People are lazy. Turns out, AI is too.
People are lazy, and marketing has spent a hundred years making the most of it.
Give a shopper the choice between comparing twelve cereals and grabbing the one they bought last time, and they grab the one they bought last time. Distinctive assets, memory structures, the default choice, we built an entire industry around removing effort from a decision so it lands in our favor before anyone actually compares anything.
We built an entire industry around removing effort from a decision.
Turns out the model doing half our thinking for us now has the same problem. Ask an AI a question with fifteen defensible answers and watch what happens. It doesn't weigh all fifteen. It grabs whatever's easiest to stand behind and gives you one answer, fast. That's just what it is: a very confident guesser trying to avoid extra work, same as the rest of us in the cereal aisle.
Every marketing conference this year has a session on AEO or GEO or whichever acronym is fashionable this quarter, all promising to get your brand mentioned inside an AI answer. I had to look one of them up. It doesn't matter which one. Getting mentioned was never the hard part, Google mentions everyone. The hard part is what the lazy machine does next, when it only gets to name one brand and has to decide which one it can defend without doing any more work.
Getting mentioned was never the hard part. The hard part is what the lazy machine does next.
We tested this on a major bank this year. Ask an AI about banking and the bank comes up constantly, nobody has trouble finding it. Ask which single bank you should actually use to address a specific, real need, and a smaller rival with a noticeably weaker product got named instead, over and over. The bank never once got picked. Being visible and being chosen turned out to be two different businesses.
Being visible and being chosen turned out to be two different businesses.
Travel is already living the same shift. More than half of shoppers now ask an AI before they ask a person, and an entire category like cruise lines is about to get flattened into whichever one is easiest for a model to describe without hedging. Nobody wants to be the seventh cruise line on a list. Everybody wants to be the one the model just says, with no list at all.
Discoverability asks whether the machine knows you exist. Recommendability asks something else: whether the machine, given the choice between doing more work and just saying your name, takes the lazy option and says it. Most brands are optimizing for the first question. The lazy machine only ever cared about the second.
Brand building has always been in the business of making things easy for a lazy mind, because effort kills conversion. The model choosing on someone's behalf now runs on the identical rule, and it isn't going to start trying harder on your account.
Give it something obvious, and it stops looking and says your name.