Without control of the story, presence on AI is nothing

Every Friday, I pick up here what we talked about on LinkedIn during the week: one subject I take a little further, then the essence of the others, with a link to each post so the conversation can continue.

Pirelli

The editorial

"No matter how prominently we show the links, users won't click."

On Tuesday I quoted that line from an OpenAI engineer, taken from the brief filed by news publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft. On Thursday I talked about a Viavoice survey for the Conseil national des barreaux, France's national bar council, conducted among 1,000 clients of lawyers: one in three has already asked an AI for help choosing a lawyer.

The two describe the same shift. Choosing a lawyer used to rest on word of mouth, directories, and rankings; it now also runs through an answer written by a machine, which the client reads without necessarily clicking any further.

This is the ground of our next analysis at ResonanceMetrics. We are going to look, across Paris law firms, at who appears in AI answers and, above all, at what those answers say about each firm: the specialties they retain, the sources they rely on, the way they rephrase the firm's promise.

If you work in an agency or on a marketing team, replace "lawyer" with "agency," "recruitment firm," or "payroll software." The executive who asks ChatGPT which provider to choose reads an answer in which your name comes out in second place, accompanied by "solid, but rather suited to large accounts." You are visible, and you have just lost that client.

We are still framing the questions for the analysis with lawyers: the sale of a company, the dismissal of an executive, a divorce involving assets… If you are one, or if you advise them, tell us which questions matter to your clients, in a comment on the post or by replying to this email.

The week's other subjects

The news: Google opens payment in AI Mode to Shopify stores. US merchants learned it by email: their products can now be bought directly inside the answer, with Google Pay. Your customer pays without opening your product page, and your feed becomes the only storefront they see. → The post

The news: the September anti-spam update targets mass-produced content. Among the first sites to lose ground, many had bet on pages generated by AI on an assembly line. Value is shifting toward what your brand alone knows: a price, a client case, the view of an in-house expert. → The post

The reading: Empire of AI, by Karen Hao. About 260 interviews to tell the story of OpenAI from the inside, and above all the contradictions of founders who fear AGI while wanting to be the first to build it. It reads like a novel, in which all of us are, a little, the characters. → The post

The step aside. Every time Google asks you to click on crosswalks or traffic lights to prove you are human, you are training its image-recognition algorithms. You have been working for AI for years, with no pay slip.

The analysis of Paris law firms is moving forward: I will tell you here what we find, as soon as the first results come in.

And in the meantime, if you want to talk about GEO, you can book a video call here:

Antoine Heftler

PS the more seasoned among you will have recognized in the title a reference to a Pirelli ad from the 1980s, the good old days of advertising. Worth another look here