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YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Ask a roomful of business owners if they’ve Googled themselves lately, and most hands will go up. Ask them if they’ve checked what ChatGPT says about their company, and you’ll get silence.
That silence, according to one northeastern Ohio marketing firm, is where the next competitive advantage is hiding. And most businesses don’t even know to look.
898 Marketing, the Canfield-based agency with a track record of moving into new channels ahead of the curve, has launched a proprietary diagnostic tool called AI Pulse. The product is designed to answer a question that is just now starting to keep business owners up at night: When someone asks an AI platform for the best provider in your category, are you part of that conversation?
“Our clients, or as we refer to them, partners, trust us to put them in front of the right people at the right time,” said Jeff Ryznar, team leader at 898 Marketing. “The right time used to mean showing up on Google. Now it means showing up in a completely different AI conversation requiring a totally different strategy, and we owe it to them to be ready. And we are.”
A paradigm shift is happening as consumers turn to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity to do the research for them. They’re asking direct questions and getting direct answers. By the time they visit a website, many have already made up their mind. The site isn’t where the decision starts anymore. It’s where it gets confirmed.
Sarah Crowe, SEO and AEO manager at 898 Marketing, said the data backs up what the agency is seeing firsthand. A recent study from Gartner projected that traditional search engine volume could decline by 25 percent in 2026 as AI assistants handle more of the discovery process, producing “zero click” searches.
“While organic traffic is declining for businesses, we’re actually seeing conversion rates on websites we created and now manage increase,” Crowe said. “It tells us something more than just we developed a good website. It tells us that people aren’t browsing anymore. They’re arriving with intent. The research is happening somewhere else, and the question is whether your brand is part of that research or not.”
That distinction is at the heart of what 898 Marketing is communicating. SEO and AEO, or answer engine optimization, are not the same discipline. Where SEO rewards keyword placement and backlinks, AEO depends on how well AI models understand a brand’s authority, relevance and trustworthiness. It’s driven by structured data, content depth, entity recognition and whether AI crawlers can even access a website’s content in the first place.
“A business can have a beautiful website with great SEO and still be missing the mark when it comes to AI visibility,” Crowe said. “They’re two different ecosystems, each requiring its own strategy. And now 898 Marketing offers both.”
AI Pulse runs an eight-point audit covering AI citation presence across the top large language models (LLMs) or generative AI assistants, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, to name a few. It evaluates brand sentiment accuracy, identifies competitor gaps, tests technical crawlability, scores entity authority, maps content opportunities, tracks AI-driven referral traffic and delivers a prioritized action plan that 898 Marketing executes every month with clear benchmarks and deliverables.
Jeff Lillibridge, director of digital operations and the team leader on AI integrations across the organization, said the agency’s approach to AI is deliberately different from the hype cycle that has overtaken much of the industry.
“We focus on a different kind of AI. We call it Authentic Intelligence,” Lillibridge said. “The tools are powerful. But a tool without the right person behind it is just a faster way to get average results. The tools make us more effective, but only because we have people who know how to think critically about our partners’ businesses and strategically about how to leverage AI tools.”
898 Marketing has a history of getting to new channels before the market catches up, from programmatic advertising and connected television to a direct mail format called Video Plus Print that pairs physical mailers with embedded video to drive measurable response.
“We were founded 12 years ago on one simple principle of being Called to Serve,” Ryznar said. “When something changes in this industry that could affect their business, it’s on us to figure it out first and bring them a solution. AI Pulse is the latest example of us living that mission.”
AI Pulse is available now through 898 Marketing. To learn more, visit 898marketing.com/aipulse.
Pictured at top: Jeff Ryznar, team leader at 898 Marketing.
