AI assistants and agents are creating a new layer between brands and their customers. How those tools perceive your brand is a new frontier of consumer discovery that companies need to anticipate, design for and monitor.
More shoppers now ask AI what to buy as a form of search. The team at IdealBookshelf.com, home of Jane Mount’s illustrated bookshelf products, wanted to know what those assistants say about their brand.
We first started with a brand audit that surfaced a gap upstream of AI: how Ideal Bookshelf should be perceived was known but not written down. So, we built a brand bible capturing Jane’s voice, values and credentials, and how the shop and the artist relate as two brands.
With that as the yardstick, we did a baseline audit and asked the same eight questions across five AI platforms. We implemented a series of changes leveraging the brand bible, so we could separate strategy gaps from expression gaps and re-ran the audit 90 days later.
Ask AI where to get a custom illustrated print of your favorite books, and three of five platforms now name Ideal Bookshelf first. AI-referred traffic grew 64% while overall traffic rose 12%.These signals are consistent with the work, not proof it caused them.
AI retells a brand’s story from everything written about it, and it’s candid about the gaps. This audit surfaced five patterns any brand can learn from.
Asked by name, every platform described the shop largely correctly.
Asked for a meaningful gift for a reader, it went missing almost everywhere.
The shop and the artist are two brands with one voice. Asked for the best gifts for book lovers, two platforms recommended Jane’s book, not her shop.
The site, Etsy and janemount.com each told the story a little differently.
An audit like ours shows brands where they have gaps in two core problem areas:
either the strategy exists but isn’t perceived accurately by AI, or a strategic decision was never made. The first calls for activation; the second calls for strategy.
The audit tells you which you’re facing.
