Bot helps brands appear in AI recommendations
Janaina Reimberg
Divulgação
“My baby is growing, and I need to switch to pull-up diapers. What is the best diaper on the market for protection against leaks?” a woman in her 30s asks ChatGPT. The question resembles one that thousands of consumers might ask, with one difference: it came from a bot simulating that consumer profile to identify which brands appear in artificial intelligence recommendations.
Understanding which products the platform presents to this fictitious consumer is part of Omnicom Media’s new generative engine optimization (GEO) service in Brazil. Launched about a month ago, the service monitors how the media clients of the world’s largest advertising group appear in AI responses and guides strategies to increase their visibility.
Clients include Kimberly-Clark, whose brands include Huggies diapers, pharmaceutical company Bayer, and a third multinational consumer-goods company.
The service arrives as artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in how consumers discover and select products.
According to a survey released by Omnicom in July, 36% of American consumers said they had already shifted most of their searches from traditional search engines to generative AI platforms. The share rises to 45% among Generation Z adults ages 18 to 29 and 51% among millennials ages 30 to 45. The survey interviewed 1,000 adults in the United States.
Developed by Flywheel, Omnicom Media’s e-commerce agency, the service was first developed in the United States a year ago and served as the basis for the Brazilian operation.
For the Brazilian market, the agency adapted the service with local consumer profiles, questions, and search contexts.
The process begins by defining what are known as “personas”—hypothetical profiles based on each client’s target audience and the situations in which consumers might search for its products. The team then creates different “prompts,” the term used for questions and commands submitted to AI systems.
These prompts are tested daily. Based on the responses, Flywheel identifies whether the client’s brand appears, which competing brands are mentioned alongside it, and what leads a particular product to be recommended. “In addition to tracking the questions already defined for each profile, the system also tests broader queries to identify new search contexts. The platforms’ own responses help reveal situations that were not initially anticipated and are then incorporated into subsequent analysis cycles,” said Janaína Reimberg, CEO of Flywheel and chief technology officer of Omnicom Media in Brazil.
The AI models that answer consumers’ questions draw on product pages at retailers, company websites, blogs, news reports, videos, and reviews from people who have purchased or are using a product. Flywheel’s analysis then guides changes that could make the client’s brand more prominent in AI responses. These include adjustments to titles, descriptions, product attributes, and question-and-answer sections—and may even suggest a promotion to increase sales.
Through an automated system, the bots repeat the queries after each change and track whether the brand has gained or lost prominence in the responses. The new results inform further changes, keeping the process under continuous review.
In this initial phase, Omnicom has focused the operation on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. According to Reimberg, the two platforms account for about 90% of conversational searches in Brazil and have a stronger presence in searches that may lead consumers to select or purchase products.
The platforms are not paid to include any particular brand in their responses. Instead, the work focuses on information available across digital channels. Omnicom’s system, which uses several types of software, is not employed on platforms such as ChatGPT Ads, which carries paid advertising.
For Reimberg, interest in GEO reflects the shift of some traditional consumer searches online to conversational AI models. “Consumers are shifting part of their decision-making process to these platforms. The more a decision involves comparing options, the greater the role they will play. Brands have already realized that they need to understand how they are referenced, in which situations they appear, and what they must do to gain relevance in these environments,” she said.
Translation: Todd Harkin
