WordPress VIP x 97th Floor: How AI Sees Your Brand

97th Floor CEO, Paxton Gray, teamed up with WordPress VIP CMO, Jodi Cerretani, on a three-part webinar series about AI discoverability. The first session covers how AI sees your brand, where visibility gaps show up, and five asks to help your team set a baseline.

Search has changed more in the last two years than in the previous twenty. Paxton put it plainly: "there's not been a bigger update than what's happened with AI search." The goal used to be ranking in a list of links. Now the goal is to get recommended.

Buyers have already moved. According to G2, half of all B2B buyers start their research in AI chat. Two-thirds say AI changed their buying decision, and 80% say it made that decision faster.

If AI is shaping the shortlist, you need to know what it says about you.

You Can't Fix a Gap You Haven't Measured

Paxton starts every AI search strategy with a baseline. "It's really hard to know what to do unless you know where you are."

He shared the example of a client in venue management software. They were a major player that wanted to move down market and win smaller venues. AI saw them differently. It called them the IBM of venue management software: well established, but clunky, hard to use, and not built for small venues.

That was the opposite of where they wanted to go. It was also a clear starting point. Find the gap first. Then build the strategy.

AI Reads Everything You've Ever Published

Jodi calls it the total information environment. AI doesn't just read your current site. It reads the 2019 microsite that's still up, legacy subdomains nobody sunset, outdated product PDFs, press coverage, and Reddit threads.

Her team evaluated one brand across six of its sites. AI comprehension ranged from 88% down to 59%. AI averages everything it finds, and as she put it, "an averaged brand is a diluted brand."

Ask #1: Inventory every property. Make sure every domain, subdomain, microsite, and PDF tells the same current story.

AI Reads Structure, Not Design

AI crawlers are fast but literal readers. "It does not care about your beautiful design. It reads structure," Jodi said. That means clear headings, semantic HTML, and schema.

In one WordPress VIP assessment, a brand had 16 product pages with no markup at all. They looked great to humans and were hard for models to decipher. Your website now has two audiences, and both need to understand it.

Ask #2: Get a structural audit. One H1 per page, a clean hierarchy, and schema on every page. It's back-end work, but it doubles as an accessibility win.

Live Content Can Still Be Invisible

For one pharmaceutical customer, WordPress VIP analyzed 28 million requests of server traffic. AI crawlers saw just 2% of what humans saw, and only 0.7% on product pages. One set of pages drew 233 human visits and six from AI crawlers. "That's not 6%, that's six crawlers."

The fix was simple. The pages weren't on the sitemap, and their content was locked in JavaScript, which shows up as empty boxes to most crawlers. Content can be live, on brand, and well written, and still be invisible to AI.

Ask #3: Audit your sitemap and add text fallbacks behind every JavaScript component.

Winning AI Search Starts With Your Audience

Once AI can read your site, the question becomes what your content says.

Traditional SEO starts with keywords. AI search starts with prompts, which create a long tail of specific questions. AI often runs several searches off one prompt. Paxton explained what that means: "the more you can answer all of those secondary query fan-outs, the more likely you are to show up in AI search."

That puts customer research at the center of content strategy. Be clear on who you're for, when your solution fits, and what questions your audience asks.

AI Search Needs New Metrics

Paxton tracks four areas: AI referral traffic, brand mentions, citations, and competitive comparison. He stressed that last one: "It's not enough to just look at these metrics in a silo."

Mentions, citations, and share of voice are leading indicators. The lagging indicators follow: more branded search, more direct traffic, and faster conversions. Buyers now do their research inside AI, so "they're coming ready to buy."

Your Dashboards Can't See AI Crawlers

Most analytics run on JavaScript, and AI crawlers don't execute it. That means one of the fastest-growing readers of your site is invisible to your dashboards. Jodi was direct: "There's really one source of truth, and that's in your server logs."

One global enterprise had a compliance plugin rejecting about 15% of all ChatGPT requests, roughly 68,000 in the period measured. WordPress VIP even found its own server layer was blocking one of Anthropic's crawlers.

Ask #4: Ask your team one question. "Show me AI crawler traffic in our server logs."

AI Visibility Needs an Owner

Echoing a point Paxton has made before, Jodi warned that AI models are "very impatient and has huge recency bias." Stale content falls out of answers fast. Baseline, fix, retest, and report on a regular cycle. WordPress VIP does it about every 90 days.

The work is spread across developers, security, WebOps, and brand. No one owns it by default.

Ask #5: Name an owner with the authority to pull those teams together.

The Brands That Move First Will Win

Paxton sees a familiar pattern. SEO demand used to start when the CEO Googled the company and it didn't show up. Now the CEO asks a chatbot, and the brand isn't there. Jodi added that it's become a board-level conversation.

Proving impact is still hard. "There's a lot of correlation and not causation," Paxton admitted. But waiting is the bigger risk. "The ones that move first are going to be the ones that win." Watch the full recording now.