Issue 15:Your Community Is Your AI Strategy. Most Teams Don't Know It Yet.
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I want to ask you something your CMO has probably not asked yet.
When a buyer in your category opens ChatGPT or Perplexity and types “what is the best solution for enterprise IT service management” — where does your brand show up?
Not on your website. Not in your paid ads. Not in your last campaign.
In the answer the AI generates. Built from what the internet believes about you. Assembled from peer reviews, community discussions, customer-authored content, third-party mentions, and forum conversations, most of which you did not write and cannot directly control.
That is the new discovery layer.
And almost nobody in customer marketing is treating it like the strategic priority it is.
I have been running experiments on this for the past several months. Testing how customer evidence, community content, and targeted review strategies shape brand visibility in AI-generated buyer recommendations. The hypothesis I keep coming back to is simple and uncomfortable.
The customer is the single greatest driver of AI visibility.
Not your SEO. Not your content team. Not your campaigns.
Your customers. What they say. Where they say it. How often they say it. And whether the systems that aggregate that information can find it, trust it, and surface it when a buyer asks.
If that is true, and the data increasingly suggests it is, then your community program is not a nice-to-have engagement layer.
It is your AI strategy.
How buyers are actually researching in 2026
Here is what the research is showing.
89% of AI citations come from earned media and peer content. Not owned content. Not paid placements. What other people say about you in public.
Only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity. These systems have fundamentally different retrieval architectures. What gets you visible in one does not automatically transfer to another. Anyone selling you a single “AI optimization” strategy is selling you false certainty.
When buyers use AI tools to research vendors, they are not getting your marketing message. They are getting a synthesis of what the internet has decided about you based on years of accumulated signal.
The brands winning in that synthesis are the ones whose customers have been the loudest and most credible voices in the spaces that matter: review sites, community forums, peer networks, industry publications, and third-party platforms, this is nothing new.
Not months. Years.
That is the moat. And the window to build it is open right now but it won’t stay open forever.
What community actually feeds
Most community leaders think about their program as an engagement play. Keep customers active. Drive retention. Create connection.
All of that is real. None of it captures what community is actually producing in an AI-first discovery environment.
Here is what a well-run community generates that directly feeds AI visibility.
Peer-authored content at scale. Every forum answer, every discussion thread, every community post is a piece of indexed content that gets picked up by search engines and AI retrieval systems. A community of 50,000 members generating thousands of authentic conversations per month is producing more discoverable content about your product than any content team could write.
Review velocity. The customers most likely to leave detailed, credible reviews are the ones most engaged in your community. They have stories to tell. They have outcomes to share. They have language that maps to exactly what buyers are searching for. Community is your review pipeline if you activate it intentionally.
Third-party citations. When your customers speak at industry events, publish case studies, contribute to analyst reports, and write about their experience on LinkedIn, those citations compound over time into the credibility layer that AI systems draw from. Community is where you identify and develop the customers who will do that work.
Category authority. The brands that show up consistently in AI-generated recommendations are the ones that have built a visible customer ecosystem. Your competitors cannot fake that ecosystem overnight. It takes years of relationship building, program investment, and community cultivation.
The community you built three years ago is paying dividends in buyer discovery channels that did not exist three years ago. The community you build today will pay dividends in channels we cannot fully anticipate yet.
What I am actually doing about this
I want to be specific here rather than theoretical because I think specificity is what is missing from most conversations about AI visibility.
At Freshworks we are running a Reddit AEO pilot. The hypothesis is that authentic, helpful engagement in category-relevant subreddits, not promotional, not branded, just genuinely useful answers from people associated with the product, creates indexed content that surfaces when AI tools query Reddit data.
We are running targeted peer review campaigns connected to analyst report cycles. Not spray and pray review drives. Deliberate sequencing of the right customer profiles to the right review platforms at the right moment to influence the specific reports that buyers and AI systems reference.
We are tracking community engagement data against brand mention frequency in AI-generated responses. Trying to close the loop between what our customers say in community and whether that content is showing up when buyers ask AI tools for recommendations.
None of this is science yet. The feedback loops are long and the attribution is messy. But the direction of travel is clear.
The brands that treat community as an AI visibility infrastructure investment today will have a compounding advantage that is almost impossible to buy your way into later.
What this means for how you run your program
If you accept the premise that your community is your AI strategy, it changes some decisions.
It changes how you think about content moderation. Forum answers that are detailed, accurate, and helpful are SEO and AEO assets. Thin content and low-quality engagement are noise. The signal-to-noise ratio of your community matters more than raw volume.
It changes how you think about customer expertise development. Customers who become recognized experts, who earn certifications, build reputations, publish their knowledge, create credible third-party signals that no marketing team can manufacture. Investing in customer expertise is an AI visibility strategy.
It changes how you think about review programs. Generic review campaigns that generate volume produce diminishing returns. Campaigns that generate specific, detailed, outcome-oriented reviews from credible customer profiles in the right categories produce compounding signal.
It changes how you think about content co-creation. Every piece of content your customers author: case studies, blog posts, webinar presentations, conference talks, is a citation that feeds the AI layer. Your job is to make that content creation as easy and appealing as possible.
And it changes how you justify the investment internally. The question is no longer just “what is our community doing for retention?” It is “what is our community doing for brand visibility in the channels where buyers are making decisions before they ever talk to sales?”
That is a different and much more powerful budget conversation.
The three things to do this quarter
I want to leave you with something concrete rather than just a framework.
First, audit where your brand shows up in AI-generated responses for your top five buyer queries. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Ask them who the best solutions are in your category. See what comes back. Map the gap between where you are and where you want to be. That gap is your AEO roadmap.
Second, identify your top ten community contributors and activate them as content creators. Not for your channels, for their own. LinkedIn posts, review sites, industry publications, conference proposals. Give them the support, the recognition, and the resources to publish. Every piece they produce is a citation in your favor.
Third, connect your review program to your community engagement data. Your most engaged community members are your best review candidates. Build that pipeline intentionally. Do not run review campaigns divorced from the relationships you have already built.
I am covering all of this and more at Community Week next Wednesday April 8 at 9 AM PT. Free to attend online. Built for community, customer marketing, and CS leaders.
My session: Stop Building Community. Start Orchestrating Influence.
If this issue got you thinking differently about what your community program is actually producing, the talk will give you the full playbook for turning those insights into a conversation your executives will fund.
See you Wednesday.
— Kevin
P.S. If you are already running AEO experiments or tracking community content against AI visibility metrics, I want to hear what you are finding. Reply to this email. I read every one.