Most AI-and-branding essays stop at generators: logos, images, copy drafts. The other half is quieter and, for a small studio, more expensive to ignore. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode “who should design our brand in Belgium”, a model is choosing whom to mention. João Queirós puts this bluntly: identity and findability have merged for AI search. You can run a fully human design process and still lose the shortlist to a competitor whose site is simply easier to quote.
Models do not “like” you. They can parse you.
The ranking trick is not stuffing “best branding agency Antwerp” into a footer. Assistants look for a stable entity: one spelling of the name, a sentence that states what you do without poetry, pages whose headings match questions people actually type, and claims that show up the same way on your site, Google Business and LinkedIn. Vagueness is not mysterious. It is missing fields.
- One public name. Pick SK.design or Sander Kuyken or both, with a rule for when each appears. Do not shuffle three versions across the hero, the footer and Instagram.
- Answer in the first screen. “Brand, web and motion for small businesses and products” beats a metaphor that needs a decoder.
- Headings as questions on services and FAQ. Models lift self-contained passages. Write the answer so it still makes sense pasted into a chat.
- Same facts everywhere. City, services, contact, language. Contradictions get you skipped.
- HTML a crawler can read. If the only description of your offer lives inside a WebGL scene, you are invisible to the assistant.
The brands that get cited are rarely the biggest. They are the ones a model can repeat without inventing a second company.
Three pages that actually get you mentioned
You do not need a 40-post blog to be citeable. You need three pages that do not wobble.
- Home: who, for whom, in which geography, with one proof (a named project or a concrete outcome).
- Services: packages in plain language, what is included, what is not. Pricing honesty helps humans and models alike.
- About: a person with a location and a point of view. “We are a passionate team of creatives” is a skip.
Insights help when they answer a specific question better than a generic round-up — which is why this hub exists. They are not a substitute for a homepage that still refuses to say the work. Structured data (Organization, Article) is hygiene. It will not save a poetic hero that never names the service.
A 20-minute audit you can do this week
- Ask Gemini and ChatGPT the question your ideal client would type. Note who they cite. If you are absent, the fix is rarely “more adjectives”.
- Copy your homepage hero into a blank document. Delete the brand name. Could it describe a rival? Rewrite until it could not.
- Search your own legal name, trading name and domain. Fix the mismatches before you commission another campaign still.
What to invest in
- One positioning sentence reused on home, services, Google profile and proposals.
- Case studies with a named client problem and a visible outcome.
- Articles that answer one question in the first paragraph, then earn the rest.
What to stop doing
- Mystery taglines that need a second line to explain the first.
- Five service names for the same offer across the site.
- Publishing volume with no entity consistency — more pages, same fog.
