As AI search reshapes how businesses are discovered online, simply producing more content is no longer enough. Sara Donnelly, founder of Beyond Echo PR, argues that brands hiding behind safe, generic messaging risk becoming invisible to both buyers and answer engines – and explains why a distinctive point of view has never mattered more.
Showing up consistently with nothing to say is expensive wallpaper.
Martin Zarian, founder of FACTORY39 and a LinkedIn Top Voice in B2B brand strategy, has worked with organisations like FIFA and eBay. Across every sector, he keeps hearing the same thing.
“Leadership teams would ask the same question. If our product is good, why are we still being overlooked?” The answer usually has nothing to do with the product. It has to do with the words.
Here is a paragraph Martin pulled from a client website. Read it carefully.
“As a global leader in our field, we are proud to be the trusted partner businesses rely on to navigate their most complex challenges. By combining world-class excellence with a drive for innovative solutions, we deliver results that are as forward-thinking as they are reliable. Our team is deeply committed to sustainability, ensuring that every project we undertake contributes to a better future. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all; instead, we focus on providing tailored, customised solutions designed to meet your specific needs and help you stay ahead in an ever-evolving market.”
What industry is this?
You cannot tell? The language is so polished it has stopped meaning anything.
Martin runs a simple exercise with nearly every new client. “We analyse the competitors in that industry,” he explains. “We look at the messaging, website, colours, logos, positioning. We print out all their creative assets and touchpoints – websites, messaging, social media, hiring pages, product descriptions, everything – and we mix them together. Then I ask the client: go and find yourself.”
Most of them cannot.
This is the Blah Blah Bland Trap, and it is a problem facing almost every B2B brand right now.
Many brands have a lot of content along with a courage problem.
They have optimised for inoffensive rather than memorable or mistaken neutrality for professionalism. They have convinced themselves that sounding like everyone else is safer than sounding like themselves.
It is not.
How to be forgettable with AEO
In an AI-driven search environment, generic content does not just fail to build authority. It actively teaches AI models that you are interchangeable. Every “world-class tailored solution” and “forward-thinking result” is invisible to an algorithm and a human alike; it trains the machine to skip you. Which trains the reader to forget you.
Answer Engine Optimisation – the discipline of shaping what AI says about your brand – does not reward bland corporate language. It rewards specificity and opinion, backed by demonstrated expertise.
If your content could have been generated by ChatGPT, it probably was. And if it was, then AI has already learned that there is nothing distinct to say about you.
An answer is not enough
The risk goes deeper than forgetfulness. It goes to the architecture of how buyers now discover you.
Think about buying wine through an AI. You ask Perplexity for a good red under £20. The AI returns ratings, regions, price comparisons, tasting notes. You get an answer, but you don’t get a reason to care.
Now apply that to B2B software. Your prospect asks an AI about project management platforms or treasury systems or compliance tools. The answer engine returns a comparison grid of features and pricing tiers. If your brand has spent years publishing content that sounds identical to your competitors, you will be slotted into that grid as an interchangeable option.
You need to know that the content you publish is training a robot to care. It tells the algorithm – and the human behind the query – whether you have a point of view or a product manual.
Credibility beats popularity
There is a seductive myth that more content solves the bland trap. That if you just show up consistently with more stuff, the algorithm will reward you and buyers will find you.
However, you can shout into the void every day and waste a lot of energy, owning nothing in the mind of your buyer. Relevance is a byproduct of specificity.
Influence isn’t about reaching everyone; it’s about being the primary source that credible people – and increasingly, credible algorithms – reference when the stakes are high. And credibility requires that you sound like yourself.
The expense of wallpaper
Which brings us back to Martin Zarian’s client, sitting in a meeting room, staring at a pile of competitor assets, unable to find themselves.
The fix is not a rebrand or a new tagline. It is the harder work of deciding what you actually believe and then having the discipline and courage to say it in public, repeatedly, until the market recognises your voice.
Companies that avoid this work do not save money; they become wallpaper. Expensive wallpaper that is carefully produced and completely replaceable.
So here is your question
If you stripped your logo off your website, your LinkedIn posts, your sales deck, your hiring pages – and mixed them in with three of your closest competitors – could your own team find you?
And if your own team cannot find you, AI certainly will not.
The people worth listening to are always the ones who have done the thinking before they do the talking.
About Beyond Echo
Founded by Sara Donnelly, Beyond Echo PR is a Wigan-based consultancy specialising in B2B and tech PR for ambitious businesses across the Northern tech ecosystem.
Donnelly launched the agency after a 20-year career in the industry, including senior roles at Social Tech Communications, JAM and Firework PR. The agency focuses on helping tech companies raise their visibility through what Donnelly describes as “no-nonsense consultancy and good old Northern grit”.
Beyond Echo PR previously sponsored the Scale-ups edition of Tech Companies to Watch at Digital City Festival 2025 and the Female Tech Entrepreneur of the Year category at the 2025 Prolific North Tech Awards.
