A smart “Ask us” experience opens new digital territory for marketers adapting to the same AI that is threatening their content.
Brands, publishers, and media companies are facing an emerging threat: the unauthorized use of content.
Giant tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are scraping proprietary messaging from commercial websites and mobile experiences. They are aggregating the unstructured web of words, images, PDFs, audio, and video from web pages, reviews, product lists and detail pages, technical specs, newsletters, learning centers, author bios, and user profiles, and representing it for use by their customers via their large language model applications (LLMs), search results pages, service chat bots, and AI agents.
The practice effectively rebrands your company’s messaging under a new authority established, owned, and managed by the content aggregators.
For publishers that have invested billions of dollars and decades of work into content marketing and audience engagement, the sudden lack of controlled distribution feels like an earthquake. The business impact is comparable to the shift from traditional media to digital in Web 1.0, and from static to dynamic brand engagement in Web 2.0.
The argument against big tech training its AI on commercial content is hazy because most of the source data is public and posted freely. It is actively promoted with the intent of broad consumer consumption.
There is also a precedent for content aggregation and curation without any need for prior authorization. We see this business model everywhere from the Yellow Pages to Yahoo’s web directories to Google’s AMP project, Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Apple News. AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are arguably on the same spectrum of content collection and dissemination.
However, the speed of this transition and the ensuing market confusion about content validity is putting unplanned pressure on marketers and corporate counsel to reestablish their brand’s relevancy when their work is not being attributed. They suffer financial harm when traffic to their sites falls off a cliff because they lose the opportunity to convert visitors into customers. A cottage industry of law firms are stepping in to defend IP and copyright infringements amid AI solutions that are training upon commercial content without the publisher’s permission.
Where legal constructs often struggle to keep pace with technical innovation, the US Copyright Office is stepping into the fray. Recognizing the speed, precision, and proliferation of AI agents that are training and re-distributing publications without authorization, they are recommending a prompt federal response as a matter of corporate protection and individual privacy.
As conflicts often do, threats to common assumptions expose what we may be taking for granted. An an emerging technology, AI agents are forcing us to confront the distinction between authorship and ownership, and to define the proper degree of attribution.
Despite these legitimate concerns, the underlying market demand for a better digital experience is strong.
Modern consumers, especially younger generations, embrace AI experiences as a superior means of learning and working. Indeed, the threat of AI to the workforce isn’t job replacement as much as it is recognizing that those who leverage AI to their jobs better and faster will outperform their peers.
The “old ways” of searching the web are cumbersome.
Engaging with well-built AI demonstrates the small mindedness of legacy search has been. We needn’t deal with oddball search prompts and having to scan lists of widely variable static results. It’s no longer necessary to click through consent forms and close annoying overlay ads on a destination site just to preview content. We needn’t sacrifice our anonymity and privacy for the knowledge we seek, or at least AI offers the opportunity to reset a clean slate.
On the flip side, companies spend billions of dollars annually on branding and content marketing in owned, earned, and paid media. They’re constantly repositioning to optimize search results to satisfy the elusive algorithms among the platforms that created this mess.
The drumbeat of performance marketing used to sound like this… Build your brand. Generate lots of content. Generate quality content. Amplify in social. Be authentic. Be responsive. Engage. Think like a publisher. Capture, convert, and grow your audience to optimize revenue. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the same brand managers that have been dutifully producing and publishing content have been caught flat-footed. The proliferation of AI agents are pushing content into places that authors didn’t attend and without attribution.
Consider the modern Google search results experience. This once-familiar web page now resembles a interactive application.
In Figure 1, the search results are a fraction of the page’s real estate. The source links (circled in red) no longer surface the source name. Instead, the tiny images burden the user to identify these visual markers and then manually engage with them via mouseover and click-throughs to see the source content.
Moving below the fold, Page 1 results are structured to retain traffic within the Google ecosystem. Visitors see video links to YouTube (owned by Google), a new “People also ask” section with more search prompts displayed in two separate blocks, discussions and forums that are heavily weighted toward Reddit, and sponsored results.
Following last year’s updates to the Google algorithm, all of the commercial investment in content and performance is pushed deeper into Google’s search results. In turn, companies must allocate budget paid ads and video content to maintain their visible relevance on the search results landing page.
What is an “Ask Stack” and how can it help marketers reach their audiences?
An Ask Stack is a collection of AI agents assembled in place of a traditional web page like onsite search results. It is designed to engage site visitors in a more immersive interactive experience, and can be utilized to assist visitors with needs beyond the brand’s reach.
Here is an example of Ask Stack.
Imagine you visit your favorite automotive brand. As a recent new owner of a Polestar, I’ll use their site as a visual example.
Instead of the annoying chat bot that pops up on the bottom-right screen (which Polestar mercifully suppresses), imagine a subtle visual cue in the site’s search icon up in the global navigation that triggers a mega-menu.
Within the mega-menu is an embedded application and a search field cycling through a series of creative prompts that invite engagement.
For example:
- Show me Polestar dealers nearby
- Show me a model comparison between Polestar and similar electric vehicles
- Help me price a vehicle within a budget of $40,000 including taxes, title, and licensing in Texas.
- How does Polestar rate among Uber and Door Dash delivery drivers?
- How do I make the switch to a fully electric car?
- Where can I find the best auto insurance rates?
- Map a route from my home in Austin to the Crescent hotel in Dallas with super fast charging stations, a pitstop at Buc-cee’s and that bakery in Waco that sells cherry ice box cookies. Include weather and traffic reports, and tell me what time I need to leave in order to arrive by 4:00 pm.
