Part 2: Authority — Clean Data Gets You Eligible. This Gets You Chosen.
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In Part 1, we talked about getting visible. But visibility is table stakes. In the agentic commerce era, the brands that win aren't just crawlable. They're credible. There's a difference, and it's costing brands more than they realize.
If you missed Part 1, the short version: AI-driven traffic is growing exponentially, ChatGPT can now complete purchases without a user leaving the interface, and the window to establish organic placement before it becomes pay-to-play is open right now. Read it here.
Part 1 was about making sure AI can find you. Part 2 is about making sure AI chooses you.
Those are two very different things.
Visibility Gets You in the Room. Authority Gets You the Recommendation.
Here’s how AI recommendation engines actually work: they don’t just index products. They evaluate trust signals, relevance depth, and category authority before surfacing a result.
Think of it like this. Two brands sell the same product at the same price point. Both have clean feeds. Both have schema markup. Both show up in the index.
But one brand has 2,400 reviews with specific, detailed language about use cases. The other has 60. One has a blog with 30 pieces of niche content establishing category expertise. The other has a homepage. One has been cited, linked to, and referenced across the web. The other hasn’t.
AI agents don’t guess. They rank. And authority signals are how they break the tie.
Most brands only convert 1 to 2% of their visitors. Ground AI identifies high-intent customers the moment they land and personalizes their first touch automatically, lifting signups and conversions without increasing your media budget. You’re already paying for the traffic. Ground helps you monetize it.
Ground accounts for 10% of DTC revenue for the brands we work with. Goes live in 15 minutes. Zero lift required.
🔌 You're already paying for traffic. Ground converts it. Book a demo.
What AI Agents Are Actually Looking For
When an AI agent is deciding which product to surface for a high-intent query, it’s weighing several layers of signal simultaneously:
Relevance depth: Does your content answer the full question, not just contain the keyword? A product page that anticipates what a shopper actually wants to know will outperform one that’s optimized for a search term.
Review authority: Not just star ratings. AI models pull language from reviews to understand what a product is actually good for, who it’s for, and what problems it solves. Thin reviews with no detail are essentially invisible to an AI agent trying to match product to need.
Topical authority: If you’re a running shoe brand but you’ve never published anything about running, training, foot health, or shoe selection, you have zero content authority in your category. AI agents are trained on the web. Your presence on it matters.
Trust signals: Backlinks from credible sources, press mentions, editorial coverage, partnerships. These still matter. Not just for SEO. For AI credibility scoring.
Brand consistency: Is your product positioning the same across your website, your reviews, your social presence, your press mentions? Inconsistency confuses AI models trying to categorize and rank you. Consistency compounds authority.
The Authority Gap Most Brands Aren’t Aware Of
Most DTC brands built their digital presence for human browsers. Clean homepage. Strong creative. Great social. Maybe a few blog posts for SEO.
That worked when humans were doing the searching.
When AI agents are doing the searching, the calculus changes completely. An AI agent doesn’t care about your homepage hero image. It cares about the depth of your product information, the specificity of your content, and the breadth of your credibility signals across the web.
The brands that are quietly pulling ahead right now aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most followers. They’re the ones that built content infrastructure with substance, not just aesthetics.
Large retailers rank well in AI queries not because of brand equity alone, but because of catalog depth, review volume, structured data, and years of crawlable content. That structural advantage is real. But it’s not insurmountable for a focused DTC brand willing to be deliberate.
The Retention Signal Nobody Talks About
Here’s an authority signal that almost no one is discussing yet: customer behavior data.
As AI agents become more sophisticated, behavioral signals like repeat purchase rates, LTV, and retention metrics will increasingly inform how brands are ranked and recommended. An AI agent that can see your customers come back isn’t just seeing a transaction. It’s seeing a trust signal.
Loyal customers aren’t just good for your P&L. They’re evidence that your brand delivers on what it promises. And AI agents are very good at recognizing that pattern.
This is where authority and revenue infrastructure meet. The brands building retention and loyalty now are building an authority signal that will compound in the agentic era.
🔌 Retention is an authority signal. Ground builds it autonomously. Book a demo.
What You Can Do Right Now to Build Authority (Without a Full Content Team)
1. Audit and deepen your top product pages Your highest-revenue PDPs should be treated as authority documents. Include detailed specs, use case descriptions, comparison context, FAQ sections in natural language, and expert-level copy that anticipates the questions a real shopper would ask.
2. Start a category content strategy, not a blog The goal isn’t to publish. The goal is to own a niche. Pick the 5 to 10 questions your ideal customer asks before buying your product. Answer them better than anyone else on the internet. That’s your content strategy.
3. Build for review depth, not just review volume After purchase, prompt customers to describe what problem the product solved, who it’s for, and how they use it. Specific language in reviews is direct fuel for AI recommendation engines. A review that says “perfect for marathon training, runs narrow so size up” is infinitely more useful to an AI agent than “love it, highly recommend.”
4. Earn credible mentions Press, editorial features, affiliate partnerships, influencer content that gets crawled. Every credible external reference to your brand strengthens your authority profile. This is not vanity. It’s infrastructure.
5. Be consistent everywhere Your positioning should be identical whether someone finds you on Google, reads a review on your site, sees a press mention, or asks ChatGPT about you. Consistency is how AI models build a clear, confident picture of what your brand is and who it’s for.
Ground: The Revenue Engine Behind the Authority
Most brands treat authority as a marketing project. Content calendar. PR sprints. Review campaigns. Done once, checked off, moved on.
That’s not how compounding works.
Ground is an AI agent baked directly into your business. On the acquisition side, we predict what each shopper will buy, why, and when, and convert them the moment they walk through your digital door. Brands see 30 to 50% more first-time revenue. No guesswork. No added headcount.
On the retention side, Ground orchestrates your customer data at scale. We predict exactly what each customer will buy next and when, target win-back opportunities automatically, and drive repeat purchase revenue up 2 to 4x. Greater LTV. Faster repeat purchase rates. All running on autopilot.
And it all plugs into your existing stack. No heavy lift.
The brands working with Ground aren’t just converting new customers. They’re building the kind of behavioral data and loyalty signals that AI agents will increasingly use to decide who gets recommended. Every repeat customer is evidence your brand delivers. Ground makes sure that evidence compounds.
Visibility gets you found. Authority gets you chosen. Ground makes sure both turn into revenue.
Building Toward Part 3
In Part 3, we close the loop on the full picture: the Revenue Layer.
We’ll break down how to turn visibility and authority into a measurable, scalable revenue system in the agentic era. From funnel architecture to lifecycle optimization to the infrastructure that makes growth autonomous.
If this series is resonating, share it with a founder, CMO, or growth lead who’s thinking ahead. And stay tuned.
Finding Common Ground
The Ground community comes together sharing different stories, but common ground.