A room full of pros, arguing about a cookie...

Years ago, early in my business, I was on contract for a product launch in Australia. Picture the Zoom call. A dozen sharp, expensive people. Serious faces. And the whole meeting, the strategy, the back and forth, all of it, was about how to position one cookie against the other cookies on the shelf.

A cookie.

And I had this thought I could not shake. If the big brands will put a room full of pros on positioning something as commoditized as a cookie, why are the rest of us, the consultants, the experts, the people who are genuinely one of a kind, showing up to the market like we are interchangeable?

That question basically became my whole career.

Buyers changed how they decide. Most experts have not noticed yet.

When someone is thinking about hiring you, more of them now open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini before they open Google. They do not want a list of blue links. They ask a human question. “Who should I trust with this?” And the tool answers with names, or it does not.

So it is kind of like a referral at a dinner party. The host only introduces the people she can describe in one clean sentence, and she leans toward the names her guest already half knows. Same instinct, now running at scale.

Most experts are still watching the wrong scoreboard.

You check your Google ranking. You see your name on page one and you feel found. But the contest you are winning is not the contest your best buyers are running. They quietly moved to a different test, and it has two ways to fail that no rankings report will ever show you.

Here is the hard part, said with love. In thirteen years of this work, the pattern I see most is not a visibility problem. It is a willing-to-be-seen problem. Talented people blur themselves on purpose. And the machine cannot pick a blur. It picks the clear one.

Run an AI visibility audit on yourself this week. Fifteen minutes, three tools, signed out.

This is the first rung of The Chosen Authority Visibility Stack™. Before you build authority the machine can see, you find out what it sees today. You cannot fix a gap you have not measured, and almost no one in your field has measured it. That alone puts you ahead.

There is an old copywriting story I love here. A blind man sat on a street in New York with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that read, “I am blind.” Barely anyone stopped. A copywriter added four words. Within minutes people were emptying their pockets. The sign now read, “It’s springtime and I am blind.” Same man. Same need. The only thing that changed was how clearly the message landed.

Five buyer-style prompts. Run them in this order. For each one, you are watching for a clear pattern, not a perfect answer. Results shift by tool and by day, so treat this as a snapshot and re-run it monthly.

Prompt 3 · The direct question (run this one first): “Tell me about [Your Full Name]. Who do they help and what are they known for?” The answer comes back in one of four ways:

• Accurate: names your category, buyer, proof, point of view. Strong.
• Vague: “a coach who helps leaders.” Your public language is generic.
• Wrong: confuses you with a name-twin, or invents details.
• Blank: “could not find information.” Almost no AI-readable footprint.

Score it in one line. For each tool, mark three things. Found? (Y/N). Accurate? (Y/N). Distinct? (Y/N). Three yeses across three tools is strong. Mostly Ns is not a failing grade: it is your starting line. This is the rough shape of an AI Visibility Scorecard™.

Do the audit this week. Fifteen minutes, three tools, signed out, all five prompts. Write down what you see. Then do one thing with it: pick the single weakest result and fix the content behind it. One clear, specific answer to a real buyer question, tied to your strongest category. One page. This week.

You already did the hard part. You became genuinely excellent, the best-kept secret in your field. This next part is the one most experts skip, and it is the part that decides who gets named when your best buyer asks the machine who to trust.