For as long as marketing has existed, brands have spoken for themselves. The ad, landing page, and pitch deck – all of it built on the assumption that a company gets to make its own case. Sebastian Pinzon Duran, Co-Founder of AIVO, says AI search ends that arrangement. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best product in a category, the brand never speaks. The engine speaks about it, assembling a verdict from sources the brand does not control.
“AI engines don’t invent recommendations,” Duran says. “They pull from what already exists across the web.” Duran spent more than 14 years in digital media across OMG, Publicis, and WPP before building AIVO to help brands appear in AI engines. He believes a brand’s own marketing is now one input among many, weighted against everything else the web has said. The work is no longer authoring the pitch. It is furnishing the evidence someone else will summarize.
What Others Say Now Outweighs What You Say
Review sites, comparison articles, expert roundups, and third-party coverage carry weight an engine treats as more disinterested than a brand’s own claims. A company can describe itself as the category leader on its homepage and still be absent from the answer, having failed to be described that way anywhere a machine would consider neutral.
Duran’s assessment leaves little room for interpretation. A brand described clearly and consistently across the web gets named, while one whose footprint is thin gets skipped. No amount of on-site polish compensates, since the engine is not evaluating persuasion. It is looking for corroboration, but a brand that has never been described well by anyone other than itself has little to offer.
Being Describable Beats Being Persuasive
Marketing copy is written to move someone emotionally, to differentiate through tone and craft. An AI engine has no use for any of that. It needs statements it can extract, attribute, and repeat, which rewards the plainest content a brand produces rather than its most polished.
Duran points to the questions buyers actually work through before choosing. Who the product is for, what problem it solves, how it compares to alternatives. Publishing direct answers to those makes a brand usable to the engine assembling a response. “When your content matches the question, you become the natural source for the answer,” he says. Clarity has become a competitive asset in a way it never was when brands controlled the page, and vagueness now carries a cost.
You Can Finally Read the Verdict
The compensating advantage is that this verdict, unlike reputation in its older forms, can be observed directly. Duran’s instruction is to run the questions buyers ask across every major AI engine and study what comes back. Three things are worth recording. How often the brand appears at all, whether the engine describes it as a leader, and whether the information surfacing is current. That baseline converts a vague anxiety into a channel with a measurable position.
Brands have always wondered what the market really thinks of them. For the first time, something is synthesizing that answer continuously and will state it plainly on request. The answer is already being given, many times a day, whether or not anyone is listening. Reading it is the first step toward changing it.
Follow Sebastian Pinzon Duran on LinkedIn or visit AIVO for more on making your brand the answer AI gives.
