Your Customer Sees You 26 Times Before They Buy. Sales Gets Credit for the Last 4. PR Touched the First 22.

Hi Team PR@ctical.

Somewhere in your sales team’s CRM right now there’s a closed deal marked “source: Google.” But we all know that’s not where the deal REALLY came from. That’s just where it ended. They likely saw you (or didn’t see you) roughly 26 times: in an AI answer, a podcast segment, a Reddit thread, and a LinkedIn comment from someone with 4,000 followers. The ad platform was the LAST click. Everything before it happened in the new customer buying journey.

6sense surveyed 4,000+ buyers and found 94% of buying groups had already ranked a preferred vendor, and they bought that early favorite 77% of the time (6sense Buyer Experience Report).

Today’s edition is going to dig in on how to read a prompt like a sentence and how to follow a citation all the way to revenue.

And the nerdy thing I couldn’t wait to share: I turned the whole buyer journey into something you can keep: The 26 Touches Field Guide, a 34-page visual walkthrough of every single touchpoint, free on my Stan store. Go grab it.

About that cohort: it was a hit, and the part I loved most was the size. I capped it small on purpose, and the whole session had a personal flow. Certificates went out to the first graduating class this week (congrats, you know who you are). Cohort #2 is now open: Thursday, August 27, 12:00 to 1:30 PM PT / 3:00 to 4:30 PM ET. 20 seats. Grab yours here.

In 5th grade English you learned to diagram a sentence. Subject, verb, object, modifier. Do the same thing to the prompts your customers type into ChatGPT and Gemini, because every part changes whether the answer names you.

Take the prompt: “I need to hire a PR agency for my business.”

Part 1, the subject: who is asking. “I.” The AI looks for signals about this person: role, industry, geography, everything it knows from prior chats. A CMO gets top-10 lists. A founder gets boutique picks. Same prompt, different person, different answer.

Part 2, the verb: the intent. “Need to hire.” Not “learning about.” Not “comparing.” This is bottom-of-funnel, wallet-out intent. “Thinking about” triggers education. “Need to hire” triggers recommendations. The verb tells you where in the journey the buyer is standing.

Part 3, the object: the category. “A PR agency.” Broad. Every agency on earth is a possible answer. This is where the fight is.

Part 4, the modifier: the context. “For my business.” Vague here, and vagueness is opportunity. The moment it gets specific (”for a Series B SaaS in fintech”), the answer changes completely.

You will not win “best PR agency” on your own. Broad plus high-intent is the hardest ground in the category. But you can absolutely win “best PR agency for a Series B fintech in Chicago.” That’s where your program shows up first. Win the niche variations, and the broad answers follow.

One more variable: the model itself. ChatGPT favors well-known brands. Perplexity favors recent press. Claude weighs authority differently. SparkToro tested this at scale: ask an AI for brand recommendations 100 times, and there’s less than a 1-in-100 chance you get the same list twice, though strong brands still showed up in 60 to 90% of answers for a given intent (SparkToro, 2,961 test runs).

And people are handing the models more parts to read every month. ChatGPT search queries now run 61% longer than Google queries, and search-enabled prompt length nearly doubled in a year (Semrush clickstream data). Longer prompts mean more modifiers. More modifiers mean more niche answers you can own.

Screenshot this for your CEO: Your category’s buying prompt has four parts: who’s asking, what they intend, the category, and the context. You can’t win the broad version. You can win every specific version that matches a customer you actually serve. That’s a content plan

NEW and FREE: The 26 Touches Field Guide. A 34-page visual breakdown of the modern buyer journey, one touchpoint per page, built like the screenshots you’d actually see: the ChatGPT shortlist, the Reddit thread, the text from a friend, the form fill that takes all the credit. Download it free on Stan.

AI Visibility Certification Day, cohort #2. August 27, 12:00 to 1:30 PM PT. 20 seats, capped small on purpose because the live prompt-diagramming is the whole point. Register on Stan.

AI Slop Reduction Addendum. Keep this on your desktop. Attach it anytime you are doing ANYTHING related to content and it will improve your output and reduce editing time. Get it here: https://stan.store/asksarahevans/p/ai-slop-reduction-addendum-for-chatgpt-and-claude

Everything in Lesson 1 can be brought to life (and in about 14 days). Our team offers the AI Accelerator at Zen Media. We run the prompts your customers actually type (the full anatomy: personas, intent verbs, modifiers, across engines), find the answers where your brand should appear and doesn’t, and close the gap in 7 days, guaranteed.

It’s built for brands that want the baseline fast and for agencies that want to white-label the whole motion.

Start here: offer.zenmedia.com

📊 Below the fold for paid subscribers: THE AGENTIC COMMERCE CLOCK, this week’s exclusive THE ATTRIBUTION LADDER with the full 26-touch walkthrough, THE RECEIPTS, REPORT DROP, PLATFORM MOVES, THE CROSSOVER, and THE MOVE →