Welcome to the HBR Executive Agenda for September 25, 2025. In This Issue: Is Your Brand Optimized for AI Search? Building a Customer-Centric Organization Is Your Brand Optimized for AI Search? Imagine a new content platform with more than 1 billion active users and billions of engagements a day. You’d probably want your brand to be visible on it. Those numbers capture the combined power of AI-driven large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview. They’re increasingly becoming users’ gateway to the Internet, chipping away at traditional search. And as opposed to search engines that return pages and pages of results, they deliver authoritative sounding, “single-answer” insights. Brands have long known how to optimize for search engines. They’re struggling, so far, to figure out how to optimize for LLMs. You can’t bid on keywords, and LLMs are offering little visibility into how they prioritize the content they feature in response to user prompts. “Search is undergoing its biggest disruption since Google launched,” says Timothy Young, CEO of Jasper.ai, an AI-powered content generation platform. “AI is changing how customers discover, learn about, and interact with companies.” While there isn’t yet a clear playbook, there are steps you can take to understand how you’re appearing on LLMs and how to improve your presence. It’s part of the emerging science of AEO (answer-engine optimization), a term that’s essentially synonymous with other new acronyms like AIO (AI optimization) and GEO (generative-engine optimization). Start with an audit. Run a series of prompts, over and over again, across a wide array of AI platforms to see how your brand is appearing. (You can do this yourself or hire a company to do it for you.) When your brand does appear, how reliable and deep is the information? Does your logo appear? Is there a link to your site? You’ll also want to measure the traffic that comes to your site from LLMs. This will give you a baseline. The next challenge is improving your presence. Here are a few tips on how to do so, based on conversations I had with Young and with Ahmed Malik, co-founder and CEO of ScalePost, an AI firm that helps companies navigate these issues. Make sure you’re active in the forums that AI bots prioritize. Insiders say LLMs tend to rely heavily on content on Reddit. If your brand builds trust within the discerning Reddit communities, AI will capture that. If you’re getting ripped on the platform, you’ll need to join the conversation and make your case. Wikipedia is also believed to be a valued source for its clarity and reliability. Publish high-quality content of your own. Earned media is great but so are posts on your own website. Make sure your content is optimized for bot consumption: This means clear headings, lists of your brand’s attributes, and other well-organized data and details that would help answer LLM prompts. Maintain an active YouTube channel. The video platform is the second-largest search site in the world (after Google), and LLMs draw heavily from its content. Use AI to probe AI. Ask the AI models how your content is likely to perform on their platforms, and then ask how you can improve the results. If your competitors’ products are being touted more favorably than your own, try to figure out the messaging that’s working for them and adapt. The path to brand success on these platforms is likely to become clearer over time. For now, you just need to experiment your way forward. To test all of this, I asked ChatGPT-5 to identify the best men’s tennis shoes on the market. It curated a short list, so I asked how it came up with that. The bot’s response was jarringly human-sounding (even featuring a smiley face) and provided some insight into how the single-answer models work: “Good question. I didn’t just pull names out of a hat —I combined expert review roundups, retailer best-seller lists, and player feedback from tennis communities.” Nike, Adidas—take note! Building a Customer-Centric Organization Customer centricity isn’t just a metric—it’s a leadership philosophy that strengthens culture while securing long-term enterprise value. Companies with strong customer loyalty are more resilient to disruption, command higher valuations, and attract top talent. They reduce waste by ensuring capital flows to investments that customers actually value. And they align the enterprise around a single north star, breaking down silos and accelerating execution. So how do you infuse customer centricity into your organization? Find out in our latest HBR Executive Playbook. Read more
