Would ChatGPT Recommend Your Brand?

So… you’re looking for a set of pans that cook evenly, clean up easily and don’t cost an arm and a leg. Rather than comparing reviews across ten websites, you ask ChatGPT to narrow down your options.

Now pretend you’re the marketer at said cookware company. Have you published enough useful information to get on ChatGPT’s shortlist? Are you about to lose a customer because they don’t use Google anymore?

In February, OpenAI reported more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users. That scale alone should give marketers a reason to prioritize AI discovery.

So, where do you start? Ensure that OpenAI’s search crawler can access your site. That makes your content eligible to appear in ChatGPT search, but earning a recommendation takes more than access.

Alongside the ‘technical’ requirements sits a familiar marketing challenge: clearly explaining what you offer and why it fits someone’s needs. For that cookware brand, “Made for modern life” sounds good on a landing page, but dimensions, packing demonstrations, competitor comparisons and warranty details help a shopper make a decision. The more you feed the web, the more information AI has to work with. Look through customer support tickets and relevant Reddit threads to find the questions people actually ask, then use those answers to shape product pages, social posts and FAQs.

As you explore AI discovery, getting mentioned is only the first step. Check whether the chatbot describes your product accurately and recommends it to people it can actually help. And when someone follows a recommendation to your website, can they make a decision with confidence, knowing you’re ‘the one’?

AI can get your brand on the shortlist. Marketing still has a job to do before checkout.

🔥 Away | John Summit as Chief Destruction Officer

When DJ John Summit posted a video in April of himself setting fire to his Rimowa suitcase after it broke mid-trip, Away answered less than a day later by torching one of its own. Now the brand has named him Chief Destruction Officer, putting its luggage through his version of product testing, which means running it over with a car and dropping it off a building. Away has turned a rival’s viral PR problem into a months-long storyline, and every video serves as proof that its suitcases can take a beating.

🍓 Cymbiotika | Hot Girls Sip Peptides ft. Amelia Gray

To launch its Beauty Peptide Complex, Cymbiotika cast model and longtime customer Amelia Gray in a film that follows her through stylized routines, from the elliptical to filing her nails, as she talks viewers through the ingredients, benefits, and clinical claims. Beauty ads usually lead with the visuals and leave the science in the fine print, and this spot has the model deliver the fine print herself, with a Hot Girl Hotline website for anyone who wants to go deeper.

🍼 Coterie | Getting the Mental Load on Men’s Algorithms

Diaper brand Coterie took the back cover of Golf Digest’s October/November issue, the first baby care brand ever to appear in the magazine, with an ad about the mental load moms still carry as the default parent. It was followed by a spot starring six-time PGA Tour winner Max Homa, who compares everything moms quietly handle, from booking doctor appointments to knowing which diaper size the kids are in, to a caddie stocking your golf balls before a tournament — work that no one notices until it isn’t done. Moms have spent years commenting that this conversation never reaches their husbands’ feeds, so Coterie bought space where dads were already looking.

🍎 Madewell | New York Public Library Collaboration

Madewell teamed up with The New York Public Library on a limited collection of tees, sweatshirts, hats, a tote, and a chore coat, cast authors Danielle Prescod, Kayla Maiuri, and Michael Bible as the models, and donated $100,000 to the library’s Young Lions Fiction Award for emerging writers. Many of the pieces sold out on the first day, and casting working writers alongside the donation gives the collection a purpose beyond the logo.

💄 Saie | Hannah Chody for Saie

When Tom Ford discontinued her favorite eyeshadow, creator Hannah Chody ran a TikTok series testing replacements for shimmer, tone, and staying power. Nothing made the cut, and her comments filled up with fans tagging Tom Ford to bring it back. Saie stepped in instead, spending more than a year developing the shade with her, and the result, Bellini, sold out online and in most stores almost immediately. Her comment section had already proven the demand, and Saie was the brand that acted on it, a point plenty of commenters were happy to make to Tom Ford.

🎧 Durable Brands, Bad Capital, and the Death of the VC/PE Playbook (Express Checkout): Tristan Walker, who built Bevel into a national brand and sold its parent company to Procter & Gamble, shares why he now thinks most founders shouldn’t take VC money, and what makes a CPG brand durable.

📄 Adidas Spent a Fortune on World Cup Marketing. Now Comes the Hard Part. (The Wall Street Journal): After a roughly $1 billion World Cup push that included jerseys for 14 teams and a campaign starring Timothée Chalamet and Lionel Messi, Adidas now has to prove the spending built lasting brand value, and early Morning Consult data shows the buzz has already faded, with favorability gains landing mostly with men.

📄 Why Luxury Brands are building Worlds Worth Escaping Into (The Drum): As consumers look for shared, real-world experiences that reach past a product or a screen, luxury brands like Hermès, Montblanc, and Amouage are building immersive worlds that carry their craft into every touchpoint, from heavily art-directed visuals to a campaign made with Wes Anderson himself.

🎧 AI is Moving Fast. Are Marketers Ready? (The CMO Podcast): Liz Bacelar, a tech and innovation leader who has held senior roles at The Estée Lauder Companies and Under Armour, on new TransUnion research showing a gap between how confident marketers are in AI and how ready their organizations are to use it, and why people, leadership, and culture decide whether that investment pays off.

That wraps this issue of the debreef. Keep an eye on your inbox for the next edition. In the meantime, browse more on our blog: The Breefing Room