- Show me a complete and healthy menu plan with meals each evening this week and box lunches for the kids. Attach a shopping list ordered by the main grocery sections (I like to charge my Polestar at my local HEB, so the two brands are interlinked in my mind).
You get the idea… The level of user engagement is endless.
The genius of this approach is that it doesn’t presume. Visitors are free to approach your brand on their terms. Even prompts that grate against traditional notions of sales and marketing (e.g. competitive comparisons or asking for an unfavorable safety rating) are still being conducted within the authority of the brand as a convenient courtesy to the consumer.
Where branding is fundamentally an act of trust-building, companies that truly value transparency and actively engage their consumer base are best suited to adopt an Ask Stack strategy.
How should marketers develop and pitch an Ask Stack to their leadership?
Recognize that your content is valuable!
You’ve invested heavily in your content to attract audiences and set your company apart from the field. Your content is an important business asset and it’s ripe for leverage among AI agents. That leverage needs to be on your terms.
Quantify the value of your content marketing program. (If you need help doing this, ask your favorite AI to assist!) Here are the typical budget categories and percentage of spend that I see among my agency clients:
- Content Creation (30-50%): This includes writing, designing, video production, and other creative services required to produce blogs, social media posts, whitepapers, videos, infographics, etc.
- Distribution and Promotion (20-30%): This includes channels like paid ads in social media and search engines, syndication, and paid partnerships for reach beyond organic traffic.
- Technology and Tools (10-20%): This includes CMS licensing and managed services, technical SEO, analytics, email marketing, and tools used for creation and performance marketing.
- Personnel and Agency Fees (15-25%): This includes variable fees for agencies and freelancers independent of fixed operational costs (internal producers) and capital expenditures (CMS design, build, integration, program development).
- Research & Planning (5-10%): This includes costs to inform content strategies e.g. audience engagement, keyword research, competitive analysis, and consultation.
These categories and percentages vary based on your business goals, content maturity, and target audience. They reveal investment concentration for spend alignment and optimization.
Tighten up your understanding of assistive vs agentive vs agentic AI language.
Christopher Noessel published an outstanding primer with visuals to help you understand the evolving relationship between humans and machines that merits important distinctions. Properly articulating the need will help you make a business case and communicate with your designers and engineers.
Google’s AI Principles are a set of philosophical core values about how the company intends to use AI. You can weave these into a forward-looking pitch, although they’re as nebulous as the company’s original “Do no evil” mantra. They lack commercial application and don’t speak to fair use of published content.
Monetize your content.
Dappier (short for data happier) aims to help companies monetize their content with permissions-based training of AI agents and LLMs.
I recently met with Dappier CEO Dan Goikhman [LinkedIn] for coffee to discuss his approach to the large-scale problem facing brand managers and publishers. His company maintains a marketplace of companies willing to pay to train their AI on your content.
Here’s how it works: Dappier takes your branded content and pre-trains it for use by LLMs and natural language APIs via RAG models. (RAG is an industry term for retrieval-augmented generation describing AI frameworks that retrieve relevant data as needed).
Plainly speaking, Dappier combines your branded content with content from premium providers in news, weather, sports, finance, and more. This technology can be used to build a highly engaging branded Ask Stack that generates factually accurate and current responses that are relevant to your audiences in real time.
Invest in Reddit content and community engagement to optimize SEO.
Reddit content is a major component of the Google search results example in Figure 1 with prominent links back to the forum. This presents a good opportunity for clever marketers to surface their content in an organic manner.
Gaming brands like Supercell actively redirect their news and support content to branded subreddits with active moderation and participation by community leaders.
A word of caution… Redditors are notoriously skeptical of sponsored content. Gaming studio EA holds the title for the most downvoted comment in Reddit history for its cavalier response to a customer complaint (“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.” has -668k downvotes as of this writing).
Therefore study Reddit use cases to ensure it’s the right venue for your content strategy. Follow the basic tenets of social marketing… be authentic, know your audience, tailor your voice to the platform, etc.
Convert corporate communications to storytelling platforms that seed AI agents.
The demand for high quality content for AI systems to train is rapidly growing. Corporate communications is an often overlooked source of branded content because sanitized B2B messaging. Press relations, analyst relations, and investor relations materials are strong sources for AI training and consumer reach via conversational agents.
Even as web- and mobile-ready composable content, these materials can be repackaged as high-impact experiences. Here are some in-market examples of branded newsrooms in which I’m affiliated:
Starbucks
https://stories.starbucks.com includes a tight integration of news and product announcements with consumer-facing interests around coffee house culture, coffee sourcing, in-store music, and employee bios.
VMware
https://news.vmware.com/ has case studies, press releases & podcasts.
T-Mobile
https://www.t-mobile.com/news is a branded mobile newsroom.
Salesforce
The brand’s unique personality and voice are captured in two content platforms https://salesforce.com/news and https://salesforce.com/blog
Uber
https://uber.com/blog/ and https://uber.com/newsroom/ split a global network of publishers into multiple languages.
Hilton
https://stories.hilton.com/ aggregates distinct brands into a single storytelling news center.
Each of these example are headless WordPress frameworks that support rich multimedia content and story layouts, press and media kits, leadership biographies, localized editions, advanced search, custom editorial permissions, support for single sign-on integration (SAML), and essential integrations like email marketing signup.
I can help you design and build a branded Ask Stack!
I’m happy to help you develop this digital strategy for your brand. Let’s connect!
Feature image is from Ana Municio on Unsplash