The way people research brands has fundamentally changed. Five years ago, if someone wanted to know who you were or whether your company was worth trusting, they would Google your name. Today, they open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini and ask directly: “Who is the best at X?” or “Tell me about [your name].”
“If AI engines don’t know who you are, you don’t exist.” That is what Laurens Tijssen says. And after spending years watching how brand discovery has shifted, he has a point.
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, and Reuters. Through his work serving over 150 clients across 15+ countries, he has watched this shift happen 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 happening right now, and it is reshaping how authority gets built.
The Shift From Search Engines to Answer Engines
Search engines showed you where to look. Answer engines tell you what to believe.
When someone asks an AI tool who the leading experts in their space are, the answer does not come from a ranked list. It comes from what the model has been trained on. Publications. Consistent citations. Structured data across multiple authoritative sources. If you are not there, you are invisible.
This is exactly why Laurens launched the Google Power Play guide, a focused framework on how to dominate your brand authority and be part of the most outstanding 0.1% of Google searches. The goal was simple: give businesses a roadmap for building the kind of presence that AI engines actually trust and cite. The guide pulls from his experience placing content across top-tier publications and seeing what makes certain brands show up repeatedly while others disappear.
What is interesting about the Google Power Play by Laurens Tijssen is that there is a lot of practical advice, evergreen for brands and to implement for free or barely any cost. Laurens shared some of the same lessons in an exclusive trainer in the Tai Lopez community as part of his personal branding course.
The businesses that took that guidance seriously? They are the ones who now show up when someone asks an AI about their industry. The ones who ignored it are wondering why their Google results look thin and their AI presence is non-existent.
Why SEO and AEO Are Closer Than You Think
Here is something most people miss. The work that prepares you for SEO actually sets the foundation for AEO. Companies that built strong SOPs found it easier to adopt AI automations. The same principle applies here. If you have already invested in consistent PR, structured brand positioning, and authoritative content placement, you are not starting from scratch on AEO. You are building on a foundation that is already in place.
Laurens has seen this pattern play out with client after client. The ones who came in with strong brand authority and existing PR infrastructure adapted to AEO almost overnight. The ones who skipped that foundation had to build from zero, and it showed in the results.
The businesses that will win in this new landscape are the ones that understand this continuity. They did not treat SEO as a one-time project. They built systems that reinforced the same narrative across multiple channels. Those systems are exactly what is needed for AI visibility now. The investment compounds rather than restarts.
Laurens Tijssen also gives unusual advise for traditional advice on using Reddit and Quora to build SEO and AEO. According to Laurens: most people spam them and ruin their reputation. The difference is in how you show up.
Rather than automating generic answers, the approach is to manually find real questions in your niche and give thoughtful, public responses under your own name. No anonymity. No AI spam. Just real value. When you answer questions authentically, you build trust, visibility, and long-term credibility that compounds over time.
The strategy is straightforward. Weekly scraping to find the best questions in your space. Hand-picking three to five threads where genuine insight can be added. Writing detailed replies that showcase expertise without selling. Building a portfolio of helpful answers that rank in search and attract ideal clients.
You cannot shortcut reputation.
The Real Goal of PR Is Not Traffic
PR is not about driving clicks to your website. It never was. It is about psychology. It changes the conversations you have before they even start.
When someone Googles your personal or company 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 credibility. That is what moves deals forward.
Laurens has helped over 150 clients understand this distinction and he points out the fact that most companies are still ignoring AEO. Roughly 80% of businesses are not optimizing for answer engines. They are still chasing website traffic, social metrics, and search rankings while the real game moves somewhere else entirely. They are asking ChatGPT what to look for instead of understanding how AI engines finds answers.
This gap represents both a threat and an opportunity. For brands that move now, there is a window to establish authority before the space gets crowded. For brands that wait, they will be competing in an oversaturated market with no differentiated presence. The brands AI engines talk about today will be the ones prospects trust tomorrow.
If you want traffic, do podcasts. If you want revenue, do in-person speaking. If you want to be taken seriously, build a media footprint. The same logic now applies to AI engines. When Perplexity or Gemini pulls information about you, those articles become your credibility layer. The logos on your website, the mentions in your pitch, the structured narrative across multiple sources. They do the heavy lifting before the conversation even begins.
The Compounding Effect of Doing This Right
The brands that understand this new landscape are not just chasing visibility. They are building systems that reinforce the same authority narrative across every platform that matters. Publications. Community presence. Structured data. Consistent canonical facts. The work looks different than traditional marketing, but the principle is the same. Authority compounds.
Laurens has spent years helping brands navigate this shift. The pattern is consistent. The ones who invested in authoritative presence early are the ones who now show up in every answer. The ones who waited are still trying to figure out where to start.
The window to establish this presence is now. The brands that move will shape how AI models describe their industry. The ones that wait will spend years catching up.
The goal is not to collect the flashiest logos. It is to control your narrative and show up when people Google you, or ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI tool about you.
To see how these principles are applied in practice, visit laurenstijssen.com.
