Earlier this year a new lead emailed my agency, and on our first call I asked the usual question about how he’d found us. His answer was one I hadn’t heard in ten years of running the company. He’d asked an AI chatbot to suggest agencies that could get his brand covered in several European languages, and our name was in the short answer it gave him.
Some background, so the story makes sense. My name is Boris Dzhingarov, and I run ESBO Ltd, a digital PR agency that helps brands earn media coverage in more than a dozen languages. Over the years I’ve watched clients arrive through search engines, social media, referrals, and conference small talk. This was the first one sent to us by a machine’s opinion, and I don’t expect it to stay rare.
Something real is shifting in how people find businesses. When someone asks a chatbot which agency to hire or which product to buy, they get a short, confident answer with a handful of names in it. There’s no page two of results to scroll. You’re either in the answer or you’re invisible.
For large companies that’s mostly a threat. For small ones it’s an opportunity, because these systems don’t care how big your ad budget is. They care about what has been written about you, and that’s something any focused founder can influence.
How the machines form their opinions
AI assistants build their picture of the business world from what they read: news sites, industry publications, reviews, directories, forums, and the pages companies publish themselves. When your business shows up in those places, described the same way each time, the systems start connecting your name to your category. When it doesn’t, they recommend whoever did that work instead.
The unit of value here isn’t the link. It’s the mention. A sentence in a respected publication saying what your company does teaches these systems something even when no link is attached at all.
That realization changed how my own agency operates. At ESBO Ltd we rebuilt our link building service around it. We call it brand mention link building: get the client named and described in real publications first, and treat the link as one benefit among several instead of the whole point of the exercise. Digital PR done this way feeds search engines and AI assistants at the same time, which matters, because nobody can tell you what the mix between the two will look like in five years.
I laid out the longer version of this argument in a piece for Entrepreneur on why businesses should stop counting backlinks and start counting brand mentions, and every month since has made me more sure of it.
What you can actually do about it
Start with consistency. Write the one plain sentence that describes your business, and use it everywhere: your website, your directories, your author bios, your interviews. Machines are pattern readers, so give them a single clear pattern instead of five loose ones. If you sell handmade furniture in Austin, say exactly that everywhere, and resist the urge to call yourself an artisanal lifestyle brand on Tuesdays.
Then go earn mentions. Write for publications your customers read, offer journalists expert comments, join podcasts, answer questions in the communities where your industry gathers. This is old-fashioned PR work, and it has quietly become one of the most durable marketing assets available, because a mention in a credible publication keeps teaching every new AI system that reads it, years after you’ve stopped thinking about it.
Publish real answers on your own site as well. A page that clearly and honestly answers a question your customers keep asking becomes raw material these systems can quote. Plain and specific beats clever here, which is a relief for those of us who were never that clever.
Don’t abandon normal SEO either. AI assistants lean on search indexes whenever they need current information, so rankings still matter, just no longer as the finish line. I think of classic SEO as the plumbing and brand mentions as the reputation. A business now needs both, and the second one is much harder for a competitor to copy.
Finally, check your own reflection. Every month or two I ask a few AI assistants what they know about ESBO Ltd and about me, Boris Dzhingarov, and which agencies they’d suggest for multilingual digital PR. Sometimes the answers are flattering, sometimes outdated, and occasionally just wrong. Either way, the gaps tell me exactly what we need to publish next.
Word of mouth, at machine scale
What I find encouraging about all this is that it rewards consistency more than budget. A mention earned this year keeps working quietly for years afterward. A startup with a clear story and a steady publishing habit can end up in the same short answer as competitors ten times its size, and those competitors can’t buy their way back in overnight, because a reputation written in text takes time to build no matter who you are.
That lead from the beginning of this story became a client, and a few more since have mentioned an AI assistant somewhere in the account of how they found us. I keep a note of every one. It’s the strangest referral source I’ve come across in a decade of doing this work, and it’s the one I’m now most deliberate about feeding.
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