Your Wine Is Disappearing from AI Search. Here's What to Actually Do About It.

A week ago I wrote about why some producers’ wines are disappearing from AI search.

The piece had only the odd comment and like suggesting it didn’t “perform well”. I then discovered that - au contraire - wine industry CEO’s had been forwarding it to their teams. In one case marked “compulsory reading”.

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This is not the first time it AI in the wine business has taken on the appearance of pornography; in that more people are looking at it than are prepared to admit.

Organisers of a wine industry AI seminar this year said it was almost impossible to get people to appear on the panel. The wine companies they invited said either they weren’t looking at AI (implausible) or that they were but didn’t want to discuss it in front of their peers. Like AI was a magazine they’d found under a park hedge in 1986.

Just to recap, you should be looking at it. And you should probably be talking about how you’re looking at it.

In the piece we learned that 40% of people - your potential customers - now use AI to search the internet. With questions such as “a wine to drink with salmon en croute”. Or indeed any other dish, or occasion, geographic location, style, price... etc etc.

The results of a little test suggested searches on AI platforms can and are being dominated by big brands. Brands who’ve clearly been doing something sordid in the privacy of their IT and marketing departments to ensure that they appear as much as possible in the results. But with the result that smaller producers, importers, and retailers are becoming invisible.

For various reasons (including one that will involve a quite revolting mental image) the answer is not to “ask AI for the answer”. Indeed, there may be quite legitimate reasons to ignore the whole AI search business. (So long as you do something else.) But here are my five top tips on how best to approach the world of AI search for wine businesses.

And yes, there’s a reason I’ve asked a question. And a reason I said there will be five answers.