Everyone understands a restaurant cannot be in business without a Google Maps profile. Businesses and personal brands tapping into AI visibility is the same thing.
“If AI engines don’t know who you are, you don’t exist.”
That is what Laurens Tijssen says. And he has the receipts to back it up.
Laurens Tijssen is the founder and CEO of Breathpage, an agency he started as a college student in 2021. He has been recognized as a Top 100 Thought Leader in Personal Branding by Thinkers360 and has published over 500 articles for clients across Forbes, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Business Insider, Reuters and other publications. Through his work serving over 150 clients across 20 countries, he has watched brand discovery evolve in real time. He knows what it looks like when a brand is invisible to AI engines, and he knows what it takes to change that.
This is not a future problem. This is happening right now, and it is reshaping how authority gets built.
Search Engines vs Answer Engines
Search engines index pages. Answer engines generate answers.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who the leading experts in their field are, the response does not come from a directory. It comes from what the model was trained on. Publications. Citations. Structured data across authoritative sources. And as the Gen Z entrepreneur earlier titled “Topman in High Level Positioning” by Mashable points out: If you are not there, you are not in the answer.
The businesses that paid attention to SEO are the ones now showing up in AI answers. The ones who ignored it are wondering why their Google presence looks thin and their AI visibility is zero.
Most people treat SEO and AEO as separate disciplines. If you have already invested in PR, brand positioning, and media presence, AEO is not a new project. It is an extension of what you already built.
Laurens Tijssen has watched this play out client after client. Brands that entered with existing authority and PR infrastructure adapted almost overnight. Brands that skipped that foundation had to start from scratch, and the results reflected it.
The businesses winning in this space understood one thing: authority is a system, not a tactic. They did not treat SEO as a checkbox. They built processes that reinforced the same narrative across channels. Those same systems now power their AI visibility.
Tijssen also challenges conventional Reddit and Quora advice. Most people spam those platforms and damage their credibility in the process. The difference is in how you show up.
His approach is manual and intentional. Find real questions in your niche. Choose three to five threads where genuine insight can be added. Write detailed replies that showcase expertise without selling anything. Build a portfolio of helpful answers that rank in search and attract the right clients.
You cannot automate reputation and expect it to hold.
The Real Goal of PR Was Never Traffic
This is the part most businesses miss completely. PR is not about driving website visits. It never was. It is about psychology. It sets the frame before the conversation even starts.
When someone searches your name and sees Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, they do not need to read the article. The frame is already set. That is authority. That is what moves deals forward.
Tijssen points to a stark reality: roughly 80% of businesses are still ignoring AEO entirely. They chase website traffic, social metrics, and search rankings while the actual game moves somewhere else. They ask AI tools what to look for instead of understanding how AI tools find information.
The window for early action is open right now. Brands that establish authority before the space saturates will shape how AI models describe their industry. Brands that wait will compete with everyone else for scraps of attention.
The logic is simple. If you want traffic, do podcasts. If you want revenue, speak in person. If you want to be taken seriously, build a media footprint. The same now applies to AI engines. When Perplexity or Gemini pulls information about you, those articles become your credibility layer. The logos. The mentions. The structured narrative across sources. They do the work before you ever say a word.
Learn more about Laurens Tijssen approach to PR called “Step Zero”
