year ahead. It can help focus the discussion among senior leadership on weaknesses to be shored up, strengths to be built upon, and new opportunities to be exploited. 

You may be planning a new service or product launch. In which case, a digital marketing audit can prove invaluable in understanding the competitive landscape, inform your go-to-market strategy, and help in positioning your new offering. 

Change In Personnel

Digital audits are often initiated with the arrival of a new CMO or Director of Public Relations or Communications in order to help them get the lay of the land in their new role. 

Other examples of changes in personnel that might trigger a digital audit include the loss of a digital marketing team strategist, or the restructuring of a unit or division requiring a team to reorient and get on the same page.

Reviewals

Another instigator of digital marketing audits is the need to review performance of recently concluded marketing campaigns. This can take the form of an annual review in preparation of future planning or acclimating a new CMO to the current state of marketing efforts. 

It can also take the form of a review of a recently conducted campaign. 

Performance 

Sometimes the competitive environment dictates a change in key objectives or new leadership will adjust key performance metrics, which can trigger a fresh look at an organization’s digital marketing efforts. 

Strategic Direction

There is a clear need to take a fresh look at digital marketing efforts when the overarching strategy behind those efforts changes. An overhaul of strategy can occur as a result of many of the changes we just mentioned.

Crisis

A crisis that prompts a need to respond with communications or simply understand the nature of the threat will often trigger a digital audit. Think of any recent backlash against a brand’s behavior on social media and you’ll get a feel for what is involved. By understanding what people are saying about the brand, communicators will have an informed basis from which to respond. 

Reputation Management

While many communicators will view the discovery of negative online reviews and ratings as a crisis situation, it typically is not. Unless those negative comments have been prompted as the result of an actual crisis. 

Negative reviews are usually the result of inattention and represent a bad situation but not one that cannot get resolved with the help of a digital audit.  

Changes In Partnerships

Finally, a digital marketing audit is typically initiated when a partner agency is being appraised. An audit is also typically iniated when an organization hires a new agency to help the new partner get up to speed.  

What Should Be Included In A Digital Marketing Audit?

What should be included in your digital marketing audit? Again, it depends on what you want to accomplish. 

At the very least, you’ll want to include all your owned channels (website and/or mobile app, email communications, podcast) and your shared properties (social media channels, YouTube/Vimeo). 

Additional elements to include, depending upon your needs, might be:

• • All of the above for your competitors
  • Analysis of target audiences
  • News media coverage
  • Share of Voice for news coverage, social media conversations, and search visibility
  • Share of Shares – Comparison of content shared via social media
  • Social listening for brand or topic mentions
  • Keyword research for brand or topics
  • Search engine visibility
  • Website & social media analytics and conversion rates 
  • Content marketing analysis and key messages for your brand and competitors
  • Advertising strategies of competitors

What Are The Critical Factors In A Digital Marketing Audit?

Most digital audits will include four critical factors.

Your Goals

What are the critical objectives your digital marketing efforts are meant to help accomplish? It could be as specific as “increase ecommerce sales by 5%” or as general as “drive new organic search traffic to our website from likely customers by creating compelling content that appeals to them.” 

Your goals could be narrowly tailored to audit-specific outcomes: “Find and appraise all our digital assets.” 

The Audit

Obviously.

The Analysis/Assessment

The audit analysis is an assessment of the nature of your digital marketing presence and/or efforts, broken down into two basic components: Quantitative and qualitative analysis. 

The quantitative analysis is the crunching the numbers part. This can include: 

• • Google analytics data,
  • Social media followership and engagement metrics,
  • Share of Social Media voice,
  • Share of Search engine rankings,
  • Email marketing metrics such as open rates, and
  • Digital advertising metrics such as click through rate

The qualitative analysis interprets the audit findings. It identifies strengths in your digital communication efforts, obstacles that are hampering your efforts, and opportunities that can be exploited.

Some things the qualitative analysis can uncover are: 

• • How your audience engages with content on social channels, 
  • The nature of social conversations about your brand and/or competitors, 
  • The type of content that is driving search engine traffic to your website, 
  • The messaging on and usability of your website and/or your competitors website,
  • The effectiveness of your digital measurement protocols, 
  • The degree to which your email subscribers act in response to your email campaigns, and
  • The degree to which your digital advertising campaigns are driving conversions.

