Typeface field CTO offers advice on creating consistent digital experiences for bots and human customers
Satya Krishnaswamy was recently in conversation with a large consumer goods company, and they were eager to discuss answer engine optimization (AEO), or how their brand got cited within AI search tools like ChatGPT.
As the Field CTO for Typeface, a company whose software helps orchestrate AI experiences, Krishnaswamy has become accustomed to guiding clients in getting noticed by large language models (LLMs) that fuel answer engines.
In a research report dubbed The AI Visibility Gap, Typeface found 68 per cent of marketers are creating content experiences for AI that humans will likely never see, and more than a quarter are building internal or hidden pages meant to influence how AI describes them.
However Krishnaswamy said he told the brand in question that they needed to be equally vigilant about what happens if a potential customer winds up clicking through a citation to its website.
Field CTO, Typeface
“The worst thing you can have as a brand marketer is to have two different perspectives of your brand being shown, depending on whether it’s being represented through the agents or through the eyes of a human visitor,” Krishnaswamy told 360 Magazine. companies need to ensure that they’re presenting a consistent view.”
The only way to accomplish that, Krishnaswamy said, is to create what Typeface is calling a “brand brain,” which centralizes everything from an organization’s voice and tone guidelines to compliance rules that govern how content is generated and published.
Typeface has productized the notion of a brand brain in the latest version of its orchestration engine via Arc Graph, which extracts, validates, and enforces a brand’s guidelines and turns them into structured rules that Typeface, and now external AI tools, can apply.
Using a brand brain to power both human and agentic digital experiences will require organizations to work more cohesively as a team, Krishnaswamy said. As it stands, Typeface’s report found only 30 per cent of leaders say their teams collaborate closely with shared tools and shared metrics. The rest are fragmented.
To some extent, this could be solved by brands looking at digital experiences through a customer lifecycle lens, where brands consistently show up on their website and channels like AI search during phases like discovery, acquisition, purchase and support. This may call for designating a specific owner, Krishnaswamy said.
“Increasingly, companies are setting up a brand steward role,” he said. “In most cases, they come from marketing because marketing ‘owns’ the brand, but that brand steward then has the responsibility to ensure that inputs and the needs from other stakeholders in the company are also incorporated when thinking through what this brand brain should be.”
Brands should still spend time thoroughly testing both how answer engines like Claude will cite them and how what humans will think and feel on their website, Krishnaswamy said. This is becoming easier through synthetic testing, whereby the tools Typeface provides can define audience segments, produce content variations and look to see what will work and what won’t.
“The big thing for everyone now is to get content out into market as quickly as they can,” he said. “If they were to rely on the traditional forms of gathering feedback or testing out new concepts, that’s going to slow them down.”
While AEO and AI visibility may seem more complex given they involve machines rather than people searching online, Krishnaswamy likened it to the early days of search engine optimization (SEO). In this case it’s less about determining keywords than identifying possible prompts, and acknowledging that bots may be the ones developing a first impression of a brand based on its content.
“There are two parallel forms of consumption of the content and experiences across the entire lifecycle,” he said. “Therefore the need to test across those two layers of consumption becomes even more important.”
