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SECURE YOUR SEAT Creators have spent years optimizing for social media algorithms. Now, they’re facing another digital hurdle in discoverability: AI chatbots.
It’s not just shoppers turning to LLMs for product recommendations and shopping — even though nearly one in five consumers have already replaced traditional research with AI, according to a recent SponsorCX survey. Brands and their agency partners are also turning to AI chatbots to determine which creators are being cited the most to strike partner deals, agency execs told Digiday.
Olive oil brand Kosterina, for example, told Digiday that it often starts searches for potential creator partnerships in Claude. And agency execs say they’re starting to include AI visibility efforts in briefs.
Being surfaced in those AI search answers could become another form of creator discoverability — both for brand partnerships and web traffic. Some creators are starting to build their own framework for visibility.
“You can’t ignore what’s happening off of social media [with the rise of AI chatbot use], because that’s where people live. And for me, that’s where my potential partners live,” said Colin Rocker, a full time content creator focused on career development and personal finance.
Early adopters #
Courtney Johnson, an Austin-based content creator, has had a website dedicated entirely to AEO (answer engine optimization) since last October.
“My main goal is to help brands understand that I am an established author with credibility in the career space and personal brand space,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s site repurposes her content from across social and the web as text articles that’s easier for bots to ingest and train on. There’s also structured data on every page, a plain-text index built for LLMs.
Verified crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Apple, Huawei, and DuckDuckGo all read her site, according to internal reporting via Cloudflare.
It’s helped Google searches too. In July, Johnson’s site received 3,048 impressions, up from 2,568 the month before, according to internal reporting. Since launch, the site has received 10,766 search impressions and 435 clicks in Google Search Console.
Auditing visibility #
Rocker, who is based in New York performed an AI citation audit this month with Claude to understand where his content was mentioned in AI generated search results. He found that he is more likely to be cited via avenues such as his LinkedIn profile or podcast appearances. It’s made him reconsider how to grow discoverability beyond word of mouth, which landed him deals with Apple, Adobe and Meta.
“It makes me want to expand the opportunity someone has to see something that I put my hands on,” he said. He has since considered pitching earned media, creating a Wikipedia page and transcribing viral video scripts.
Targeting future partnerships #
Rachel Lowenstein, a content creator focusing on cultural analysis, and her perspectives on autism and neurodiversity, has partnered with companies like TED, Wella, Havas and TikTok. She’s considering how she can optimize her content with keywords and consistency.
AI search’s effect on how creators are discovered is top of mind.
“If a brand wants to work with someone who talks about culture, girls, and brands, I want to be the creator who is showing up in their queries about the best marketing and culture creators,” she said.
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