How to use your unique brand voice to get noticed in AI searches (and maintain brand coherence)

Your brand voice is one of the most important elements that will help your company get noticed in AI searches. Why? Because content strategy in the AI era is omnichannel, but if your brand is professional on LinkedIn and snappy on X, AI-driven platforms will have a harder time connecting all those brand voices and associating your brand with one of them.

Think of your brand voice as your digital charm, your personality’s handshake in the vast online crowd. Everybody is talking about AI search for business. It’s the most eligible bachelor in town. With its popularity only growing, getting mentioned in AI responses is a massive opportunity to build your brand awareness and trust. So, how does AI decide which brands get name-dropped?

If AI were to create a dating profile, in the ‘What I’m Looking For” section, it would list:

• Clear structure (schemas help with this)

• Brand authority (so it can check your reliability)

• Content clarity (making it easy to summarise into an answer)

• Brand voice (Wait, what?!)

Yes, read that last point again. AI is looking for a well-defined brand voice when deciding which websites to quote and mention in its responses.

That might come as a bit of a shock. Why would the robots care if you show your brand personality by sliding in a funny pun, spicing it up with some sass or including a reference to an 80s film?

Well, there are a couple of reasons that AI will choose a Back to the Future joke over a bland overview. And that could get you recommended to your customers by a chatbot.

TL;DR: One way you can draw the attention of AI bots looking for brands to quote and mention in their answers is by developing your own tone and unique personality as a company. It makes it easier for AI to read and interpret into natural answers, provides original ideas it can use to enrich its responses, and makes it more likely people will engage with your brand, boosting your trust indicators. Read for pointers on developing a well-defined brand voice.

Why brand voice matters in AI visibility 

We all want to get noticed by AI. It’s another way for customers to discover your brand, find out what’s great about it, and become interested in buying from you. See how your efforts are paying off so far with our Brand Visibility Score tool. Then come back here to find out how enhancing your brand tone can help.

The humanness of a brand personality

AI can do a lot of amazing things. I’ve spent many hours asking AI to do all sorts! But one thing it hasn’t quite nailed (yet!) is human emotion, expression and experiences. It’s looking for the human touch in the content it learns from and summarises. 

If your marketing materials, like your website, have a distinct personality, chances are that they will sound more natural, understandable and conversational. That’s what AI wants to emulate in its answers. It’s what people will respond best to. 

When you write like a real human, AI gets what you’re saying, trusts what you are saying and can easily turn it into a nice, neat answer. 

Using brand tone to engage and excite

Before you can impress AI, you need to impress people. Nothing turns people off more than bland and boring content that they could find anywhere else online. Spicing things up with a bit of personality, on the other hand, attracts and keeps people interested. 

They are more likely to stay a while on your website and engage with your content (tick) and recommend you on other places online, from review sites to blog posts with backlinks (big tick). All this improves your credibility and positions you as a reliable, trusted source - the holy grail for both mentions in AI search and ranking in Google search. 

Oh and don’t forget the endgame is always boosting sales. There’s no point getting found on AI or Google if people aren’t excited enough by your brand to follow through with a sale. 

The originality of a unique brand identity

Among all the millions of websites online, why would AI quote from yours? Because you have something no one else does. When you let yourself run wild with your brand voice, you flavour your content with your unique perspective, compelling storytelling, real-life experiences and insightful context. AI eats that up!

AI doesn’t want a load of keywords. It doesn’t want regurgitated information it can find in a million other places (literally!) with exactly the same tone. It wants authenticity, originality and something worth quoting to really enrich the answers it produces. 

How to develop a strong brand voice

Your brand voice is your secret sauce. It makes your brand stand out from all the noise, instantly recognisable and undeniably memorable. People build a deeper connection to what you’re all about and want to be a part of it. 

From AI’s perspective, it can more easily interpret your content and summarise it into natural answers. Plus, there’s the trust signals engaging content creates as your audience raves about you and original thoughts as the cherry on top.

It’s good for SEO too. Google loves EEAT - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Leaning into a unique brand voice definitely helps you explore your experience and can build your authority in your niche as it creates a distinct point of view. 

With all that being said, how do you write content with a strong brand voice? (Psst… If you need help structuring your content to appeal to AI, here are some templates to get you started.)

What is a brand voice?

Taking it back a step to make sure we’re all on the same page. Your brand voice is your company’s personality and communication style. How do you come across in your marketing communications? What wording do you use? How do you make your customers feel?

There are some amazing examples of companies using their brand voice to stand out. 

Brand voice examples

You can’t escape Duolingo’s Instagram posts. From their bio “just an owl tryna vibe” to their cheesy post “are you an owl? bc I think you’re talon-ted,” they are totally informal and casual with a funny tone and a little bit of a crazy side. Any expectations about what a language learning app should be like are flipped on their head. 

A great example of a brand's commitment to a unique tone and memorable content that doesn’t push the boundaries as far as Duolingo is Monzo. It has that ‘I’m not like other banks’ energy. Here are a couple of snippets from their social media captions for example:

• “We've been doing this banking thing for ten years now, and in that time we've picked up a thing or two about money.”

• “😂 the reality of going outside as an adult:”

They’re keeping things a little cleaner with standard grammar and spelling while sticking with a tone that feels like you’re talking to a friend. 

How do you define and use your brand voice?

So, where should you fall on the scale between bland, boring and basic tone of voice and running around doing crazy things in a mascot suit? That’s up to you. What personality traits would best suit your company’s brand identity? Think about your industry, mission and core values.

Above all, think about your target audience. What would grab their attention? What would keep them coming back for more? What would help them connect with you? What would build that all-important trust factor? Often, it calls for us to challenge the traditional way of doing things, like this Swiss bank. 

Write down some key brand voice characteristics and intentional stylistic choices. Then share these brand voice guidelines with your team so you have a consistent brand voice across all your communication channels. It would confuse your customers to see you making doughnut puns in your social media posts when your website reads like a textbook. 

It goes to show there is fun to be had when writing content to get your brand mentioned in AI search results. While you are structuring the page, ensuring each sentence is clear and adding about sections, don’t forget about a sassy remark. You’re helping AI do its job and people connect with your business. 

Finding the balance between AI optimisation, Google SEO, content strategy and brand voice is something we can manage at decipher. We’ve pretty much nailed the magic potion for getting robots and humans to fall in love with you. Let me tell you all about it.