At our May breakfast, Steve Robinson of Path3 walked the room through one of the most pressing questions facing marketers in 2026: how do you get ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to recommend your brand? The short answer is that most of the popular advice circulating online is either outdated or flatly wrong.

The marketers who actually get cited by AI tools are the ones doing strong organic SEO, writing with sharp positioning, and earning real mentions across the wider web. Steve framed his talk through the story of his own hunt for a new refrigerator, which began with his wife Kim’s love of ice and a broken ice maker, then unpacked how modern AI engines actually choose which products to surface.

Modern AI Reaches for Tools Before It Answers

The first myth Steve dismantled was the idea that the goal is to “get into the training data.” That advice made sense in 2024. It does not hold up in 2026. Today’s AI tools are not simply predicting the next word based on what they were trained on. They reason about your prompt, recognize their own limitations, and pull in external tools before answering. The most important of these tools is web search.

That means when a chatbot recommends a brand, that brand was almost certainly surfaced through a live search of the open web. Whatever appears in those results gets pulled into what Steve called the context window, weighed against everything else, and synthesized into the response. The practical implication is straightforward. If you already win at organic SEO, you are most of the way to winning at AI recommendations.

There is one nuance worth noting. AI prompts carry far more context than the typical Google search. Someone asking for the best refrigerator for a family of five might also mention their budget, their kitchen size, their ice maker preferences, and their shopping history. That additional context is what allows AI to deliver more qualified traffic than search. Studies from SEER Interactive and Similarweb suggest AI referral traffic converts 1.7 to 9 times more often in B2B contexts and roughly 2.15 times more often in e-commerce.

Position for Ideas, Not Keywords

The deeper mechanic behind AI recommendations is that these tools do not actually process words. They process ideas. Steve illustrated this by having the room map vehicles onto two axes (small to large, boring to fun) with their hands. Modern AI does the same exercise across roughly 1,536 dimensions for every idea it encounters.

When a customer types a prompt, the AI encodes that prompt into the same multidimensional space and then looks for products and content positioned at the same coordinates. The clearer and more specific your positioning, the more precisely the AI can match you to the right prompts.

This is why keyword stuffing is even less useful than it was for traditional SEO. The tools already understand synonyms and adjacent ideas. What they need from you is consistency. Talk about your product or service the same way across your site, your reviews, and your earned coverage. The stronger your positioning sits in that idea space, the more reliably AI will recommend you to the people you are actually built for.

Steve also flagged a measurement caution here. Memory settings, prompt variation, randomness in the model (Steve called it “chaos monkeys”), and variability in search results all conspire to give every user a slightly different answer. That makes it nearly impossible to reliably measure your visibility in AI tools today. Most of the vendors selling AI visibility dashboards are selling noise. The better proxy is your AI referral traffic in Google Analytics, which Google recently made easier to isolate with a new channel grouping. Watch the volume, and watch the conversion rate. If AI traffic converts well, your positioning is working.

Be Worth Talking About

The final piece of the puzzle is what happens outside your own website. When the AI bot runs a search, it is not just reading your site. It is reading everything that mentions you. If your brand does not show up across the broader web, you will not get recommended.

Steve’s word for the solution is remarkable, in the literal sense of being worthy of remark. The tactics that earn those mentions will be familiar to most marketers, but they take on new weight in this context. Deliver an experience worth reviewing, especially if you are a local business. Offer free tools or proprietary data. Sponsor causes and events that align with your positioning. Show up where your audience already gathers.

A few practical notes for your own site round it out. Use clean headings and short sections so AI can chunk and encode your content correctly. Lead with the core idea up top, because crawlers often stop reading after the first few hundred characters. Check that tools like Cloudflare and Wordfence are not blocking legitimate AI bots from reaching you. Consider adding an llms.txt file, an emerging standard for declaring your content to language models.

As for blogs, Steve was direct. Generic educational content gets scraped and absorbed. Blogs that frame buying decisions in a niche space, on the other hand, still earn their place because that thought leadership content is exactly what AI pulls into the context window when it is helping someone decide what to buy.

If you do three things, Steve argued, you will get recommended by AI. Own your position. Follow SEO best practices, with a few extra steps for crawlability. Be remarkable.

Follow this link for the presentation slides.

SPONSORS:

• DreamBank
• Live Well Video
• VEDUB Media | Bryant Vander Weerd
• Melissa Carlson Creative
• Suttle-Straus
• Talent CPA

NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT: Food For Kidz

Food for Kidz is a Dane County nonprofit is making a powerful impact on food insecurity by turning community energy into action. Since 2005, they’ve mobilized nearly 1,000 volunteers – many of them youth – for a large-scale annual meal-packing event that produces between 300,000–400,000 nutritious, shelf-stable meals in just one day. With over 4.7 million meals already distributed locally and globally, they’re approaching an incredible milestone: 5 million meals.

Volunteerism is at the heart of their mission and you can help! Sign up to work a shift (or more) during their October 11 event. There are also opportunities to get involved year-round through a volunteer committee. Their work not only provides critical meals for families in need, but also inspires the next generation to lead with service, compassion, and community connection.

Connect with them at:

• Website: waunakeefoodforkidz.org
• Facebook: @waunakeefoodforkidz