Picture a national quick-service chain standardizing the menu boards across 2,000 drive-thru locations. Or a multi-brand retailer planning a digital signage refresh across their 800-store chain. Long before the RFP is written, someone on that team opens an AI assistant and asks which integrators and CMS platforms they should be considering.
Read the answer they get back, and notice where it comes from. A fair amount of it won’t come directly from the vendors’ own websites. It will come from trade coverage, best-of lists, published case studies, peer threads and review sites.
In short, sources and places the vendors don’t directly control. That should change how our channel thinks about marketing.
How The AI Shortlist Is Created
Not every buyer starts with an LLM (Large Language Model). Plenty still use Google, ask a peer or call a distributor they’ve worked with and trust. But a growing share of decision makers are now beginning their journey with an AI assistant, and even the ones who don’t may still check what it says.
Here’s what this means. When a buyer asks an LLM for the best integrator or platform, your website homepage is only one signal among many. The model largely averages what others already say about you. The answer reflects the prevailing consensus not the whole reality.
The pattern is measurable. Siege Media, which tracks AI visibility across hundreds of brands, reports that ChatGPT alone drives roughly 83% of the LLM activity it sees. Moreover, companies that put a specific, proprietary point of view into the market earn about 45% more AI citations than those relying on generic “best overall” language.
Volume isn’t the winner; specificity is.
How to Describe Your Brand Instead of Simply Optimizing
For 20 years, the discipline was straightforward. You built a site, fed it keywords, climbed the rankings, and buyers found you. That isn’t disappearing, but it is changing, and optimization alone won’t get you there. Search is shifting to AI assistants that answer the question and then name a shortlist.
The old instinct to optimize your way to the top misses the point. You don’t optimize your way into that answer. You’re described into it.
Reputation has always spread through trusted recommendations. Today, AI is becoming another voice in that conversation, assembling its own view from third-party sources across the web.
For instance, in digital signage, the buyer usually can’t experience the solution before committing to a partner. There’s no test drive for a national rollout. Here, one of the marketing practices is earned media from press efforts on relevant topics, from wins to use cases to end-user stakeholder interviews. Concentrating on gaining third-party pickup of the stories allows you to build authority in ways that now fuel LLM citations.
Brand Authority is Now Upstream Demand
While the medium has changed, the principle hasn’t. Independent credibility has always mattered; now AI is often the first to surface it. This reframes brand authority. It’s no longer a soft metric you report after the fact. Increasingly, it’s what creates demand in the first place, generating interest and shaping the shortlist before a single vendor has been named.
It helps to see the parts as one system. Thought leadership is the point of view. Earned media carries it into the world and earns the citation. Meanwhile, paid media rents attention the machine largely ignores.
How to Build Your Pro AV Brand
The fix for making it to the AI shortlist is a discipline around ownership of a message, not a campaign.
First, own a specific claim. Not “full-service integrator.” Not “end-to-end platform.” Those anchor to nothing, and an AI model has nothing to attach them to. Pick the territory you can actually win, the best integrator for quick-service drive-thru, the best CMS for enterprise retail networks, and say it in public, repeatedly. The narrow claim is the one that gets cited.
Second, multiply the vote beyond your own site. One post won’t move an answer built from dozens of sources; earned media does the heavy lifting. A recent Muck Rack Generative Pulse analysis — drawing on more than a million AI citations across several platforms and published with go-to-market firm LeadCoverage — found that journalistic and earned media account for close to a quarter of everything LLMs cite. What’s more interesting is that non-paid sources account for roughly 94%. That’s the part worth underscoring: the position that matters most is one you largely can’t buy.
The budget logic that favors paid media may now be working against you. Siege Media estimates the shift takes 60 to 90 days to register, and it compounds rather than spikes.
Third, make your own house confirm it. Your website still matters, not as the storefront that ranks, but as the source that verifies. When the model checks whether the outside story holds, your own words should say the same thing, in the same language. This works hardest in the form of FAQs or “this vs that.”
Ensuring Time and Budget for the AI Shortlist
Timing matters, because position hardens. The integrators and platforms publishing now are setting the terms that the rest of the channel will be measured against next year. Arguing against a story already written is a harder, costlier fight than writing it first.
This leads to the question every plan in this channel now must answer: as SEO gives way to GEO, it isn’t whether to invest; it’s whether your budget still sits where the buying decision now gets made. The line item that earns your citations is almost never the paid line your budget was built around.
In the AI era, brand authority isn’t something you measure after demand has been created. Increasingly, it’s what creates demand in the first place.
The companies shaping the conversation today are becoming the companies AI recommends tomorrow. The question isn’t whether your buyers will ask AI, it’s whether AI already knows who you are.
Beth Warren is global consultancy partner of Re-Sauce, a sales, marketing and PR consultancy.
