Law 8: Map the Bot’s Journey
We’ve all heard lots of things about the consumer journey, and why it’s important. But what is it?
Well, the idea was born as far back as 1898 by someone named Elias St. Elmo Lewis. They don’t make names like that anymore. An advertising pioneer, Lewis wanted to bring scientific rigor to selling products, and in those early days of industrializing, the challenge wasn’t building a brand or relentless competition. It was consumer ignorance.
New products were flooding the market, and the public needed to be educated before they could be persuaded.
Lewis developed a model to guide a prospect to a sale. The consumer journey, in other words. You’re probably familiar with Lewis’ model: AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). As fit the media market of those days, it was linear.
Attention: The first crucial step. If you fail here, Lewis argued, nothing else matters.
Interest: Transform fleeting awareness into deeper curiosity about the product’s features, utility, etc.
Desire: Go beyond the rational mind (”I get it”) and tap the power of emotions (”I want it”). It’s where brand building starts.
Action: If all the other stages are done right, Lewis felt consumer action was a natural, inevitable consequence.
Today, more than a century later, the AIDA model is still in marketing textbooks. It aligns with behavioral psychology. It’s core.
Until today.
The chatbots blew it up.
Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, they don’t take the consumer journey. They’re not consumers. They’re predictive algorithms. They follow the beat of their own drummer.
They travel on the Bot’s Journey.
It’s not about Attention or Interest. It’s certainly not about desire. And the chatbots can’t actually do anything but, well, what they do. Analyze language and find patterns in response to queries.
So to map the bot’s journey, we need to know where they look for information and in what sequences. In other words, what happens after the first question is asked. So here’s a shot at the new AIDA.
Relevance–the bots crawl the web looking for pertinent information based on the analysis of word patterns.
Authority–the bots look for sites with authority based on links and traffic (we think). But it doesn’t work like Google sera
They select the best sources available. That doesn’t mean the New York Times. Behind a paywall. But too often it does mean Wikipedia.
Discovery–They prefer HTML to PDFs. All technical choices must be optimized to ensure the answer engines find the right material.
Depth–They favor information that responds as clearly as possible to the initial query and follow ups.
So, if you want to make sure you’re part of the Bot’s Journey.
It’s time to get RADD!