AI can increasingly compare businesses before a customer visits their websites. If it understands your company but can’t explain why you’re different, your positioning may have a bigger problem than AI visibility.
AI can increasingly compare businesses before a customer visits their websites. If it understands your company but can’t explain why you’re different, your positioning may have a bigger problem than AI visibility.
Lance Hemenway
Most companies can tell you why they’re different from their competitors. Ask the leadership team and you’ll hear about experience, expertise, service, technology, culture or some combination of all five. Somewhere along the way, those differences usually get turned into positioning language and make their way onto the website. I’ve been through enough branding exercises to know that companies can spend an incredible amount of time finding a more interesting way to say something their competitors are also saying. AI may force us to confront the difference between distinctive marketing and an actually distinctive business.
Ask an AI platform to compare your company with three competitors and you’re no longer asking whether it understands what you do. You’re asking whether the differences you believe you’ve built into the company are strong enough to survive comparison. I think that’s a much tougher and more useful test of positioning.
Customers have always compared businesses, but AI can now do a surprising amount of that work for them. Instead of visiting four websites and sorting through four versions of “why choose us,” someone can ask AI to compare the companies, explain their strengths and weaknesses and suggest which might be better suited to a particular need. We’re already seeing this behavior in B2B software. G2’s 2026 AI Search Insight Report found that 51% of more than 1,000 B2B software buyers and decision-makers surveyed said they start their software research with an AI chatbot more often than Google. The research also found that AI chatbots are increasingly being used to compare options and narrow vendor shortlists. That’s one industry, so I wouldn’t apply those percentages to every buying decision, but the behavior is worth paying attention to.
Imagine asking AI to compare four Kansas City marketing agencies, law firms or technology companies. If the response tells you they all have experienced teams, provide customized solutions, care deeply about their clients and deliver results, we haven’t learned much. The problem may not be that AI failed to understand the companies. It may be that the companies haven’t given customers much meaningful differentiation to understand.
A distinctive visual identity matters, good copy matters and a memorable tagline can absolutely help someone remember a company. But competitive positioning has to survive after the marketing language is stripped away. Suppose two Kansas City engineering firms both claim deep healthcare expertise. One has completed dozens of healthcare projects, its leadership has spent years working in hospital design and healthcare represents a meaningful part of its business. The other lists healthcare alongside 14 other industries on its website. Both can legitimately say they serve healthcare, but when a customer asks which firm is particularly suited to a complex healthcare project, there is considerably more behind one position than the other.
Search Engine Land has examined this problem, arguing that interchangeable messaging across websites, profiles, reviews and content can lead AI systems toward similarly interchangeable summaries. That makes sense to me. If every company describes itself as innovative, strategic, experienced, customer-focused and results-driven, those words aren’t giving AI, or frankly the customer, much help. The more useful question for a leadership team is whether the differences you talk about internally are actually visible from the outside. If your differentiation only becomes clear after somebody reads your carefully written positioning statement, there may not be as much underneath the marketing language as you think.
There’s another possibility I find even more interesting: AI may distinguish your company perfectly well, just not for the reason leadership expects. Maybe you believe customers choose you because of strategic expertise, while AI consistently separates you from competitors because you’re local. Perhaps you’ve invested heavily in positioning around technology, but AI primarily talks about customer service. Or you see yourself as a premium provider while AI keeps comparing you on price.
I wouldn’t immediately assume AI has it right. These systems make mistakes, prompts affect responses and different platforms can reach different conclusions. But if the same distinction keeps appearing across AI systems, I’d want to understand where it’s coming from and whether customers might be seeing the company the same way. That’s different from asking whether AI knows your business exists. In our earlier article, What Does AI Say About My Business?, I looked at the gap between the company leadership believes it has built and the company the outside world can actually see. This takes that idea one step further: once AI understands your company, does that understanding remain distinctive when you’re placed beside the alternatives?
The stakes get more interesting as AI moves further into purchasing decisions. Accenture surveyed 25,590 consumers across 16 countries in 2026 and found that 74% would delegate routine tasks to an AI agent, while 32% would allow an agent to decide what to buy as long as they retained control of payment. Accenture argues that as agents become more involved in these decisions, brands will increasingly need to offer value that can be verified rather than simply promised. I think there’s an important marketing lesson in that. We’ve spent years getting better at making the promise sound compelling. AI comparison puts more pressure on whether there’s something underneath the promise that actually separates one company from another.
This is where SEO, AEO, GEO and AI Authority start to intersect. Discoverability still matters, but AI Authority has to go further than simply appearing. If AI can find your company but can’t explain what meaningfully separates it from the alternatives, visibility alone hasn’t accomplished very much. One exercise I’d suggest is asking several AI platforms to compare your company with the businesses you actually compete against. Give them a specific customer, problem or use case instead of asking a generic “who is better?” question, then pay attention to the attributes AI chooses. Are those the things you thought made you different? Are they meaningful to customers? Do they remain fairly consistent across platforms? Most importantly, would you be comfortable competing on those differences?
For years, marketers have spent a lot of time asking whether positioning is clear. I think AI adds a harder question: does it remain meaningful when the company is compared directly with the alternatives? A positioning statement tells people how you want the company to be understood. A competitive position gives them a reason to understand you differently from everybody else. Those sound similar, but there’s a pretty big difference between them.
That’s why I wouldn’t immediately start optimizing for AI if your differentiation disappears. I’d look at the business and the brand first. Put your company beside the three businesses you compete against most often, remove the logos and ask whether an outside system can explain what meaningfully separates you. If it can, you’ve probably built something more valuable than a positioning statement. You’ve built a position.
Lance Hemenway is CEO & Founder at Fireball Agency, a Kansas City-based marketing agency helping businesses build AI authority and visibility. Connect with Lance on LinkedIn.
Over the past two decades, Lance has helped launch, grow, and scale digital businesses during some of the internet’s most transformative moments.
