In the AI era, does good wine still fear a deep alley?
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
There is an old Chinese saying: "Even good wine fears a deep alley." However good your product, if it is hidden away where nobody passes, nobody will find it.
A while ago I shared something I found really interesting.
A friend of mine was pregnant and needed to choose a hospital and a doctor. The one she ended up going to wasn't recommended by a friend, and she didn't find it through a Facebook ad. She asked ChatGPT, and ChatGPT recommended that doctor.
Later my friend asked the doctor about it, and the doctor told her that over the past year or two, quite a few patients had said ChatGPT sent them.
It turned out this doctor had started writing a serious blog many years ago, steadily sharing a lot of professional content. In the past we would have called that SEO: hoping your website ranks a bit higher on Google.
But today, besides being read by Google, this content has also become the material AI uses to understand you.
For AI to know who you are, what you are expert in, and which questions it should recommend you for, there first has to be enough about you online for it to learn from.
So after that, the first thing I did was rush to rebuild the websites for our different businesses.
I started researching keywords, looking at competitor rankings, checking what people actually search for and what nobody searches for at all.
Then I started writing blog posts non-stop.
SEO, AEO, GEO. Which structures are easier to understand, which questions to answer directly, what data to include, how to make it easier for AI to know what we actually do.
Still working on it.
Results don't come that fast, of course. But slowly some keywords started ranking, and I discovered that keywords we thought were important were ones nobody was looking for. So we adjusted, and kept writing.
But lately I had almost fallen down this rabbit hole.
A business owner with no sales team
Today I met a potential client who made me rethink all this.
He has spent decades in a very specialised corner of the renovation industry.
It isn't ordinary renovation. It is a niche service that needs a lot of specialist knowledge, experience and skill. One part of the business involves grinding and polishing, and a single job may be worth a few hundred to a few thousand ringgit.
I asked him how business was lately.
He said: very busy.
Demand is so high that sometimes they can't keep up.
So I was curious and asked: "How do you find customers?"
He said: "I don't find customers. They find me."
I asked again: from where?
Google and ChatGPT.
The most interesting part: he doesn't even have a sales team.
For decades he has answered the phone himself, understood what the customer needs himself, and then sent his people to do the job.
No funnel, no lead generation strategy, no content team, and certainly nobody in the office discussing how to optimise for GEO.
Yet customers keep coming.
At that moment I found it rather ironic.
Those of us in tech and digital can easily spend every day studying algorithms.
How to rank this keyword, how to write the article, how to do AEO, which format AI likes to quote, how to get ChatGPT to recommend me.
Because all of it can be optimised, everyone optimises together.
In the end, ten companies write ten nearly identical articles for the same keyword, and AI may have helped write all of them.
It gets more and more competitive, and the content looks more and more alike.
Then today I met this owner, who took a completely different path.
He doesn't know much about optimising for AI.
He just knows his own trade extremely well.
A very, very narrow field, worked for decades, solving the same kind of problem again and again, until anyone in the market who really needs that service can find him easily.
Does good wine still fear a deep alley?
We often repeat the saying:
Even good wine fears a deep alley.
However good your product, without marketing, without distribution, if nobody knows about you, it's no use.
But since AI arrived, I suddenly feel this saying may be starting to change.
Because customers used to look only at the first page of Google. Today they can just ask:
"Who is the most expert?"
"Who should I go to for my situation?"
"Who nearby does this?"
"Which company has experience with this kind of problem?"
AI is starting to walk customers into alleys that used to be very hard to find.
SEO is an amplifier, not a foundation
Of course, that doesn't mean you can do nothing.
If a brilliant old craftsman has nothing online at all, no website, no reviews, nobody ever mentioning him, AI can't magically know he exists either.
So a digital footprint still matters, and of course SEO, AEO and GEO matter too.
But I'm starting to feel that these things are amplifiers, not foundations.
If you have nothing real to say, however much you optimise, you still end up with the same article as everyone else.
But if you have truly spent ten or twenty years in a field, with lots of real experience, cases, customer word of mouth and expertise, AI actually makes those things, which used to be hard to spread at scale, easier to find.
Although I have been studying SEO, AEO and GEO seriously lately, this owner reminded me of something today.
When building a business, we shouldn't only keep asking:
"How do I get more people to see me?"
We should also ask a different question:
"If one day AI seriously helps a customer find the most expert person in this industry, would it have a reason to recommend me?"
Marketing can be learned.
SEO can be optimised.
Content can be produced faster and faster with AI.
But what is truly hard to copy is whether you have gone deep enough, solidly, in one industry.
In the AI era, a deep alley may really matter less than it used to.
But only on one condition:
your wine has to be truly good.