Welcome
Search is no longer just about ranking. Increasingly, people ask AI systems for advice, comparisons, and recommendations and receive a single synthesised answer, often naming only a few brands.
If your brand isn’t mentioned there, it effectively doesn’t exist.
The core problem
For years in SEO, the main question was:
“Why don’t we rank higher?”
Today, the more important question is:
“Why am I not being recommended by AI?”
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for product or service suggestions, only a small number of brands appear.
Most don’t, even if they have strong SEO, paid traffic, or brand awareness elsewhere.
What friction AI is
friction AI is a platform that helps brands understand how they are recognised, represented, and recommended in AI-generated answers.
In practical terms, friction helps brands answer:
Is my brand recognised by AI systems at all?
In which prompts and contexts do I appear?
Which competitors am I compared against?
When recommendations happen, why do others win?
What signals influence trust, sentiment, and purchase intent?
This is not about links or rankings. It’s about AI visibility and recommendation behaviour.
You can explore what we’re building at frictionai.co.
How AI discovery actually works
AI systems don’t browse the web like humans.
They get their brand understanding from:
repeated mentions across sources
clarity of category and product definition
consistency of positioning
evidence of credibility and usage
how often a brand is cited when answers are synthesised
As a result, many brands are invisible not because they’re low quality, but because they are ambiguous.
Why brands fail to get recommended
From what we’ve observed, brands are often missing from AI answers because:
their category is unclear
their products aren’t recognisable as products
their messaging doesn’t survive abstraction
competitors provide stronger, clearer signals
AI systems lack confidence in when to recommend them
Understanding how a brand sees itself and how AI systems interpret it, is now a competitive advantage.
What this newsletter covers
This newsletter focuses on:
how AI systems form brand understanding
why some brands get recommended and others don’t
what “visibility” means when there is only one answer
how commerce, content, and credibility signals interact
practical observations from analysing real prompts and brands
No traditional SEO advice. No growth hacks. Mostly first-principles thinking and applied analysis.
Clarification
This is not about optimising for search engines.
It’s about optimising for AI-driven discovery, where recognition, comparison, and recommendation matter more than rankings.
If the question “why am I not being recommended?” resonates, you’re in the right place.
The friction team