Ask a room full of marketing and communications leaders why customers choose their organization, and you’ll probably get some pretty good answers.
“We understand their industry.”
“We make a complicated process easier.”
“Our customers get better results because we stay involved after the sale.”
Great! Those are potentially meaningful reasons to choose you. Your sales team probably has a story for each one, and your marketing team has spent considerable time getting the language just right.
Now ask everyone to pull up something in the public space that supports those answers.
It could be a case study explaining how that industry knowledge helped solve a customer’s problem. A video showing how the process works. A customer account describing what happened after the contract was signed.
Suddenly, the meeting gets quieter. Someone opens the website, while someone else tries to remember a sales deck.
Here’s the thing…you may have the proof, but does anyone outside that room have access to it?
That question matters for customers, sure. But marketers and communicators aren’t just worried about customers anymore. We have to think about the AI tools helping them research their options.
Teams can spend all day telling people what we want them to believe. We still need to give them a reason to believe it. An AI tool looking for information to support a recommendation needs something meaningful to work with, too.
That public evidence helps create brand trust signals: specific information that gives someone a reason to believe your promises.
As I explored in You STILL Can’t Buy Your Way Into AI Relevance, advertising can buy exposure. The case for trusting you still needs evidence.
So, where’s yours?
Somewhere inside your organization, someone probably has a terrific answer to that question.
Your sales team knows how you helped a customer navigate a complicated rollout. Customer service knows what your people did when something went wrong. Your operations team has the numbers showing how much time your process saved.
That’s useful evidence. Unfortunately, it may be sitting in a sales deck, buried in an internal report, or living exclusively in the head of someone named Dave.
Dave is great, but Dave isn’t available for every conversation about your brand. I’m also willing to bet that ChatGPT or Copilot might have a hard time finding everything Dave knows so it can be referenced.
As those stories travel from the people who know them to the people marketing them, the details can disappear. A specific example of helping a customer navigate three regulatory requirements becomes “deep industry expertise.” Or, a documented reduction in implementation time becomes “seamless onboarding.”
The promise makes it onto the website, but the proof stays in the meeting notes. That’s a pretty significant loss of potential trust.
And the person researching your organization sees the promise without the explanation that makes it convincing.
In Your Next Customer May Send an AI Agent First, I explored how an AI tool can help a customer compare options before anyone visits your website or contacts your team. That means the explanation you usually provide on a sales call may arrive after someone has already narrowed the field.
You can’t assume you’ll get the chance to fill in the blanks.
So, before writing another version of your brand promise, ask:
Let’s say you check your website and find “exceptional service” on the homepage, three service pages, and a blog post.
That’s amazing. Five references! Gold stars for everyone.
Except, what have you actually given someone to work with? Five places where you describe your service as exceptional. They still don’t know what makes it exceptional, what that means for them, or whether a customer would agree.
Marketers and communicators know repetition can reinforce a message. But repeating a promise doesn’t substantiate it.
“We understand your industry” becomes more useful when a case study explains the specific challenge a customer faced, why your industry knowledge mattered, and what happened as a result.
“We make implementation easier” carries more weight when someone can see the process, understand the support available, and read a customer’s account of how it worked.
And “we stay involved after the sale” means more when you explain what that involvement includes and show how it helped a customer solve a problem six months later.
Notice that none of those examples requires a wall of awards or a lengthy announcement about how amazing you are. The evidence, context, and clarity help someone—and yes, AI tools and platforms—understand what they can reasonably expect from choosing you.
Start by making that substance accessible through your owned media. We’ve talked many times about how owned media (as part of Gini Dietrich’s PESO Model®) should be your foundation.
Relevant earned coverage and shared customer experiences can reinforce the story through voices beyond your own, providing additional trust signals for those AI tools.
That gives both customers and AI tools more information to evaluate. It doesn’t guarantee a recommendation, but it provides a stronger basis for one than another unsupported adjective.
Before you count how many times you’ve published a selling point, check whether any of those references actually supports it. Then try that with the reasons you most want customers to choose you.
Let’s put this to work!
Once you have your two or three reasons written down, set aside 15 minutes to look for public evidence supporting them. Capture what you find and where you come up short. You’re taking a first look, so you don’t need to resolve every gap today.
Use the reasons your team already communicates, aligned with your values, and relevant to an actual buying decision. This isn’t the time to invent a new brand positioning statement.
If you’re unsure, ask sales or customer service what customers consistently value. What helps them trust you enough to move forward?
And it helps to be specific. “We’re experienced” gives you less to investigate than “We help healthcare teams navigate complex regulatory requirements.”
Look for case studies, landing pages, white papers, articles, videos, news coverage, or customer accounts that substantiate the claim.
