How to stand out in AI search when every business sounds the same

Most businesses sound interchangeable online, and AI search is making that impossible to ignore. When ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI systems summarize your business, they build that understanding from your website, profiles, reviews, and content. If all of it sounds like everyone else in your category, the machine’s summary will too.

This is why AI visibility is becoming a positioning problem as much as a technical one.

Businesses that stand out in AI search are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most aggressive tactics. They’re the businesses that clearly communicate who they serve, what they do differently, and why customers should care. Everything else — content, ads, SEO, PPC, schema, and optimization — only amplifies that underlying message.

Why businesses default to tactics instead of positioning

Sun Tzu said it first, and nobody has improved on it since:

• “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

He was talking about warfare, but he might as well have been sitting in on a digital marketing meeting, watching a business owner ask their agency to “do something with the SEO” while their homepage still describes how they deliver exceptional results with great service.

There is a pattern here: something changes, whether it’s a Google update, a dip in traffic, or the dawning realization that AI is changing how people research and buy things. This creates an instinct to act. Immediately. Update the keywords, try a new ad format, and post more on LinkedIn. Be busy, busy, busy. Do something because at least action feels like progress.

This isn’t just a marketing folly. This is evolutionary behavior that is hardwired.

Daniel Kahneman spent a career documenting this. His framework from “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describes two cognitive systems: System 1, which is fast, automatic, and emotional, and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical. 

The uncomfortable finding? System 1, basically heuristics, runs the show roughly 95% of the time. We’re not the rational strategists we imagine ourselves to be. We’re pattern-matching, reflex-driven creatures who take comfort in movement and action.

Psychologists call the specific reflex that drives all this tactical overactivity “action bias” — the largely unconscious urge to act in the face of uncertainty, even when a more considered approach would serve us better. 

Think of a goalkeeper who dives left or right on a penalty kick, even though the data shows they’d save more by standing still. The diving feels more engaged, more committed, more in control. Standing still feels like giving up — even when it’s the smarter play.

Business owners do this constantly. They change their Google Ads targeting every week because the waiting feels unbearable. They add another service to their homepage because it feels more thorough. They try a new social platform because something must account for the slow results. 

Meanwhile, the actual problem is often that their positioning is unclear, undifferentiated, and indistinguishable from every competitor, but it sits untouched because fixing it requires sitting with uncertainty long enough to think rather than just act.

This is why most businesses end up with tactics stacked on tactics: an ad here, a keyword tweak there, a new landing page, a social media calendar. This all floats on a foundation of generic, uninspiring positioning.

This is busy, expensive, and utterly unsuccessful. This is Sun Tzu’s noise before defeat.

AI removes the hiding places for generic marketing

I have been in this game a long time, maybe pushing 30 years of marketing something or another, and a good 26 digital and online, and maybe, just maybe, you could get away with this for a while.

Why? Well, the customer is also human.

Being first, just being there, also connects to the inherent laziness, the path of least resistance, that is common in all of us. If there is an easy option, take it. Don’t waste precious calories thinking.

This helped us survive as hunter-gatherers, but it exposes us now, so those ads nobody clicks on actually get all the clicks, and for a while, you could buy your way around this.

But AI is the flood. The entropic tide. The sudden calamity that will finally expose lazy marketing and wash away those businesses that bought their way out of the pit of undifferentiation.

Now, the businesses that win in SEO, PPC, and definitely AI, whether search or otherwise, are not the ones with the most budget or the biggest tactical reach. The businesses that will board the ark and survive the AI flood are the ones that did the harder, earlier strategic work: figuring out what they stand for, who they actually serve, and what makes them genuinely different.

They’re also the businesses that took the time to figure out how to articulate this clearly and communicate it to an increasingly fatigued audience that just wants things to be easy.

When AI summarizes you, what does it say?

Open ChatGPT. Ask it to recommend an accountant, an IT support company, or a marketing agency in your city. Read what comes back. Notice anything?

Probably not. And that’s precisely the problem.

Now visit five websites in any professional services sector. Count how many claim to be passionate, experienced, client-focused experts delivering exceptional results through tailored solutions backed by decades of expertise.

Yawn.

That’s marketing wallpaper. It covers every surface, blends into the background, and communicates absolutely nothing. The sad truth is that most businesses have spent years perfecting bland, insipid, boring messaging.

