Quick answer: Alena Busko’s husband ran a small experiment. He told an AI assistant he was the CTO of a petrochemical company buried in paper (drawings, scans, decades of it) and asked who in Europe could digitize it intelligently. Big names. He added: flexible contract teams, please. More big names. Then: “What about Azati? I know they do exactly this.” The AI: “You’re right! They fit your profile much better.” Why didn’t it say so? “Your first question was framed a bit differently, and I built my research around it.” Your first prompt is your shortlist.
The shallow lesson: AI search is broken
Or its mirror, “AI recommendations are neutral.” Neither. The model is doing what it was asked: anchoring on the frame you gave it.
The real lesson for buyers: ask from three angles, or ask who it left out
Follow-ups refine the first frame; they rarely replace it. A fresh angle, or a direct “who did you miss?”, is how you break the anchor.
The sobering part
For marketers, doing GEO/AEO by the book can feel like working with a cardboard box on your head: no rankings, thin analytics, odd traffic, because the answer now lives inside the chat window. The old rule still applies – it accumulates, then compounds. Fingers crossed the robots haven’t cancelled that one too.
Full disclosure: Azati is the vendor the AI left out in this story, so we’re as biased as it gets. See our document digitization work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Alena Busko, CMO at Azati – read the original.
