How much a brand needs to work on AI recommendability depends primarily on its buyers.
- Jessica Bowman
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
By Jessica Bowman, Coxwell & Gain
Most conversations about AI visibility assume there is one best approach. There isn't. Organizations differ dramatically in how their buyers discover, evaluate, and ultimately choose products. Those differences should fundamentally change how much an organization invests in improving AI recommendations.
The question isn't whether AI matters. The question is how much recommendability your organization actually needs.
When auditing GEO team action plans I don't see the right level of work happening to actually gain the recommendation throughout the buyer journey. For many brands more than traditional GEO is needed.
Buyer due diligence is one of the strongest indicators of how much recommendability work an organization is likely to require.
For some organizations, buyers spend only seconds making a decision. They ask AI for a nearby restaurant, a local plumber, or the best coffee shop. If your business appears in recommendations with strong reviews, accurate information, and good visibility, that may be enough. For these brands, traditional GEO is often the right level of investment.
Other organizations face a very different buying process and AI plays a larger role in the buying funnel. Examples include: enterprise software, industrial equipment, medical technologies, financial services, cybersecurity, manufacturing platforms, and other high-consideration purchases rarely end with a single recommendation.
When AI becomes part of an extended due diligence process, buyers ask:
Why wasn't this company recommended?
What do competitors do better?
What risks should I know about?
What problems appear after long-term use?
In which situations is this product a poor choice?
Each new question gives AI another opportunity to strengthen—or weaken—your position.
Buyer reliance on AI during their decision making changes the amount of organizational commitment required.
Organizations often assume improving AI recommendations is primarily a marketing initiative. That assumption holds when marketing owns most of the signals influencing AI.
However, that isn't the case when buyers begin asking questions that require product expertise, implementation experience, operational evidence, customer outcomes, engineering knowledge, support history, and real-world performance. At that point, marketing alone cannot improve what AI recommends. The organization itself must begin contributing better signals.
Three levels of recommendability
We've found that what brands need in terms of GEO vs. Recommendability work generally falls into one of three categories.
Traditional GEO: Marketing strengthens the marketing signals AI can discover and interpret. For many organizations, this is sufficient.
Targeted Operational Activation™: As buyer evaluation becomes more sophisticated, selected operational functions are needed to contribute the knowledge, evidence, expertise, and change needed to improve AI recommendations. The effort remains targeted rather than enterprise-wide.
Recommendability Management™: When AI recommendations become strategically important, recommendability evolves into an enterprise capability. Cross-functional governance, operational processes, and continuous management ensure the organization consistently produces the signals AI needs to recommend it with confidence.
The right answer for every brand highly depends on your buyers’ behavior with AI.
For many brands, the future isn't only “more GEO.”
The brands that lead in the AI era will understand when GEO is sufficient (and when it isn't).
Some organizations will never need enterprise-wide recommendability programs.
Others are already reaching the point where marketing alone can no longer influence the narratives AI develops during buyer evaluation. Unfortunately most don't know it yet.
About Coxwell & Gain: We help build the cross-functional and enterprise-wide capabilities required to influence how AI understands, evaluates, and recommends their products. By aligning cross-functional teams, we help organizations compete for the recommendation, not just citations and mentions. It's a completely different playbook. Learn more at: https://www.coxwellandgain.com/
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