Future Direction/Plans

Finally, what do the audit finding say about the success of your digital marketing goals and how might the findings inform your future strategic direction and plans? 

This section would typically include recommendations. 

What Is The Most Important Part Of A Digital Marketing Audit?

The analyst. 

Anyone can collect and compile data but understanding what that data means requires a completely different set of skills and experience. 

Ideally, the person overseeing the audit has deep experience in all aspects of digital marketing so as to be able to connect the dots between different tactics and channel use. Failing that, the team conducting the audit should have 5-10 years experience with the digital channels they are auditing. 

What Are The Steps For Conducting An Audit?

1. 1. Define your goal(s) for the audit
   2. Identify what you need to learn from your audit (landscape analysis? competitive review? employer reputation? etc.) 
   3. Identify the digital channels you want to examine
   4. Identify what type of expertise you’ll need to conduct the audit
   5. Assemble your in-house team or vet marketing agencies to do your audit
   6. Calculate your budget
   7. Draft a timeline for completion 
   8. Let your audit team get to work
   9. Review the findings
   10. Plan to implement recommendations

Need help with your audit? Let’s talk!

Tunheim’s Director of Digital, David Erickson, answers the question, how is AI changing marketing? David shares that AI is changing the way brands can be found. As generative AI is built into search results, it is pushing down the top ten links we typically see in search results and making it harder for brands and products to be found. This is something we are focused on and evolving with as we go.

If you have questions about AI and search marketing, reach out to Tunheim.

Countless eye tracking studies demonstrate that people do not read online in the same, concentrated manner as they do printed material. People scan online content.

There are different types of scanning behavior but the most common is the F-shaped scan, where eye movements track in the shape of the letter F. The following are eye tracking heatmaps demonstrating the F-shaped scanning behavior:

This predictable online behavior can be harnessed to help ensure the messages you want to convey are seen and ultimately sink in.

Given this fact of online behavior, it is important to weave key messaging into online content where it is most likely to be seen. In the context of text, that means at the beginning of headlines and sub headlines and within the first sentences of paragraphs.

In order to both harness scanning behavior and make it easier for the reader to consume key messages, consider surrounding those key messages with white space to make them stand out and to make it easier for the eye to begin a scan.

This tactic is most easily deployed with a headline but it could also be used by making key message paragraphs a single sentence long.

Ideally, boil down your key messages to three to five words to facilitate ease of consumption.

Weaving your key messages into the headlines and paragraphs of an article or blog post is an important aspect of being understood, but if you are promoting that content in social media channels, there’s still work to do in order to earn the attention of your target audience.

The most prominent feature of social media channels is the news feed. When users log into their favorite social media channel, the first thing they will likely do is scroll through their feed to get the latest “news” from their network.

Mobile accounts for nearly 80% of visits to social sites in the US, so attention spans are fleeting.

People are far more likely to engage with a social media post that includes a visual element such as a photograph, illustration, chart or video. Use multimedia that supports your key messages.

Photographs of people are especially effective at stopping users from scrolling.

Human beings are hard-wired to pay attention to other people’s eyes. This is likely a legacy survival mechanism when noticing other people focusing on potential dangers in the wilderness could’ve meant the difference between life and death for early humans. This behavior is illustrated in heatmap studies:

Not only do people focus on the eyes of other humans, they also follow their gaze:

Here’s another example of a gaze pattern following the eyes of the subject.

The image on the right shows the gaze intensity of eye tracking participants when shown an image of a person who is looking directly into the camera.

The image on the left shows how people will follow the gaze of the subject of an image. You can harness this dynamic to draw the attention of viewers into your key messages, in this case the product’s brand name.

Conversely, if you have messages that must be posted but would prefer it not attract a great deal of attention or engagement, publish your content as plain text. This scenario would typically occur when you’ve got bad news to convey that isn’t critical but must be conveyed.

Digital marketing considerations are woven into everything we do at Tunheim.

If you need help thinking through how you can best be understood, let’s talk.