What problem does your brand solve? If you need more than one sentence to answer that, AI-powered search is about to make your life harder.
That's the core argument from Greg Jarboe writing in Search Engine Land, and after watching how AI search tools handle brand queries over the past year, it tracks with what we've seen firsthand.
The Compressed Journey Problem
Consumer behavior used to follow a funnel: discover, research, compare, buy. Those stages still exist, but they're collapsing into single sessions. Someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's the best project management tool for a 5-person agency" and gets one answer. There's no second page of results. There's no "let me browse 10 comparison articles."
David Edelman, former CMO advisor at Aon and McKinsey, puts it this way: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping now happen simultaneously. The purchase happens wherever confidence peaks, not wherever impressions accumulate.
For brands, this means the old playbook of producing more content across more channels is activity disguised as strategy. If an AI model can't figure out what specific situation your product is the best answer for, more blog posts won't fix that.
Positioning Clarity Is Now a Technical Requirement
Jarboe points to Warby Parker, Nike, Glossier, and IKEA as brands with positioning so clear that AI models can reliably surface them for the right queries. These companies can each be described in a single, specific sentence.
The practical advice here is to run what he calls an "objectives audit" - not just checking where your messaging appears, but whether your brand can articulate the specific problem it solves. Most can't. They default to category descriptors ("we're a productivity platform") instead of situation-specific claims ("we help freelance designers manage client revisions without email chains").
This matters for anyone doing SEO or content marketing with AI tools. The models pulling answers from your site aren't just matching keywords anymore. They're trying to understand what you actually do and who you do it for. Vague copy that worked fine for traditional search rankings falls apart when an AI needs to recommend you over a competitor in a direct answer.
The Practical Takeaway
Before investing in AI-optimized content strategies, fix the foundation. Write one sentence describing the specific situation where your product is the best answer. If that sentence sounds like it could describe three of your competitors, it's not done yet.
The brands winning in AI search aren't the ones producing the most content. They're the ones whose positioning is so specific that models can confidently recommend them. That's a messaging problem, not a technology problem.