They may be winning customers because they’re nearby or competing on price, but if you don’t stand out and have something truly different, that is often the only reason they will.

AI has turned up the contrast on this problem in a way that’s hard to ignore. People are no longer just typing keywords. They’re handing entire decision-making processes to AI assistants. AI reads, synthesizes, compares, and recommends.

It doesn’t just find you. It forms an opinion of you.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: the machine only knows what it can find about you.

It reads your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn bio, directory listings, and reviews. It stitches all of that together into a summary, and if everything you’ve put out there sounds like everyone else in your category, that summary will sound like everyone else, too.

The human element matters here, too. Have a niche. Stand out. Target a subset of your broader customer profiles and specialize your service. This makes marketing, sales, and operations easier.

The technical side of this tends to dominate the conversation. Structured data. E-E-A-T. Citation signals. Schema markup. All of it matters eventually. But it all sits downstream from a much more fundamental question that almost nobody is asking:

What story are all those sources telling about you?

Spend an afternoon polishing your schema markup while your homepage still says “we deliver exceptional results for businesses of all sizes,” and you’ve polished a window that looks out to nothingness.

The sea of sameness: Why this happened

Most businesses sound alike because they made the same rational decision: look at what successful competitors are saying, then copy the tone, the structure, and the claims. Safe. Professional. Unremarkable.

I’ve always been a fan of classic marketing texts from before the chaos and constant change of the digital era, and what they can still teach us. One text that captured this deeper problem decades ago was “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries. The battle for customers isn’t fought in the marketplace. It’s fought in the mind.

And minds are crowded places with very limited space. If you can’t occupy a distinct position in someone’s thinking, you won’t occupy much position at all. You become a commodity, and the only competition left is price — the classic race to the bottom.

The result is what Blue Ocean Strategy calls a red ocean: a market where everyone competes on the same dimensions, in the same ways, for the same customers.

The good news is that most of your competitors are still swimming in that red ocean, and they have no intention of getting out. The water is bloody and exhausting, but at least it’s familiar.

You’re not the hero

Before we get to the frameworks, there’s one mindset shift worth making because it changes everything that follows.

Joseph Campbell spent a career documenting the Monomyth, the universal story structure that appears across cultures throughout human history. If you’re not familiar, George Lucas hired Campbell to help shape the story for the original Star Wars.

Subsequent work revealed that we tend to see the world through the lens of a story, and in those stories, we are the hero.

It goes something like this: the hero receives a call to adventure. The hero faces obstacles. The hero finds a guide. The hero transforms. It’s the backbone of every myth, every great film, and every story that actually sticks with us.

In Star Wars, Luke is bored and craves adventure. He meets Obi-Wan, but initially turns down the call until he goes home to find his adoptive parents dead. Then, with the help of his guide, he sets off, saves the universe, and transforms himself from farm boy to savior of the galaxy.

Donald Miller tied this framework to marketing in “Building a StoryBrand.” He recognized that outside of movies, this is also the structure of every great brand. And he noticed something even more important: almost every business gets this completely backward and makes itself the hero.

• “We are the UK’s leading provider of…” 
• “Our award-winning team has been serving clients since…” 
• “We pride ourselves on delivering…”

The customer reads this and thinks: great story, but what about me?

The best client-facing messaging reframes this. The customer is the hero. You’re the guide. Think Gandalf, not Frodo. Yoda, not Luke. Your job isn’t to tell your story — it’s to help your customer save their own galaxy.

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Find your difference

From having thousands of conversations with business owners and marketing teams over the years, I firmly believe that most businesses do have something unique. They just don’t do a very good job of communicating it in their marketing.

Fortunately, there are some powerful tools you can use to aid you in this endeavor. The goal is to surface what makes you genuinely distinctive and identify the segments you can best help.

The Blue Ocean Strategy canvas

Blue Ocean Strategy’s central tool is the strategy canvas: a chart mapping the key factors businesses in your sector compete on — price, service speed, specialization, range, expertise, location, and industry focus — and plotting where you and your competitors score on each.

Do this honestly. Most businesses, when they complete it, find their lines almost perfectly parallel to their competitors. They’re competing on the same things, in the same ways. The marketing sounds the same because the strategy is the same.

Blue Ocean asks a different question: 

• Instead of competing better, what if you competed differently? 
• What could you eliminate, reduce, raise, or create that would genuinely move your line — not just rhetorically, but in practice? 
• Where is there uncontested space rather than bloody, contested ground?

