Three Reasons You Must Build Your Digital Footprint in the AI Era

You must build your digital footprint because search has changed and AI is the new gatekeeper. AI looks for specific trust signals before it recommends anyone, and if you have not built those signals, it cannot find you. The important part is that your digital footprint is not something that happens to you. It is something you engineer.

Digital footprint: everything that shows up when someone searches for you, whether they search in Google or in an AI model.

What a Digital Footprint Is, and How to Check Yours

Before we get to the reasons, the fastest way to understand this is to go and look at your own.

Go to Google, search your own name, and see what comes up. Then go into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, any large language model you like, and ask about your name, and see what comes up there. That is your digital footprint.

It is everything you have built over the past years since you became an entrepreneur. And you can invest in it. You should engineer it. There are a couple of reasons why.

Reason One: Search Has Changed and AI Is the New Gatekeeper

People are moving away from Google and towards AI, and you probably feel this already when you do your own research. By now, 94% of B2B business owners are searching for experts in AI before they make contact. They make a list of the people they would like to work with, and they do that inside AI. More than 50% of consumers do the same.

Here is something you need to understand. AI reads content differently than we do as humans. Say someone asks, “I am looking for an expert who can help me get through my divorce.” I used to work as a breakup and divorce coach, which is why I use that example. What AI does is scan the internet, and it looks at the Google Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is the backend database of Google, and that is the place you need to train. That is where you teach it who you are.

While it does that, AI is searching for specific trust signals. Podcast interviews. Media features. Your about page on your website. Whether there is schema markup. The links that point to your website. Whether you have a Google Knowledge Panel. If you do not know what a Knowledge Panel is, Google someone by name and look at the box with the images at the top, the description of the person, the website, the links and the social links. That is a Google Knowledge Panel.

One more thing on where AI looks. It does not really read social media, at least not Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. What is relevant to AI is LinkedIn, which is the second most cited social platform out there, and YouTube. If you are already on LinkedIn or YouTube, that is a great place to start.

So this is the first reason. Search changed, AI is the new gatekeeper, and this is why you need to engineer your digital footprint with third-party trust signals so that AI can recommend you as an expert. If you do not build those trust signals, AI cannot find you.

The takeaway is this. If you say that you are great, that is advertising. If someone else says you are great, that is PR. It has always been that way, but in times of AI, PR became even more important, because PR is what AI listens to. It needs a point of reference. Everybody can say anything about themselves, so AI needs data points it can read to verify that what you claim is true, and it uses third-party endorsements and backlinks to do that.

Reason Two: We Are in a Trust Recession

We are in a trust recession, and the only proof of strong trust is third-party validation.

Anybody can say anything about themselves, and anybody can pretend to be an expert in anything. Why? Because AI gave us that opportunity. You can use AI to create a video avatar, to create content, to create anything you want and pretend to be someone you are not. We are only at the beginning of this, people already know it, and it is only getting worse. So we have to work harder to build trust.

But there are a couple of things that nobody can fake. You cannot fake podcast interviews. You cannot fake media interviews, media features and media appearances. And you cannot fake a Google Knowledge Panel, because for all of those you have to be a real expert. You cannot show up to a podcast interview with your video avatar. You have to show up and have a real conversation. You cannot get into the media if you are not an expert, because journalists look at who you are. They google your name and do their research, and if you do not have a trustworthy website or some kind of digital footprint that lets them verify you as an expert, you will not get in. And a Google Knowledge Panel is something you only get if Google recognises you as an expert.

But again, everything I am sharing here is something you can engineer.

This is also why content alone no longer proves your expertise. That is how it used to be. Before AI, you needed to know what you were talking about, because you had to get the content out of your own head, out of your own brain. Now you can just create it with AI. That is exactly why we need third-party endorsements.

Reason Three: Social Media Is Rented Land, Your Digital Footprint Compounds

The third reason is that social media is rented land. You are basically screaming into the void there, and you are not really building anything. And even if you do build something, it can be taken away at any given moment. When the algorithm changes. When Instagram, Facebook, Meta or whoever decides to take your account down, for whatever reason. It has happened to multiple people I know on LinkedIn.

On social media you put out content every single day, often multiple pieces of content, and it is still hard to get attention, because it is crowded and overcrowded. That is partly because of AI as well, since people who never created content before AI are creating it now, because it is so easy.

Your digital footprint works differently, because it compounds. What I do with my clients is engineer that footprint, and it builds on itself over time. You start with your website and make it AI readable, and then you create content for it. I am not saying you have to reinvent the wheel. If you are already on Substack, take that content and put it on your website. You just need to make it AI readable, and you can do that with apps I created, for example. If you have YouTube videos, take the transcript and turn it into a blog post on your site, and make that AI readable too.

That is where you start. You streamline your website, you put content on it, and then you start reaching out to podcast hosts and build your digital presence with podcast interviews. Once you have a couple of podcast interviews, you add media into the mix.

And the beauty of AI is that it does not need volume the way social media needs volume. AI needs consistency and high quality content. You do not have to publish 20 articles a week on your website. If you publish one, that is fine. You do not have to speak on 20 podcasts a month. If you speak on two, that is fine. You do not have to be in the media every other week. Every other month is good enough, because it compounds over time. Obviously the more you get yourself out there, the faster it compounds.

These things also stay. A podcast interview is searchable, and it creates long-form natural content that AI can cite. The same goes for media. And with media, the bigger the source, the more valuable and the more trustworthy the trust signal. If you get featured in your local newspaper, that is great, because it is a third-party endorsement. If you get featured in Forbes, of course the trust signal is bigger.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do Not Wait Until You Need to Be Found

The reason to engineer your digital footprint now rather than next year is that it compounds, and compounding punishes late starts more than it punishes small ones. Every month you wait is a month where someone in your field is being shortlisted inside a model and you are not, and you will never see the enquiry that did not arrive.

So start with the thing you already have. Go and search your own name in Google and in one AI model, write down what is missing, and fix the first gap this week. For most people that is the website: make it AI readable, put your existing content on it, and get your about page telling a machine exactly who you are. Then go and pitch one podcast. That is the whole beginning of it.