Your Public Record Is Being Written Without You

There’s a version of your brand that lives on the internet without your permission.

You may think you’re shaping your brand through your website and your content, but increasingly, the internet is shaping it for you. It’s happening in Google AI Overviews, Claude answers, Reddit threads, reviews, comparison pages, social media chatter — it’s all the things people say about you where your audience is paying attention. It’s the public record, and it’s not just a reputation management problem. It’s also a zero-click problem.

Today’s Zero Click Marketing episode gives you a playbook for strengthening that public record.

I’ll tell you two stories about why this matters:

First: Wil Reynolds and Nick Haigler at Seer Interactive found one old negative review that kept showing up across a meaningful share of branded AI prompts about their company. It wasn’t even representative of Seer as a company. But because the feedback exists, publicly and online, LLMs found it. Then those LLMs repeated it. When Seer published a post with more specific, current information about their company, the AI outputs changed quickly, and better, more honest information about the company came up to the surface. The lesson: if you don’t help strengthen your public record, weaker claims may do the job for you.

The other story is much smaller (and probably more related to positioning), but I think it matters. Last month, while building the Zero Click Marketing website, I asked Claude Code to recommend a tool for my contact form. It suggested Formspree. I skimmed their product page, saw that it could do exactly what I needed, and signed up.

I became a customer without experiencing the brand through any kind of marketing funnel. I never even saw Formspree’s homepage — which, by the way, is geared towards developers, and had I seen that, I never would have converted in spite of it being the perfect solution for me:

Admittedly, these two stories are AI-specific. But the broader point I want to emphasize is that they are also stories about influence where the brands themselves weren’t the ones controlling the message. We’ve reached a point where customers are increasingly making decisions based on what other people, platforms, and systems say about your brand — not just what your brand says about itself. On one hand, that’s… kinda scary. But it doesn’t mean we just surrender to whatever platforms, reviewers, communities, and AI systems happen to surface. We still have a role to play in strengthening that public record.

So how do you play that role?

In this week’s episode, I walk through a practical framework for strengthening your public record on purpose. It starts with auditing the story the internet is already telling about you: your branded search results, the snippets and citations that appear first, the comparison pages, reviews, Reddit threads, and AI answers that shape perception before anyone ever reaches your site. From there, the job is to figure out which weak but visible claims are winning, which strong facts you can actually support, and how to publish more of the stuff only you can credibly say.

The playbook, in short:

1. audit the current public record,

2. treat third-party surfaces like part of your brand footprint,

3. identify the weak claims that are winning,

4. publish better facts that only you can publish,

5. structure them so they’re easy to retrieve and cite,

6. refresh the record continuously,

7. and measure whether the story the internet tells about you is getting better.

If you want the full framework — and how to actually put it to work — watch (or listen to) the 12-minute episode:

🧁 Petits Fours: Elephants, Robots, Chickens, Shoes, Oh my!

Four discrete bite-sized thoughts because this newsletter, after all, is called the "Menu.”

🐘 Jason Cohen and the elephant curve: I’m at MicroConf this week and got to meet Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine and someone I’ve admired for a long time. He gave a killer presentation which was partly about “the elephant curve,” which describes most successful marketing programs. The tactic performs really really well, eventually reaches a point of saturation, and then slowly declines. That’s a really good essay and well-worth the read. And by the way, he has the most-viewed MicroConf talk at over 500,000 views! A must-watch for those looking to built bootstrapped businesses.

🤖 On the AI vs. Human debate: My friend Melanie Deziel wrote this essay, and weeks later I’m still thinking about it. A key line: “It doesn’t matter if AI can actually compete with human creators if decision-makers believe it can.” Because she’s right. Plus… in this AI era, I worry about the increasingly-loud paranoid people who speculate that just about everything they now see is AI. It’s happened to me and to my peers where something we’ve written was accused of being AI-generated. And nobody can prove anything to confirm or dispel, so there won’t be any satisfaction. But if we’re supposed to treat everything we consume like it might be fake, without any real way to know for sure, what’s the point of consuming anything at all?

🐓 On that note of AI vs. Human, here’s a human whose work you should really care about: Lianna Patch. She has a consultancy called Punchline Copy where she offers custom services for copywriting. She can rewrite your website, advise on your email strategy, coach you on your writing, or pretty much whatever else you need better words for. She’s currently emceeing MicroConf and doing a killer job, so I just really wanted to shout out her work because she is fantastic and I would hire her if I could. (Why the chicken emoji here? Because chickens are a theme on her website and it’s cute.)

👠 Literally nobody asked, but let me tell you about my shoes: I have several speaking engagements this year, so one thing on my mind (and on my credit card balance) is conference outfits. I have a couple fast fashion-y tops, Ann Taylor trousers, and my real favorite: Ally shoes — specifically, their bold block heel. It’s a bit of a challenge to walk longer distances (but that’s only because we generally shouldn’t be walking a mile in heels), but for the most part, I can wear these shoes for 6-8 hours with no problems. They’re that comfortable. And I wouldn’t dare gatekeep. Admittedly, they are pricey, but they’re the only heels I ever wear.

Also, thanks for being here.

Since last week, 41 of you joined this newsletter. Welcome! You can expect all things zero-click marketing, yes, but you can also expect occasional weird detours — usually via my Petits Fours which are really just four random things I’m noodling on, found, or felt I needed to amplify because I think they’re genuinely interesting or helpful. I am painfully aware there are a million newsletters out there and I really want to make sure that this is a good use of your time. I’m always open to feedback and topic ideas, too!

See ya next week.