A quick starting exercise: draw a simple table, list six to eight things businesses in your sector typically compete on, and score yourself and two competitors honestly from one to 10. 

If the lines are broadly parallel, you don’t have a marketing problem. You have a positioning problem, and no amount of clever copy or website wizardry will fix it.

The Value Proposition Canvas

The Value Proposition Canvas works beautifully alongside Blue Ocean thinking. 

On one side, you map your customer: 

• Their jobs (what they need to get done).
• Their pains (what makes those jobs hard or risky).
• Their gains (the outcomes they’re hoping for). 

On the other side, you map your offering: 

• The pain relievers.
• The gain creators.
• The products or services you provide.

The insight comes from the fit — or the mismatch. Most businesses spend 80% of their marketing talking about features and 20% talking about the customer’s pains and gains. It should probably be the reverse because features are about you, and pains and gains are about them.

A useful test: if your ideal customer woke up at 3 a.m. worrying about something your business could solve, what would that worry be?

• Are you speaking to that worry on your homepage?
• In your Google Business Profile description?
• In your LinkedIn bio?

If not, you’re solving a problem people don’t feel instead of speaking to one they’re already carrying.

Tell your story

Once you’ve identified what genuinely makes you different, you need to get it into words — usable, repeatable, tested words that anyone in your business can pick up and run with.

Again, there are a couple of simple, well-established tools you can use to achieve this. The cost of entry here is probably around $10 for each book.

The BrandScript

StoryBrand’s BrandScript is a one-page framework that maps out your complete brand narrative: who your customer is and what they want, the problem they face (external, internal, and philosophical), how you establish yourself as a trustworthy guide, the plan you offer them, the action you want them to take, and the transformation that awaits them if they do.

It takes an afternoon to do properly. It’s worth every minute because what comes out is a shared story that everyone in your business tells consistently, rather than a different version depending on who picks up the phone.

The internal problem deserves particular attention because it’s the most powerful and the least used.

• External problems are practical: “I’m not getting enough leads.”
• Internal problems are emotional: “I feel like I’m falling behind while my competitors grow.”
• Philosophical problems are about values: “Good businesses shouldn’t have to be invisible online.”

Most marketing speaks only to the external problem.

We are far more emotional creatures than we like to admit, and the businesses that truly connect speak to all three.

The one-liner

This is a modern way to tackle the elevator pitch for the internet generation, where 60 seconds is a lifetime.

This comes from Donald Miller’s “Marketing Made Simple.” The one-liner is a single sentence that captures what you do in a way a distracted person at a networking event would actually register.

The structure is:

• “We help [who] who [have this problem] so they can [achieve this result].”

Simple in theory. Genuinely difficult to nail in practice.

Compare these two:

• ❌ “We’re a full-service digital marketing agency offering bespoke solutions for businesses of all sizes.”
• ✅ “We help small businesses in competitive markets get found online so they can compete with companies 10 times their size.”

The test is simple: does someone respond with “Oh, interesting — how do you do that?” or do their eyes slide away?

Write five versions. Say them out loud to someone who doesn’t work in your industry. Watch their face, and you’ll know when you’ve found one that lands.

The three-layer soundbite

While the tactical masses are decrying the death of the marketing funnel because of AI, your messaging still needs to speak to customers throughout the purchase journey.

Think of your core message as needing to do three jobs at once.

It needs to grab attention by leading with the customer’s pain rather than your solution. “Struggling to stand out in a crowded market?” outperforms “Experts in brand positioning” because one is about them, and one is about you.

It needs to engage by showing you understand their world. Use their language, not your industry’s. “We help businesses that have outgrown their original marketing” lands differently from “we provide strategic marketing consultancy services.”

And it needs to convert by giving them one clear next step. Not “explore our full range of services.” One clear, consistent call to action.

Once you have these three layers working, they become the raw material for everything: your homepage, your Google Business Profile description, your social bios, and your elevator pitch. Written once, deployed everywhere.

Get it out there

Here’s where the positioning work meets the visibility work.

You now have the strategy to build the tactics that take you toward victory.

AI systems are assembling a picture of your business from every source they can find. According to Yext research, 86% of citations in AI-generated responses come from sources businesses can directly control: websites, listings, and owned content.