Start with your owned channels, then look beyond them. Record the links and what each resource demonstrates. Remember, another page repeating the promise doesn’t count as additional proof.
And consider how easily someone without your inside knowledge could find it. If locating the evidence requires knowing the exact title of a six-year-old PDF, make a note.
Finding a link is the beginning. Now ask whether it gives someone a meaningful reason to believe the claim. Specific, credible information also gives an AI tool more substance to draw on when describing or comparing your brand.
Use these three labels:
Then note whether the evidence was easy to find and whether it connects to useful supporting resources. Strong evidence buried somewhere obscure still deserves attention.
You’re assessing the public-facing and accessible support you found for each selling point. These labels give you a starting point for deciding where to look more closely.
Your notes might look like this:
| Reason to choose us | Public evidence found | Assessment |
| We understand healthcare regulations. | Recent case study explaining a regulatory challenge, our approach, and the outcome. | Supported |
| We simplify implementation. | Process overview with little detail about customer experience or results. | Thinly supported |
| We stay involved after the sale. | Service page repeating the promise without explaining the support. | Unsupported |
If you finished that exercise with a few gaps, resist the urge to immediately assign three new blog posts.
We have some things we need to accomplish before that. The first is to figure out what those gaps are telling you.
Perhaps the evidence exists internally, but nobody has made it public. Your team has documented results, customer stories, and useful explanations. They just haven’t traveled beyond the people who already know your business.
Or maybe you found a terrific example from 2019. Does it still reflect your services, your process, or the experience a customer would have today? It might. But someone researching you shouldn’t have to guess, and that content likely needs to be updated.
And don’t assume older content has quietly retired. A 2025 Ahrefs study found that pages cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot averaged about 2.9 years old. That doesn’t establish how far back those platforms search, but it does show that their answers can draw on content published years earlier. The question is whether that content still tells an accurate story about your organization.
Another possibility is that your reason to choose you sounds suspiciously like everyone else’s. If every competitor promises “personalized support,” you need to explain what yours involves and why that difference matters to the customer.
And sometimes, there simply isn’t evidence behind a claim yet. That deserves a conversation with the people responsible for delivering on it. Marketing can’t publish a customer outcome the organization hasn’t demonstrated.
Each finding calls for a different response. You might need to uncover existing evidence, update it, clarify your advantage, or examine the promise itself. Understanding which problem you have helps you decide where to put your resources.
This exercise won’t tell you how often AI recommends your brand or give you a comprehensive AI visibility score. It gives you an initial view of whether your public evidence supports the reasons you expect to be chosen.
Start with the gap that matters most to a customer’s decision. If your strongest selling point has the weakest support, that’s a useful place to focus.
Once you’ve identified that priority, someone has to connect the promise to the people, information, and experiences that can substantiate it.
Let’s go back to “we stay involved after the sale.”
What does that actually mean? Scheduled check-ins? Help with adoption? Access to specialists when something changes? Your customer service and operations teams should be able to explain what happens, while customers can help you understand which parts make a difference.
Those conversations give marketing and communications something specific to work with. They also help determine which evidence you can accurately share, what needs customer permission, and what requires more documentation.
Then you can decide how to make it useful.
Start with your owned media. Perhaps your service page needs a clear explanation of ongoing support, connected to a customer story showing how that support helped resolve a problem. That gives someone researching you both the promise and a relevant example.
From there, consider where independent voices can reinforce it. A substantive story may have value for an industry publication. A customer may describe their experience in a review or discussion. Those opportunities should grow from something worth sharing.
And someone needs to keep the information current. Who owns the facts, notices when the service changes, or makes sure the website and sales team still describe the same experience?
This is where strategy matters. You’re deciding which reasons to believe deserve investment, what evidence would make them meaningful, and how the pieces should connect.
Go back to the two or three reasons you wrote down.
Which one would you least want a potential customer to overlook? And how well does the evidence you found support it?
That’s the conversation to have with your team.
If you know an advantage matters to customers, but the public information barely explains it, you’ve found a gap worth addressing. Your organization may already be doing something valuable that deserves to be understood beyond the people who experience it firsthand.
AI visibility adds urgency to that work. A customer asking an AI tool for help may encounter your promise without ever hearing the story that supports it. Making that story accessible gives both of them more substance to evaluate.
At TC Strategic Communications, I help organizations identify where those gaps matter most and build an integrated marketing and communications strategy to close them. If this exercise leaves you wondering what to tackle first, let’s talk about what you found.
And give Dave a heads-up. We may need to get a few things out of his head and onto your website.
Your brand already has a pitch. Make sure the proof can travel with it.
