Ten Things a Merchant Can Do This Week · IDAEO: Marketing in the Age of AI
Ten Things a Merchant Can Do This Week
These ten tasks are preparation, not a guarantee of results. Each is something merchants can complete themselves.
1. Write a Fact Sheet
How to do it and check it yourselfWrite down your name, address, phone number, opening hours, what you do, and why you are credible. Replace adjectives with verifiable facts, such as your opening year, products, and prices. Put each fact in its own sentence, with a source and date. Check every item yourself.
Maps to S1; Law of Fact Primacy and Law of Claim Traceability; see the Q&A in Chapter 2, the Q&A in Chapter 4, and Figure 4-1; for W3C PROV, see Figure 8-2
2. Use the Same Wording Across the Web
How to do it and check it yourselfUse exactly the same business name, address, and hours on your website, maps, and every platform. Copy the listings side by side. Make the wording consistent on pages you can edit. Flag pages managed by others for review.
Maps to S1; Law of Identity Continuity; see Figure 2-5 ③ and entity resolution in Figure 8-2 (Fellegi & Sunter 1969)
3. Check Access and Decide Who to Let In
How to do it and check it yourselfCheck that pages open and can be found within your site. Review the access rules your website publishes for crawlers. Your website settings determine whether crawlers can access your site. For each platform's policies on training use, check its documentation.
Maps to S2; diagnostic gate question: “Can they get in?”; see the Q&A in Chapter 2; for RFC 9309, see Figure 8-2
4. Provide a Version Machines Can Read
How to do it and check it yourselfTurn your fact sheet into machine-readable formats: structured data on your web pages and a content guide file for AI. You can do this yourself or get help from a Third-Party Source. When finished, compare it with the fact sheet to check for missing items.
Maps to S1; Law of Audience Adaptation; for schema.org, see Figure 8-2; for llms.txt (Howard 2024), see the references at the end of the book
5. Answer One Question per Page
How to do it and check it yourselfWrite a short answer on a separate page for each common customer question: how to book, prices, directions, and who you serve. Every sentence must match your fact sheet. Delete anything that does not.
Maps to S5, S7; see Figure 2-5 ②; for retrieval-augmented generation (Lewis et al. 2020), see Figure 8-2
6. Cross-check what other pages say about you
How to do it and check it yourselfCheck information about you across platforms and pages verified by a Third-Party Source. Do they still match your fact sheet? Correct errors on your own pages. Flag errors on external pages for review. Do not create a different version of the facts.
Maps to S4–S5; Law of External Corroboration; see Figure 2-5 ③④; for Chen et al. 2025, see the references at the end of the book
7. Remove outdated information or add dates
How to do it and check it yourselfFind discontinued items, old prices, and old hours. Remove them where possible. Otherwise, mark them as no longer current and state when they applied. Check again whenever you change prices or hours.
Maps to S7; see Chapter 4, “Verify each fact and keep checking that it is current,” and re-verification when validity expires
8. Make sure tasks can be completed
How to do it and check it yourselfWrite booking instructions, contact details, and directions so both people and machines can follow them. Then try each process yourself to find any sticking points.
Maps to S8; gate question: “Can the task be completed?”; see Chapter 1 on AI Agents acting for customers; for principal–agent theory, see Figure 8-2
9. Ask several AI services questions in your customers’ words
How to do it and check it yourselfAsk questions the way your customers would. Record whether AI mentions you and gets the facts right. If it gets something wrong, revisit items 1 and 6. Answers with sources can still be wrong, so check them against your fact sheet.
Maps to S6, S7; see the Chapter 3 Q&A, “Regularly ask several AI services questions to check mentions and answer accuracy”; for Venkit et al. 2025, see the references at the end of the book
10. Review records by event type and record your starting point
How to do it and check it yourselfReview your existing records of site visits, inquiries, and returns by event type. Mark unclear sources as unknown. Record where you stand now. Then check each month whether the answers from item 9 have changed. Do not focus on a single metric.
Maps to S9, S10; see Chapter 3, “Interpret results from each source separately, using their respective units,” and Figure 6-1; for the Cold Start timeline, see Figure 6-6; Goodhart’s law
What to avoid
- Do not hide instructions for AI in your pages or stuff them with keywords. Research shows that adding a passage to a page may sway AI recommendations (Kumar & Lakkaraju 2024).
- Do not present exaggerated or unverifiable descriptions as facts. Replace them with facts that can be checked. See item 1.
- Do not rewrite facts to please a particular AI service. Webpage text can manipulate AI recommendation rankings (Pfrommer et al. 2024). When everyone competes to manipulate them, performance worsens for all parties (Nestaas et al. 2025).
- Do not treat a single AI response as a final verdict. Relying on one result can lead you to the wrong conclusion.
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Cite this book
IDAEO: Marketing in the Age of AI · 林毅祥（TK Lin） · 1st edition, 9th revision · · https://km.idaeo.ai/idaeo/textbook?lang=en · CC BY 4.0