Marketers are getting AI search all wrong—and it’s hurting their bottom line

I’m sure Christopher Nolan didn’t have marketing metaphors on his mind when he directed The Odyssey, but after I watched Odysseus face the wrath of Poseidon in Nolan’s three-hour epic, I thought the movie summed up neatly the trauma that marketers endure when they try to navigate the world of AI assistants. AI apps play by their own rules, and they’re constantly changing the map to upend the journey. If you’re allowing yourself to be led around by the nose, you’re in for a bumpy ride. The Great Reddit Reckoning Marketers who adapted their media and content strategies to favor Reddit this year simply because of its popularity as a ChatGPT citation got stung, and badly. As we all know, for a spell, Reddit was the darling of the artificial intelligence digerati because its content accounted for a disproportionate share of citations in ChatGPT search. You couldn’t attend a trade show or read a LinkedIn post without someone urging you to adopt a Reddit strategy lest you become invisible in the eyes of the AI gods. Never mind whether Reddit was a good fit for your brand. But in August, Reddit’s fortunes got dashed against the rocks. Between mid-July and mid-August, Promptwatch reported …