That’s actually good news. It means this is largely in your hands.

The question is whether all those controlled sources are telling the same distinctive story or a confusing, muddled, generic one.

Your website

Your homepage has roughly five seconds to answer the single question every visitor arrives with: Is this for me?

Most homepages fail this test spectacularly. They open with a company name, a tagline only the founders understand, and a stock photo of someone shaking hands in a glass-fronted office.

Lead instead with your customer’s problem. Make it immediately clear who you help and what life looks like once you’ve helped them.

Have one primary call to action, not five.

Then let the rest of your site consistently reinforce the proposition you established at the top, rather than drifting into “we also do…” territory that undoes all the clarity you’ve worked for.

Google Business Profile

If you serve local customers, your Google Business Profile is some of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost marketing real estate available, and most businesses treat it like an admin task, filling it in once and never going back.

Your business description is 750 characters. Use your one-liner. Speak to the customer’s problem. Don’t waste it on a list of services and the year you were founded.

The same logic applies to every directory listing, trade association profile, and industry registry your business appears in. AI systems read all of these, and they’re building a composite picture.

Consistency in messaging — not just in your name, address, and phone number — is what compounds over time into genuine authority.

These systems triangulate, so set a clear message and communicate it consistently.

Social channels and bios

Every platform gives you a bio field. Most people put their job title and a handful of emojis. That’s a missed opportunity.

Use the space to articulate who you help and why it matters. Same one-liner. Same language. Same story, adapted for each audience.

Then use your content to demonstrate your positioning rather than merely declare it because anyone can claim expertise, but consistently helpful, specific, clearly articulated content actually proves it.

For a content strategy that flows naturally from this, take a look at my earlier pieces on applying They Ask, You Answer to AI search and why customer personas sharpen everything.

Every other touchpoint

Email signatures. Speaker bios. Award entries. Press releases. Partner directories. Podcast show notes. LinkedIn About sections. Reddit. Forums. Everything else.

Every one of these is a signal.

We have worked with colleges, universities, societies, and many other organizations, and every time, the breakthrough came from focusing on the core audience, stripping positioning down to a single clear category, and aligning every channel around that one message.

When all your signals tell a consistent, distinctive story, you start to become the obvious answer to a specific question.

When they’re inconsistent or generic, you remain part of the noise, and AI dutifully summarizes you as such — or ignores you altogether.

The framework in brief

If you want to make this actionable, here’s the sequence.

Start with your difference

• Run the Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas honestly, and map your customers’ real pains and gains through the Value Proposition Canvas.
• Ask the 3 a.m. question. Find where you have genuine white space, not just claimed differentiation that your competitors could say just as easily.

Document your story

• Work through the BrandScript. Write your one-liner in multiple versions and test them on real people.
• Build your three-layer soundbites. Get it all captured somewhere that everyone in your business can access and use.

Audit every touchpoint

• Website, Google Business Profile, social bios, directory listings, email signatures — everywhere you appear.
• Rewrite each one through the lens of your customer’s problem and your genuine answer to it. Remove anything that could have been written by any of your competitors.

Build content that proves it

• Answer the real questions your customers ask for the real people asking them.
• Not generic, keyword-stuffed articles, but specific, useful, persona-driven content that demonstrates you understand their world better than anyone else.

Stay consistent

• Stay consistent long enough for it to work. The temptation will be to broaden the message, add more services, and cover more ground. Resist it.

Specificity isn’t a limitation. That’s the whole point.

The gap between who you are and what AI sees

Most businesses already know what makes them different. Ask a founder over coffee, and they’ll tell you exactly why customers stay loyal, what frustrations they solve, and what competitors still don’t understand.

Then ask where any of that appears on their website. Usually, there’s a long pause. Their marketing has become an echo of their competitors instead of a reflection of who they actually are.

Today, that gap — between who you are and what the web thinks you are — is becoming a serious risk. AI systems are reading your digital footprint right now, forming a summary of your business, and presenting it to people making buying decisions.

What story is it telling? The answer usually isn’t a new tool, a bigger budget, or another tactical adjustment. It starts with clarity: understanding what you do differently, expressing it in language your customers actually use, and communicating it consistently everywhere.

When that happens, the website gets easier to write. SEO becomes more effective. AI systems start to understand you. Customers do, too.

The noise disappears, and what remains is a clear signal.